Chapter 31
Artem
SHE CATCHES ME OFF guard.
There's no warning. No build. She reaches up, takes my jaw in both hands the way I took hers in the corridor three days ago, and presses her mouth to mine, and the kiss is the most contradictory thing I have ever felt.
Passionate and innocent at the same time.
Certain and trembling. A girl who has decided exactly what she wants and has very little idea how to ask for it, and so she asks the only way she knows, with both hands and her whole heart and no plan beyond this.
Something in me gives. The locked thing. The glass I've held everything behind for thirty-four years, already cracked in that corridor when she called me a gargoyle, finally goes.
I take over.
I turn the kiss, slow her down, gather her in against me with one arm while my other hand cradles the back of her head, and I feel the small startled sound she makes against my mouth when she realises the lead has changed hands.
She came in here brave. I let her be brave for exactly as long as it takes me to remember that I've spent two weeks not touching her, and that I'm done with restraint.
The desk lamp throws gold across the room. Her hands fist in my shirt. And whatever I've been holding myself back from since the first time her hands found my scars and didn't flinch, I stop holding it back now.
After, she's tucked against my chest in the gold lamplight, her cheek over the scar she found first, the long one, and I can feel her breath going slow and even against my skin.
My hand is in her hair. The ship hums at sixty-two hertz.
Neither of us has said anything in a while and the silence is the good kind, the kind her hands make in a treatment room, the kind I haven't had in thirty-four years.
"Your hands," I tell her, when I can, "are not the only valuable thing about you."
She turns her face into my chest and I feel her smile against my skin, and the smile is so warm it makes my eyes burn.
I TELL HER EVERYTHING.
We're on the balcony. Two AM. She's wearing my shirt because hers is somewhere on the sitting room floor and the night air is warm for the Mediterranean but not warm enough for bare skin and I gave her the shirt before I gave her the information, which is the correct order of operations: cover the girl, then confess the crimes.
She buttoned it wrong. The same way she buttoned her uniform wrong when I walked her home from the spa. I'm not going to correct it. I'm never going to correct it. She can button every shirt she owns in the wrong order for the rest of her life and it will undo me every single time.
"Ace Royale," I begin. "The casino. It's the front."
She's sitting in the deck chair with her knees pulled up, my shirt falling past her thighs, her bare feet on the cushion.
She's listening like she listens during sessions, with her whole body, that complete attention that made me yield to her in the first session and hasn't stopped making me yield since.
"The casino generates enough revenue to fund the real operation. Shipping routes, port contacts, intelligence networks. We track the money that flowed out of my father's case. Bribes, payoffs, the men who turned the other way while a casino owner in Saint Petersburg fed my father to the system."
"The witness," she says. Not a question. She's been assembling this since the corridor. Filing the pieces in that planner of hers, fitting them together like her hands find what's hidden in a body.
"Someone who can identify the man who gave the order. We've been tracking them for three years. Mila's primary assignment."
Star doesn't flinch at Mila's name. Two weeks ago she would have. The name would have carried its own weather. Now she just nods and waits, and the fact that she can hear that name without reacting tells me more about the steel in this girl than any word she's ever spoken.
"Four brothers," I continue. "Alexei runs the operation.
Strategy, finance, the decisions nobody wants to make.
Andrei handles security. Physical protection, threat assessment, the work that requires someone who doesn't flinch at violence.
" I pause because the next part is mine and it tastes different when I'm saying it to her.
"I handle enforcement. The people who owe the casino money, the debtors, the ones who disappear. "
"The ones you send to rehab."
I go still. "How do you know that?"
"You told me your father was a gambler who lost everything.
You told me a casino owner destroyed him.
And you told me you make people disappear.
" She's studying me with those eyes, clear, unblinking, reading me like she reads a body on her table, and I can see her assembling the final pieces, turning them over, checking the fit.
"You're not killing them. You're saving them.
You're doing for strangers what nobody did for your father. "
I have been assessed by intelligence officers.
By military psychologists. By Alexei himself, who can dismantle a man's motives in three questions.
None of them saw it that fast. None of them delivered it with that much certainty, like it were obvious, like the math were simple and she'd finished it before I'd set up the equation.
I'm sitting across from her with my chest cracked open and she's in my shirt with her knees pulled up and she just named the thing I have never named to anyone, the real reason, the actual reason I do what I do, and she spoke it like she was reading it off my ribs.
"And Anton?" she asks.
"High-roller relations. Guest-facing. He's the charm.
