Chapter 28 #2
So, I let him take me back through the villa, past the open glass doors and the soft white walls and the impossible ocean just outside, into the bedroom where the curtains move with the breeze and the sheets are still rumpled from the night before.
He lays me down like I’m something precious.
Then proves, very quickly, that precious doesn’t mean safe.
What follows is all warmth and skin and laughter that turns into gasps, mouths finding familiar places, hands learning them better.
It is softer in some places than what came before, and somehow more dangerous for it.
Because there is no more pretending now.
No more strangers in hotel corridors or bullets in windows to explain away why we’re doing this.
Just us.
Just the reckless, growing certainty that whatever line we crossed is very far behind us now.
And when it is over, when we’ve both caught our breath and the world has narrowed to the white sheets and the quiet ocean outside and his arm heavy over my waist, I lie there listening to his heartbeat and decide I’m not letting him drift away into silence this time.
I turn slightly to look at him.
He’s staring up at the ceiling, one hand behind his head, the other splayed lazily over my hip. For the first time since I’ve known him, he looks almost… unguarded.
It makes him seem younger. Not actually young. Just less carved by whatever made him.
So I ask, carefully, “Tell me more about your family.”
His eyes shift to mine. “That’s not exactly post-coital pillow talk.”
“It can be.”
His mouth twitches faintly. “You are alarmingly persistent.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
Then, surprising me, he doesn’t dismiss the question.
He exhales once and looks back at the ceiling.
“My grandfather was the architect,” he says.
“Everything started with him. He built the business, the real estate, the influence. By the time I was old enough to understand what family meant, it already came with bodyguards and people who never used full names in front of children.”
I stay quiet.
He seems to like silence when it isn’t demanding something from him.
“My father,” he continues, “inherited the worst parts of him without the discipline. He likes power. He likes possession. He likes the feeling of breaking a room just by entering it.” His voice turns flatter. “He also likes being obeyed.”
I think of the way Aleksei’s jaw tightens whenever his father comes up. “And you didn’t.”
“No.” That earns the faintest, bitter laugh. “I was disappointing very early.”
I prop myself up on one elbow to look at him better. “Your mother?”
That changes him. Not dramatically. But enough.
His gaze softens somewhere I’m not sure many people ever get to see. “She stayed longer than she should have,” he says quietly. “For me, probably. For the image of the family. For reasons I still don’t fully understand.”
I swallow. “Was he cruel to her?”
His eyes cut to mine, and I know immediately that I asked the right question and the worst one. “Yes,” he says.
Just that. No details. He doesn’t need them.
I feel something in my chest pull tight. “I’m sorry.”
He studies me for a second, then looks away. “You say that like it changes something.”
“It doesn’t,” I admit. “But I still mean it.”
For a moment, there’s only the sound of the ceiling fan and the sea.
Then he says, almost absently, “My mother thinks I am too much like him.”
I blink. “Do you?”
That earns me a long look.
“No,” he says at last. “I think I am too much like him in the ways that matter, and not enough in the ways that kept him happy.”
That is one of the saddest things anyone has ever said to me.
I reach out without thinking and touch his face. His eyes close for one brief second, leaning almost imperceptibly into my hand.
Then his phone rings. The sound slices through the room.
He stills.
I feel it instantly, the way his body changes before he even reaches for the phone on the bedside table. Not panic exactly. But alarm. Real alarm.
He glances at the screen and all the softness disappears. He sits up.
I push up with him, the sheet slipping down over my chest. “What is it?”
He answers the call, listens for about five seconds, and whatever he hears puts a darkness in his face I haven’t seen yet. When he ends the call, he’s already moving. Already out of bed. Already reaching for his trousers.
“Aleksei.”
He looks at me, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I see something dangerously close to fear.
“It’s my mother,” he says.
My stomach drops. “What happened?”
He buttons his shirt with quick, efficient hands that are just a little less steady than usual. “She’s sick.”
The room seems to tilt.
“How sick?”
He shakes his head once, like the answer doesn’t matter or he doesn’t have one yet. “We have to go.”
The ride to the airport feels nothing like the one that brought us here.
No teasing. No warm hands on my thigh. No impossible private-jet seduction hovering in the air like heat.
Just… urgency.
