Chapter 1
ALEXEI
Sandro Pavlov was dead, and Alexei felt nothing.
He stood in the doorway of what used to be a sitting room in a townhouse in Saint Petersburg and forced himself to take in every detail.
The charred remains in the chair. The smell, which was exactly what burning flesh smelled like and nothing else.
The star-shaped pattern on the floor where the accelerant had been poured with a care that spoke less of rage and more of ritual.
All of it. For this.
And someone else had gotten here first.
He should have felt something. Rage that the kill wasn’t his. Relief that it was done. Satisfaction, at the very least, that the man who had destroyed his father’s life was now unrecognizable in a chair.
But there was just...nothing. A blankness where the purpose used to be. And the blankness was worse than grief, because grief at least had a shape, and this had none.
“Sir.”
Detective Kotov was in the corridor, unwilling to step inside the room uninvited.
Smart man. In this part of Russia, a detective who wanted to keep his career intact learned early which rooms belonged to him and which belonged to the Almazovs.
Behind him, the scene was working: uniformed officers at the perimeter, forensic techs in the stairwell, a guard logging evidence by the front entrance.
All of them deferring. In this part of Russia, everyone deferred.
“We found something.”
Kotov held up the evidence bag. Alexei pulled on gloves and took it.
Inside was a folded sheet of paper with burnt edges. He opened it. The words were written in blood. Pavlov’s, most likely. The handwriting was neat. Almost elegant.
Cursed are you who reads this.
Alexei read it twice. Then he folded the paper, put it back in the bag, and handed it to Kotov.
“I’d appreciate a copy in my inbox.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Any leads?”
“The accelerant is military grade. My men are canvassing. This wasn’t amateur work.”
“Keep me updated.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexei walked out of the building without a backward glance. The street was grey and wet. November in Saint Petersburg, which meant the air tasted like diesel and river water and a cold that got into your bones whether you wanted it to or not.
He got in the car. Typed the message.
Sandro Pavlov is dead. Someone else got to him first.
He hit Send.
Andrei’s reply came in less than a minute. Good.
Artem: It’s over.
Anton: Tell me you’re coming home.
Three brothers. Three replies. For them, this was enough. The man was dead. The chapter was closed. They were ready to move on with their lives.
Alexei wasn’t.
And he couldn’t explain why. It wasn’t about wanting to be the one who did it.
It wasn’t injured pride or some unsatisfied bloodlust. It was simpler and worse than that: for twenty-two years, this had been the reason he got out of bed.
The reason Ace Royale existed. The reason he had turned himself into a man who could stand in a room with a burnt corpse and feel nothing at all.
Take that away, and what was left?
A billionaire with an empire and no reason to run it.
He put his phone away. The driver pulled onto the motorway without being told where to go. The airport. Where else.
The grey city thinned into grey suburbs. Alexei leaned back and closed his eyes and tried to figure out what a man was supposed to do with the rest of his life when the thing that had driven it was gone.
His phone rang.
Not the encrypted line. The personal one. The number that only four people in the world had, and three of them had just texted.
Mia.
His eyes opened. His jaw tightened. And something in his chest did a thing he refused to name, because naming it would mean admitting that an eighteen-year-old girl he hadn’t seen in two years could do more damage to his composure in a single phone call than a dead body could.
He could let it ring. She’d leave a voicemail. She always did. Long and rambling and full of stories about classes and friends and some stray cat she’d found, and he would listen to it later on the plane, alone, like he always did, where no one could see his face while she talked.
But ignoring her call would make him a coward, and whatever else Alexei Almazov was, he wasn’t that.
He answered. “Speak.”
“There you go again, issuing orders before saying hello.”
Her voice hit him the way it always did. Right in the chest. He set his jaw harder.
“Hello, Mia. Now speak.”
She laughed, and the sound filled the car, and the nothing in his chest cracked just a little. Just enough to let the warmth in. Just enough to piss him off.
“So, please don’t be mad.”
Those five words had never once in the history of their relationship preceded anything that didn’t make him exactly that. “What did you do this time?”
“I’ve already informed Whitmore—”
Her college. The one he had personally selected. The one with the best security infrastructure of any university in Europe, which he had verified himself before signing the tuition check.
“—that I’m taking a year off, and they’ve already given my slot to someone else.”
Alexei took a breath. Then another one.
“There’s more,” she added cheerfully.
There was always more with Mia.
“I’m already here.”
“Here,” he repeated.
“In Monaco.”
He didn’t speak.
“As in your home.” He could hear her smiling. He could always hear her smiling, and it drove him out of his mind that he could. “Surprise?”
The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. Whatever he saw in his employer’s face made him look away immediately.
“Mia.”
“Before you say anything—”
“Mia.”
“—I already have a plan, okay? You know the program at Ace Royale? The one Artem told me about, where you help people with gambling problems? I want to work there. Gap year. I’ve thought about this, Alexei, I’ve really, really thought about it, and I know what you’re going to say.
You’re going to say it isn’t safe, or it isn’t appropriate, or I need to be in school, and I get it, I do, but I’m eighteen, and I’ve already given up my slot, so you can’t send me back even if you wanted to, which means—”
“Breathe.”
She stopped. And in the silence that followed, the bravado fell away, and what was left was the voice he heard in his head at 3 AM when he couldn’t sleep.
The voice of the girl who had shown up in his office at sixteen with a suitcase and a bruised chin because she’d tripped getting out of the taxi, and eyes so bright with unshed tears that he’d had to leave the room for a full minute before he trusted himself to speak.
“I’m asking you to let me stay,” she whispered.
The car hummed. The wipers beat against the windshield. Two thousand miles of airspace between them, and she might as well have been sitting next to him for how hard those words hit.
Joshua Robertson had gripped his hand in a hospital bed three days before he died and asked Alexei to take care of his daughter.
And Alexei had said yes, because Joshua and Carol Robertson had been the only people in the world kind enough to help Daniil Almazov when kindness was something that cost you, and saying no to a dying man who loved his daughter more than breathing was not something Alexei was capable of.
He had kept that promise. He had given her the best schools, the best security, the safest distance he could manage.
The distance was the important part. Because somewhere between Mia’s sixteenth birthday and the day he put her on the plane to Whitmore, the girl he had agreed to protect had turned into the single most dangerous person in his life. Not because she threatened him.
Because she made him want things he had no business wanting.
And now she was in his home. With her bags unpacked. And her slot at Whitmore gone. And nowhere else to go.
“Stay where you are,” he told her. His voice gave away nothing. “I’ll be there tonight.”
“That’s not a yes.”
“It’s not a no.”
“That’s what you told me when I asked for a puppy at sixteen.”
“And you didn’t get a puppy.”
“I got a Rottweiler named Biscuit and you pretended not to notice for three weeks.”
His mouth twitched. He killed it immediately, but the damage was done. The driver kept his eyes on the road.
“Stay where you are, Mia.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Her voice dropped. Not to a whisper. To something honest. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Alexei. I’m not going anywhere.”
The line went dead. She didn’t say goodbye. She’d learned that from him.
He lowered the phone. The screen went dark. The grey outskirts of Saint Petersburg scrolled past the window, and Alexei saw none of it.
Pavlov was dead. The purpose was gone. The empire was pointless. And a girl he hadn’t seen in two years was sitting in his penthouse, waiting for him to come home.
“Faster,” he told the driver.