Chapter 27
ALEKSEI
By the time the jet touches down in Cancún, the sun is already cutting the horizon in half.
Gold on water. White heat even this early. Palm trees moving in the wind like they know exactly how obscene this place is.
Zatanna sleeps through most of the descent.
She’s curled into the leather seat with my jacket under her head, hair a dark spill over one cheek, one hand tucked near her mouth. After everything, after the flight, after the sheer emotional violence of the last forty-eight hours, she’s out cold.
I watch her longer than I should.
The cabin lights come on softly. She stirs, blinks, and looks out the window like she’s not sure whether she’s still dreaming.
Then she sits up. “Oh my God.”
The words are quiet. Reverent. A little wrecked.
I follow her gaze. The water beyond the runway is that impossible Caribbean blue, the kind that looks edited even when it’s real. “You’ve never been here.”
It isn’t a question.
She looks at me, still half asleep. “I’ve never been anywhere.”
The drive from the private terminal takes less than twenty minutes, but by the time the car turns through the gates of the resort, Zatanna is staring openly now.
Not trying to hide it. Not pretending she belongs.
Just taking it in with that raw, honest wonder I am learning is one of the most dangerous things about her.
The villa sits directly on the beach, all white stone and open air and walls of glass that fold back into nothing.
There’s a private pool, a strip of untouched sand, and a terrace that leads straight down to the water.
Bougainvillea climbs one wall in a riot of color.
Somewhere nearby, the ocean keeps breaking in slow, lazy breaths.
She stops just inside the entrance.
“This is not a villa,” she says. “This is a Bond villain’s summer house.”
I laugh, openly and raw.
It startles both of us.
She looks at me, eyes wide. “You do that?”
“Rarely.”
“Good. I was beginning to think you only communicated through smirks and threats.”
I close the door behind us. “That’s unfair. Sometimes I use expensive gifts.”
That gets the smile I wanted. Though, I know I should be thinking strategy. Instead, I’m thinking that I want to keep giving her things that make her look like that.
By noon, we’ve both changed. She’s in a simple black swimsuit under a loose white shirt that does absolutely nothing to hide the fact that I’m in trouble, and I am pretending not to notice how many thoughts I’m having about dragging her back to bed when the beach outside exists.
We eat fruit and coffee on the terrace. She kicks off her sandals and walks straight into the surf like she belongs there, then turns around and calls, “Are you coming?”
I lean back in the chair. “I’m considering whether I enjoy watching you more.”
She narrows her eyes. “Coward.”
That does it. I follow her down.
The water is warm. The sun is hotter. The sand burns underfoot until the tide cools it again. She laughs when a wave hits her knees too hard and reaches for me automatically, both hands on my forearms. I steady her. She doesn’t move away right away.
We spend the afternoon exactly the way people in our position should not.
Swimming. Drinking cold beer from the villa fridge.
Lying half in the shade while she reads the labels on imported sunscreen and mocks the language.
We race once down the stretch of private beach and she cheats shamelessly by tackling me at the end.
I let her, mostly because I like the way she looks sprawled across my chest, triumphant and breathless.
“You let me win,” she says.
“Yes.”
“That is so insulting.”
“And yet you’re smiling.”
She rolls off me and lies in the sand beside me, both of us breathing hard, the ocean loud in the distance.
Then, slowly, the mood shifts.
It happens while we’re back at the villa, both of us on the shaded terrace with our feet in the pool. The heat has gone softer. The afternoon is folding into evening. I pour her another drink and she turns the glass in her hands without drinking.
“What was it like,” I ask, “where you grew up?”
She glances at me, surprised. “You want the honest answer?”
“I rarely ask for anything else.”
She smiles faintly at that, but her eyes drift back to the water.
“Small,” she says at last. “Smaller than you can probably imagine. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody knew your business before you did. If you wanted to leave town, people talked about it like you were announcing a terminal illness.”
I say nothing.
She’s easier with silence than most people.
She fills it when she’s ready, not when she’s pressured.
“We weren’t dirt poor,” she continues, “but close enough that money was always the third person in the room. Every bill mattered. Every mistake cost too much. My dad…” She pauses, jaw tightening.
“He had a temper. My mom had a way of making that feel normal.”
The words are plain. That makes them worse.