Aleksei is on the phone for most of the drive, switching between English and Russian so fluidly I can’t follow more than a few clipped words. Hospital. Doctor. Mother. Arrival.
I sit beside him in the backseat, dressed too quickly, hair still damp from the shower I barely had time to take, and try not to think about the fact that the last time we were in this car, he was distracting me into agreeing to run away with him.
Now his whole body is tuned toward one thing only.
Getting home.
By the time we board the jet again, the staff has the cabin set up for speed rather than comfort. The flight attendant speaks in soft, efficient tones. The engines spool up almost as soon as we sit down. Aleksei doesn’t even pretend to relax.
I want to say something helpful. I have no idea what that is.
So I settle for reaching across the seat and touching the back of his hand once.
He looks at it. Then at me. And for one second, something in his expression softens.
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
That’s all. But it matters.
The flight back is a blur of dark sky, tense silences, and the low glow of screens. I doze for maybe twenty minutes with my head against the seat and wake up to the plane already descending.
The States below us are all lights again.
The second my phone reconnects to service, it buzzes with a message. Then another. I blink at the screen.
A bank credit alert. For an amount so large I genuinely think my eyes are crossing wrong.
“What the hell?”
Aleksei glances over, already standing to retrieve his jacket. “What?”
I hold up the screen. “I just got a credit.”
He looks once, not surprised in the slightest. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“This is the first installment of the bonus I promised.”
I stare at him. “I haven’t done anything yet.”
His attention flicks to the cabin door, then back to me. “You came.”
“That is not what we agreed.”
“No,” he says, stepping into my space with that same impossible certainty he always seems to have, even now, even with worry carved into every line of him. “But it’s what I’m paying for.”
“Aleksei—”
He cuts me off by kissing me. Not hard. Not like the bathroom, or the jet, or any of the times we’ve combusted into each other. Just one slow, deliberate kiss that says more than his timing allows words to.
Then he pulls back, checks my face once like he’s memorizing it, and heads for the stairs.
I follow him out into the early-morning gray of the tarmac.
Two black cars are waiting.
Men in dark suits move quickly but quietly, collecting bags, opening doors, scanning the perimeter. Everything feels larger and sharper here. More real. Less like a stolen escape and more like the life he tried to warn me about.
Aleksei is halfway to the first car when I realize he isn’t slowing down for me.
“Aren’t you coming with me?” I ask.
He turns. For a second he looks almost surprised by the question. Then the surprise vanishes, replaced by the hard, tired focus I’m learning is his default under pressure.
“I have to go see my mother,” he says.
The words are obvious. Rational. Fine.
But they still hit me strangely hard.
Maybe because I had not thought beyond the plane. Beyond his hand in mine. Beyond this strange little bubble where, despite everything, we had somehow become an us.
The cars, the men, the hospital waiting somewhere in the city for him. It all reminds me very quickly that his world did not pause just because he took me to the beach.
“Can I come?” I ask.
The words leave my mouth before I can second-guess them.
His gaze searches my face. For uncertainty, maybe. Hesitation. Some sign that I’m saying it out of obligation rather than want.
I let him look.
Finally, he nods once. “Yes.”
The answer settles something in me I hadn’t realized was braced for rejection.
He opens the rear door of the first car himself this time. I slide in, and a second later he’s beside me, one hand already on his phone again, giving clipped instructions as the convoy pulls away from the terminal.
The city rolls toward us in stages. Highway lights. Gray dawn.
Hospitals always seem to exist in a different color than the rest of the world, and this one is no different when we pull up. Glass and steel and white fluorescent light waiting behind the entrance doors like a warning.
The moment the car stops, everything in Aleksei changes again. He is not the man from the villa now. Not the man from the plane. Not the man who just paid me enough money to buy a new life.
He is someone’s son. And he is afraid.
Not visibly, not in a way most people would catch. But I can feel it in the way he gets out too fast, the way his jaw is set too hard, the way his hand closes around the car door once before he lets it go.
Inside, the hospital smells like antiseptic and coffee and bad news.
A woman at the front desk looks up and recognizes him instantly. Not from celebrity. From expectation.
“Mr. Vasiliev,” she says, standing. “They’re waiting upstairs.”
He nods. “Condition?”