Epilogue #2
His hands were on her hips. His mouth was on hers. And the warmth between them had gone from zero to everything in a single pulse.
She gasped against his mouth and started to turn, needing to check the partition, but his hand cupped the back of her neck and brought her gaze to his.
“Focus only on us, Mia.”
His body moved against hers. Hers followed.
And then there was nothing else, just his hands and her hands and how they found each other, his grip tightening on her hips every time she said his name, and the sound he made against her throat, low and rough and wrecked, and her name in his mouth, and the falling, together, as they always fell, as they always would.
WHEN THEY PULLED INTO the penthouse garage, Mia spent four minutes in the car mirror trying to make herself look like a woman who hadn’t just done what she’d just done in the back seat of an armored vehicle.
It wasn’t working.
Her hair was a catastrophe. Her mascara, already compromised by the memorial service, had now achieved full disaster status.
Her dress was wrinkled in places that dresses didn’t wrinkle from sitting, and there was a mark on her neck that she was going to have to address with concealer and possibly a turtleneck and possibly a new identity.
“Stop fussing,” Alexei told her. His voice was calm. His suit was perfect. His tie was straight. He had somehow emerged from the same encounter as though he’d spent the drive reading the Financial Times, and the injustice of this was staggering.
“You don’t have a hickey the size of Monaco on your neck.”
“It’s not the size of Monaco.”
“It’s visible from space, Alexei.”
His mouth twitched. The left-eye micro-twitch, the one she’d been cataloguing since she was sixteen, except now it came faster and lasted longer and sometimes, in private, it became an actual smile. Progress.
“They won’t notice,” he told her.
They noticed.
The penthouse was already full. The brothers and their wives had got there first, because Alexei’s car had taken the scenic route for reasons that Mia was never, ever going to explain, and when she walked through the door with her hair finger-combed and her collar pulled up and what she hoped was a casual expression on her face, the room went still.
Not the wives. The wives were fine. Ciana glanced at her and returned to her wine with the diplomatic composure of a woman who had spent years pretending not to notice things on airplanes.
Star caught her eye and blushed and smiled and went back to fussing over Aria in Daisy’s arms. Daisy didn’t even glance up, because Daisy Fletcher Almazov had learned early in her marriage that the best response to anything an Almazov brother did was to not respond at all.
The brothers were a different story.
Anton was first. His eyes traveled from Mia’s face to her neck to her wrinkled dress to Alexei’s suspiciously immaculate suit, and a sequence of emotions crossed his features that could best be described as horror, amusement, and the dawning realization that some things couldn’t be unknown.
“I think I need therapy.” Anton’s voice was hollow.
Andrei was by the window, a glass of water in his scarred hand, and his expression had taken on the particular grimness of a man who had once changed Mia’s tire when she was seventeen and was now confronting information he hadn’t asked for.
A stain darkened his cheekbones, his scar standing out more prominently against the flush.
“I think I need an eternity,” Andrei’s voice was grim, “to get past what just happened to our little Mia.”
Artem, from the far corner, hands in his pockets, dark eyes missing nothing: “I think I need to leave the room.”
Mia could feel the heat in her face reaching temperatures that were probably medically concerning. “Guuuuuys...”
But Alexei, who had walked in behind her with the unhurried confidence of a man who had built an empire and married the woman he loved and buried his father and was done, permanently done, apologizing for any of it, simply shrugged.
“She was meant to be mine.”
The room exhaled.
Anton laughed first, because Anton always laughed first, and the laugh broke the tension as his laughs always did, and Daisy shook her head, and Star made a sound that was half sob and half giggle because Star’s emotional range didn’t include neutral, and Ciana raised her wine glass a fraction in a toast that was so understated it was practically invisible and was, for that reason, exactly right.
After that there was chaos.
The good kind. The kind that happened when four Almazov brothers and the women who’d broken them open occupied the same room and the grief from the memorial mixed with the wine and the noise and the particular alchemy of a family that had spent decades in the cold and was learning, one evening at a time, what warmth felt like.
Mia stood by the kitchen island with a glass of something bubbly and took it in.
Anton was on the floor with Aria, who had gotten hold of a champagne cork and was attempting to eat it.
He was narrating the attempt in real time.
“And she approaches the cork. She circles it. She assesses the structural integrity. She makes her move. Ladies and gentlemen, the cork is in the mouth. The cork is— Daisy, the cork is in the mouth.”
“I can see that,” Daisy told him from the sofa, where she was reading a novel with colour-coded tabs fanning from the pages.
Not case files. Not Keyes briefs. A novel.
The tabs were purple, which Mia had learned meant “favourite passages,” and the fact that Daisy Fletcher Almazov still colour-coded her joy was the most Daisy thing in the world.
By the window, Andrei and Ciana occupied a silence that needed no filling.
He was enormous beside her, the afternoon light turning his scar to silver, and Ciana’s hand rested on his forearm with the casual possession of a woman who had earned every inch of proximity.