The one who makes billionaires feel comfortable losing money in our casino while we use their data to trace the network.
" I lean back. The railing behind me cuts the sky into sections.
"Alexei doesn't smile. Andrei smiles once a year. Anton smiles enough for all of us."
"Who does Artem smile for?"
She asks it like she asks everything: straight, no performance, no buildup. Just the question. The voice she used when she asked why don't you sleep on the upper deck and what changed at his door and was Curtis using the right pressure. Just the question.
"You," I tell her. "Apparently."
The lopsided thing happens. Hers, not mine. A half-smile that mirrors the one I didn't know I had until she found it, and the sight of my own expression on her face does something to me that I couldn't explain if I had a thousand years and a vocabulary to match.
"And Mila fits in how?"
"Eleven years of fieldwork. Contacts I don't have. Intelligence channels from before the family operation existed. She's been tracking the witness through shipping manifests, port registries, encrypted communications. The gallery gives her cover and access to the ship's guest list."
"And she reports to Alexei."
"To me. But Alexei knows everything."
Star is still for a moment. The sea is black beneath us. The ship rocks, that constant motion that has become invisible, like the sixty-two hertz, like her hands, something so present it disappears into background.
"She's in love with you," Star says.
Not a question.
"I know."
"You've always known."
"I've known for years. I chose to treat it as loyalty because it was useful and because I didn't want to lose the best operative I've ever worked with." My jaw tightens. "That was a mistake."
"One of several."
"One of several."
She unfolds her legs. Plants her bare feet on the deck.
Leans forward, elbows on her knees, chin on her fists, and she's twenty years old and wearing my shirt and I've just told her that the man she loves runs an intelligence operation funded by a Bratva casino and she hasn't taken a single step backward.
Her feet are on the deck. Her chin is on her fists. She's thinking.
"I'm not afraid of your world," she decides.
"I know."
"I'm not afraid of your brothers. I'm not afraid of Mila. I'm not afraid of the man who killed your father."
"You should be afraid of him."
"Maybe." She tips her head. "But I'm not afraid of you. And that's the one that matters."
I stand. Cross to her chair. Take her face in my hands, and my palms fit against her jaw the way they always do and my thumbs find her cheekbones and she tilts her face up to me and her eyes are full and fierce and she is not afraid.
She's not afraid and I've given her every reason to be and she's sitting in my shirt with her feet on my deck and she's not afraid.
"I love you, Star."
Her hands come up to cover mine on her face. Her fingers on my scarred knuckles. "I love you, Artem."
I kiss her. None of the desperate corridor energy.
None of the fierce reunion or gallery collision or private deck ambush.
A slow, careful, thorough kiss, the kiss of a man who has told a girl his worst secrets and she's still here, and the taste of her mouth right now is the taste of someone who has chosen to stay.
She turns her head and presses her lips to my palm.
The scar. The one she traced through oil every Thursday.
She presses her mouth to it and I feel the kiss in every cell of my body, because her lips on my scar is the thesis of us, it's the whole thing, it's the reason we started and the reason we came back and the reason we're standing on this balcony at two-thirty in the morning, because she touched my scars and didn't flinch and I haven't been the same since.
MY PHONE BUZZES AT four AM.
Star is asleep on the balcony chair, curled under the blanket I put over her, my shirt still buttoned wrong. Her hair is across her face and one hand is tucked under her chin and she's still and I stand in the doorway and allow myself ten seconds.
Ten seconds to look at her. To memorise how she sleeps, curled tight, small, her body doing the thing it does when she's not awake to manage it, making itself compact, taking up as little space as possible, and even in sleep I can see the girl who counted bus fare and ate standing up and I want to fill every inch of space around her until she stops making herself small.
The screen.
Mila.
Need to meet. Gallery. Found something on the package. Come now.
The package. Our word for the witness file.
Three years of dead ends and manifests and cold trails, and Mila has found something at four in the morning and wants to meet in the gallery and Star is asleep on my balcony in my shirt and my body is still humming with the memory of her mouth on my scars.
Clean shirt. A note on the hotel pad: Gone to gallery. Back before you wake. Coffee is in the machine. Black, one sugar. —A.
I cover her with a second blanket because the night air is cooling and her feet are bare. I don't kiss her because I'll wake her and she needs sleep more than I need to touch her.
The suite door closes behind me. The corridor is empty.
Somewhere below, in the Tranquil Antique Gallery, Mila is waiting with information I've been chasing for three years.
I take the stairs. Two at a time.