Chapter 9 #2
Not with technique. Not with aim. She swung at the sound that wasn't Alexei, at the space in the dark where the breathing was wrong, and the poker connected with something solid and the impact traveled up her arms and into her shoulders and the sound Morgan made was surprise.
Not pain. Surprise. The sound of a man whose game had just been altered by a variable he hadn't adequately accounted for.
It was enough.
One second. The second between Morgan's surprise and Morgan's recovery. That was all Alexei needed.
The sound that followed was final. Not drawn out. Not dramatic. A single, concentrated impact, and then a weight hitting the floor, and then silence.
Real silence. Not the manufactured silence from before. The silence of a room where the threat had been removed and the air was slowly remembering how to carry sound again.
She heard Alexei move. Not toward her. Away. Toward the weight on the floor. A pause. The sound of fingers on a throat, checking for the thing that wouldn't be there. Then his breath releasing, slow, controlled, final. The breath of a man confirming what his hands already knew.
"Mia." Alexei's voice. Wrecked. Ragged. Coming from the dark, from the floor, from somewhere near where the weight had fallen. "Mia, where are you?"
"I'm here." Her voice was trembling. The poker was still in her hand. Her arms were shaking so hard the iron was rattling against the stone of the hearth. "I'm right here."
"Are you hurt?"
"No. Are you—"
"Come here."
Two words. The same two words. The ones he'd spoken in the kitchen when the domesticity had cracked him open. The ones he'd spoken on their wedding night when the pins fell from her hair. Come here. Always come here. The two words that meant: I need you closer than you are.
She dropped the poker. It hit the stone with a clang that filled the cabin.
She moved toward his voice, hands out, and her fingers found his chest, and he was on the floor, sitting against the wall, and his shirt was wet in places she didn't want to think about, and his hand found her face in the dark.
Both palms. Thumbs on her cheekbones. The same way he'd held her on the counter. The same way he'd held her at the wedding. The same way he always held her, as if her face were the only compass he had and he needed to know which direction was north.
"You hit him with a poker," he said.
"I did."
"I told you to run."
"You tell me a lot of things. I listen to approximately none of them."
A sound came from his chest. Rough. Broken. It took her a moment to identify it, because she'd never heard it before, not in the kitchen or the bedroom or the twenty-two years of control that preceded her.
Alexei Almazov was laughing.
Not a twitch. Not a suppressed smile observed by his brothers.
A laugh, low and wrecked and disbelieving, the laugh of a man who had just fought a killer in the dark and whose eighteen-year-old wife had hit the killer with a fireplace poker and was now kneeling in front of him with her hands on his chest and her voice even and her chin up in the absolute dark.
The laugh broke something in her. The anger from before the lights went out, the "so you married me because of him," the closing of her face and the cracking of his voice.
All of it was still there. All of it was real.
But the laugh was real too, and the laugh was underneath the anger, and it meant: I am ruined and you are ridiculous and I am alive because you swung a poker at a serial killer and I don't deserve you and I know it and I have never been more certain of anything in my life.
"I love you, Alexei."
She didn't plan it. She didn't rehearse it.
The words came out the way everything came out of Mia Robertson: too fast, too soon, before the moment was ready, before the anger had resolved or the adrenaline had faded or the man on the floor had stopped bleeding.
She said it first because she always said things first. Because she was brave, and bravery meant doing the terrifying thing with your whole chest, and loving a man who had lied to you and fought for you and was laughing on the floor of a dark cabin was the most terrifying thing she'd ever done.
His thumbs stopped moving on her cheekbones.
The silence stretched. One second. Two. The dark cabin. The cold floor. The shape of a man against the wall with her face in his hands and his breath uneven and his heart under her palm where she'd pressed it, the same place she always pressed it, over his heart, where the words lived.
"I love you, Mia."
Four words. Blunt. Raw. Spoken the way Alexei Almazov spoke everything that mattered: with the minimum syllables required and the maximum cost. His voice broke on her name.
The same fracture from the proposal, from the wedding night, from every moment where the man underneath the empire surfaced and discovered that the surface was where he'd been meant to live all along.
She leaned into his hands. Her eyes were closed.
The dark was the same with them open or closed, and she chose closed, because the feeling of his palms on her face was better than sight, and the sound of his breathing was better than light, and the three words he'd finally said were filling the cabin the way her laugh had filled it that afternoon, the timber walls and the stone floor holding the warmth of them.
His hands were on her face.
They were sure.
Not the stillness of control. Not the deliberate calm of a man managing his body. Not the surrender stillness or the claiming stillness or the predator stillness. Just sure. The hands of a man who had nothing left to fight and nothing left to hide and nothing left to hold back.
She felt it. She always felt it. From the first time his hands shook after a kiss to the last time they went still after a word, she had been reading his hands the way other people read faces, and this was the final entry on the spreadsheet. This was the column she'd been waiting for.
Sure. Because he meant it. Because the war was over. Because the doors were open and the walls were down and the man who had spent twenty-two years gripping the edges of his own control had finally, in the dark, on the floor, with blood on his shirt and her face in his hands, let go.
She pressed her cheek into his palm and closed her eyes, and the sureness was the truest thing he'd ever given her.