They weren’t talking. They were just there, next to each other, in the particular stillness of two people who had survived the worst thing love could do to them and had come out the other side holding on.
Ciana caught Mia’s eye and the ghost of a smile crossed her face, warm and knowing, the smile of a woman who had walked into this family through an impossible door and was still here.
Artem was at the edge of the room, where Artem always was, because the edges had the sightlines.
His posture was the posture of a man who occupied margins, not centers, who loved from the periphery with a fierceness that didn’t require proximity to prove itself.
And Star was beside him, pressing her face into his arm because Aria had just taken three consecutive steps toward her and Star had caught her and the act of catching a toddler had, predictably, made Star cry.
Artem’s free hand came up to cover hers. The gesture was so gentle on a man who could dismantle a room with the other hand that Mia’s own composure took a hit.
These people. This family. These impossible, beautiful, terrifying men and the women who had loved them into something softer.
A year ago, Mia had shown up in a penthouse in a white sundress and changed outfits four times and burned takeout in a pot that cost more than her tuition.
Now she was standing in the kitchen of a home she shared with the man who had sent her away and let her come back and married her on a counter and fought a killer in the dark, and his brothers were on the floor and by the window and at the edges, and their wives were reading and crying and raising wine glasses, and a toddler was eating a champagne cork, and this was her family.
Not bad for a gap year.
ALEXEI
The penthouse emptied at ten.
Not because he asked. Because Anton read the room, as Anton always read the room, and touched Daisy’s arm, and Daisy touched Star’s arm, and within fifteen minutes the cars were called and the coats were on and the goodbyes were brief because they’d all be here again next week.
Andrei was last. He stopped at the door.
Turned. His eyes found Alexei’s across the room, and something passed between them that was thirty-seven years old and had no words, something composed of shared grief and shared silence and the language of men who loved each other in a register that didn’t require sound.
His chin dipped. A single nod.
Alexei returned it.
The door closed. The penthouse was silent.
Mia was in the kitchen, doing something violent to the French press, because Mia Robertson Almazov didn’t make coffee so much as commit acts of aggression against it, and Biscuit was asleep on the marble by the island in the spot he’d claimed four years ago when he was a puppy Alexei had pretended not to notice, and the apartment was full of sounds that had nothing to do with an empire.
Clink of ceramic. Hiss of water. The click of a dog’s paw twitching in a dream.
He crossed to the balcony.
Monaco spread below him. The harbour, the yachts, Ace Royale on the cliff’s edge with its diamond-and-flame crest lit against the dark. His kingdom. The thing he’d built from wreckage, from a phone call when he was fourteen, from the nothing where purpose used to be.
A year ago, he’d stood in a charred room in Saint Petersburg and felt nothing. The blankness where the drive should have been. A billionaire with an empire and no reason to run it.
The blankness was gone.
Not because of the empire. Not because of Ace Royale or the offshore accounts or the encrypted files. Those things were still there. They still ran. They still needed him on Mondays and Wednesdays and most of Friday.
But on Tuesdays, Mia dragged him to lunch. On Thursdays, Anton brought Aria to the penthouse and the baby pulled books off shelves and Alexei rebuilt the shelves without complaint. On Sundays, Andrei came for dinner and didn’t speak and the silence was the warmest sound in the apartment.
The emptiness had a shape now. The shape was a girl in a kitchen murdering a French press.
The shape was a dog on a floor. The shape was brothers who called and wives who stayed and a toddler who ate champagne corks and a father whose name was carved into marble on a hill above the city, home at last.
Daniil would have liked this. Not the empire.
Not the casino. This. The noise. The chaos.
The Tuesday lunches and the Sunday dinners and the girl who talked too fast and the brothers who showed up.
He would have sat in this penthouse and held his granddaughter and offered nothing but his presence, because Daniil Almazov had been a man of few words, and his sons had inherited the economy, and the silence between them would have been the good kind.
Live good lives. That was all he’d ever wanted for them.
“Alexei.”
Her voice from the kitchen. The same voice that had called him from a car in Saint Petersburg and cracked the nothing open.
The same voice that had promised “I’m not going anywhere” and meant it.
The same voice that had told him she loved him on the floor of a dark cabin while he was still bleeding, because Mia spoke first, always first, before the moment was ready, because she was brave and bravery meant doing the terrifying thing with your whole chest.
“Your coffee is ready and it’s perfect and if you say it’s warm milk I will pour it on your head.”
His mouth moved. Not the twitch. The thing past the twitch. The thing his brothers had witnessed at his wedding and that he no longer killed, because there was no one left to hide it from.
He turned from the balcony. The penthouse stretched in front of him. The open door to the kitchen. Mia at the counter, barefoot, holding a mug, her hair still wrecked from the car, the mark on her neck visible above her collar.
Every door had been a barrier. His bedroom door, closed against her that first night. The study door in the cabin. The darkness that had swallowed them both. Every threshold a test, every frame a wall.
This one was open.
He walked through it.
“Home.”
The End
Thank you for reading Belong to Me.