Chapter 36
Artem
CURTIS HAS BEEN PROMOTED.
Curtis took the promotion with a grin and an olive stolen off the nearest plate. He didn't ask questions. He glanced at me, at Star, at the ring on her finger, and nodded once.
Now he's weaving through billionaires and their wives with a tray of canapés and the expression of a boy who has been handed the keys to a kingdom and plans to enjoy every second.
MILA'S PYRE BURNS AT midnight.
It was written in her will: a file buried in her laptop between encrypted intelligence reports and eleven years of operational logs. Two lines: No burial. Burn me. Scatter the ashes in open water.
We built it on the lower service deck, where the hull meets the waterline and the sound of the sea is louder than the engines. Andrei stacked the wood. He builds things when he doesn't know what to feel.
Star stood beside me. I told her she didn't have to. She came anyway, in her flat shoes and her uniform and the gold band on her finger, and she didn't look away.
The fire caught. Rose. Turned the dark service deck orange and gold. The wood crackled and the sparks flew upward and out through the open hull doors toward the black water.
I thought about who Mila had been before me. Before the military and the intelligence work and the gallery cover. There had been a girl, once. A girl who chose this life for reasons I never asked about because asking would have made her a person instead of an asset.
That was my failure. One of several.
The ashes went over the rail at one AM. Star dropped a single white rose with them. She didn't explain. She didn't need to.
"WE GOT A NAME."
Anton, on the upper deck. The guests have gone to their cabins. The deck is empty except for us: four brothers in the Mediterranean wind, the harbour lights of Monaco scattered below.
"Out of Mila's laptop." His usual grin is gone. His face is all sharp angles and focus, the charm stripped back, the operative underneath. "Took me six hours to crack the secondary encryption. She had a contact log buried three layers deep."
He looks at each of us. Andrei, arms crossed. Alexei, champagne untouched. Me.
"None of us is going to like it."
Silence. The wind off the water. The hum of the ship.
Andrei unfolds his arms. Plants his hands on the railing.
"Tomorrow." His voice carries the finality of a man who knows when a room has reached its limit. "We talk about it tomorrow. Tonight, we give our newlyweds their privacy."
He turns. Star is standing in the doorway to the deck, half-lit by the corridor behind her, her hair loose, her flat shoes, the gold band catching the light.
Andrei crosses to her. He's a head taller and twice as broad, and she tips her face up to look at him and doesn't step back.
One hand on her shoulder. The gesture is careful, calibrated: a man who breaks things for a living and has learned to be gentle with the things worth keeping.
"Добро пожаловать в семью, сестрёнка."
Welcome to the family, little sister.
Star's eyes fill. She blinks fast, the crybaby-bride battle, fought and barely won, and nods once.
Andrei squeezes her shoulder and walks away.
I cross to her. Take her hand. Her fingers lace through mine.
"What did he call me?" she whispers.
"Little sister."
She presses her face into my chest. One breath. Two. Then she pulls back and her eyes are dry and her chin is up and she is the bravest woman I have ever known.
"Take me to bed," she murmurs.
THE SUITE IS DARK EXCEPT for the balcony doors, open, the light from Monaco harbour painting the room in pale gold.
She stands by the bed. I stand in front of her. Twelve inches between us.
My hands find the hem of her tunic. Button by button.
Slowly, because there's no rush and because every button I open reveals another inch of her skin and I want to memorise the temperature of each one.
The tunic falls. Her shoulders bare. The thin straps underneath, simple, white, practical, because she's Star and nothing about her is performance.
I trace her collarbone with my thumb. The same path my mouth traced in the spa. She shivers.
My mouth follows. Collarbone. Throat. The hollow where her pulse hammers. I rest my lips there and count the rhythm because I've wanted to memorise this since the first time I felt it through my shirt in the gallery, and now I'm allowed, and there are no more doors between us.
Her fingers find my hair. Hold me where I am.
I lower her to the bed. My hand cradling the back of her head the way I cradle everything that matters. Her dark hair fans across white sheets. The harbour light paints her gold.
She whispers my name. Not loud. A breath. Artem. The way she first whispered it outside her cabin, low and uneven and full of everything she'd been holding, and the sound does what it always does. It opens something in my chest that will never close again.
I give her everything. Not the operative. Not the Almazov who makes problems disappear. The man underneath. The one whose hands shook in a corridor. The one who sat on a gallery floor and told his brother I'm going to marry her before he'd asked.
She whispers my name again, and her hands find my face and hold it the way I hold hers, palms on my jaw, fingers at my temples, and there are no more doors between us and there never will be again.
The ship hums. Sixty-two hertz.
Hers. Mine. Both.
AFTERWARDS. SHE CURLS against my chest with her hand on the scar over my ribs. Her fingers trace the ridge of it, the familiar path, the map she drew in a treatment room a lifetime ago. Her breathing slows. Evens.
My lips press the top of her head.
Her arm tightens around my waist.
The harbour light shifts on the ceiling. Monaco glitters through the open doors. The Mediterranean is black and vast and full of things that want to hurt us and I am lying in a bed with a girl who holds handkerchiefs like they're breathing and I am not afraid.
For the first time in five years, I sleep.
The End
Thank you for reading Hold On to Me.