I look at her profile, the line of her face turned toward the sea, and keep my own voice level. “He hurt you.”
She lets out a breath that might be a laugh if there were any humor in it. “Not all the time.”
I go very still.
She notices. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“That thing with your face. Like you’re deciding which bones to break first.”
I hold her gaze for a second. “Maybe I am.”
That gets a real smile out of her, small and tired. “See? That’s not comforting in a normal-person way.”
“I was not raised for normal-person comfort.”
“No,” she says dryly. “That much is clear.”
The smile fades quickly.
“It was hard to leave,” she says. “Not because I didn’t want to. I wanted to for years. But leaving means admitting you might fail somewhere bigger, and if you fail at home at least everybody already expects it.”
I don’t like the calm way she says that either. “So, you left anyway.”
She nods. “With one suitcase and fifty-eight dollars and a bus ticket that felt way too expensive.” Her mouth curves. “Very glamorous.”
I picture her smaller, younger, getting on that bus alone, and something ugly moves in my chest.
“I worked awful jobs,” she says. “Diner shifts. Reception. Data entry. I thought if I kept my head down long enough, the city would eventually start making sense.”
“And did it?”
She snorts softly. “No. It just got more expensive.”
I laugh. “That sounds accurate.”
She leans her head back against the chair and finally drinks. “But I stayed. Which still feels miraculous some days.”
The late light turns her skin gold. There’s salt drying on her shoulders. Her hair is still damp from the sea, curling at the ends. She looks softer here, with the city stripped off both of us.
“You did more than stay,” I say. Her eyes cut to me. “You built something,” I continue. “Not what you planned, maybe. But yours.”
For a second she just looks at me. And because this is Zatanna, because she cannot let sincerity exist for too long without nudging it somewhere dangerous, she says, “Wow. That was almost encouraging.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
She smiles into her glass. “Your reputation?”
“Exactly.”
The sun lowers. The pool ripples. Somewhere behind us, the staff has lit lanterns along the path to the beach.
She sets her drink down and asks, quieter now, “What about you?”
I look out at the water.
I should give her something easy. My grandfather, the business, Moscow, discipline, schools, expectations. Facts without blood in them.
Instead, I say, “I was born into something I didn’t choose and got too good at surviving it.”
She doesn’t push. Not right away. That restraint may be the kindest thing anyone’s done for me all week.
We sit there in the warm air with the waves breaking in front of us, and I let her shoulder brush mine without moving away. When she shivers slightly as the breeze turns cooler, I stand, go inside, and bring back the light blanket from the sofa.
She looks up as I drape it over her legs.
“You know,” she says, “for a terrifying criminal, you have surprisingly decent bedside manner.”
I sit back down beside her. “That is not a phrase I wanted attached to me.”
“It is now.”
I look at her. She looks back.
I should be sleeping.
Instead, I’m standing barefoot in the dark of the villa living room with a ring in my hand and no business being here.
Moonlight spills across the floor in silver bands. The ocean beyond the glass is all sound and shadow, waves folding into shore, then dragging back again. Everything in the room is quiet except for me.
And the ring.
It sits heavy in my palm, colder than it should be in this heat.
Old gold. A family stone set in a severe band my grandfather had commissioned long before I was born.
It belonged to my grandmother first, then sat in a vault for years waiting for the “right” woman.
As if women can be judged by pedigree and timing and whether they fit neatly into a plan drawn up by dead men.
I brought it here. I don’t know why.
Or rather, I know exactly why and refuse to admit it.
I tell myself I only brought it because I need to be prepared. Because a man in my position does not move toward a proposal without the proper symbol in his pocket. Because one week is one week, and if I am going to marry, I’m going to do it decisively.
All true.
None of it the truth. Because all I can think about is her.
Zatanna laughing in the water this afternoon.
Zatanna in that black swimsuit, sun on her shoulders.
Zatanna curled into the lounge chair after dinner with her head tipped back and her mouth soft with sleep and trust.
Zatanna saying my life sounds like it hurts and meaning it.
I close my hand around the ring until the edges bite. This is madness. I should be thinking of logistics. Contracts. Timing. Strategy. A wife on paper.
Instead, I am standing in the middle of the night staring at a family heirloom and seeing only dark eyes and stubbornness and a woman who was never supposed to matter enough to make this impossible.