Chapter 4 #3
"It's fine," he told her.
"You're lying. Your left eye does this thing when you lie."
"I'm not aware of a thing."
"It does! It sort of twitches. Very subtle. Very micro. I've been cataloguing your tells since I was sixteen. I have a mental spreadsheet."
He ate another bite. It was still terrible. "You've been cataloguing my tells."
"Someone has to. You're basically a vault with legs." She ate her own risotto, grimaced, and put her fork down. "Okay, that's truly bad. I'm so sorry."
"It's not your worst."
"Name something I've made that was worse."
"The scrambled eggs when you were sixteen. You used sugar instead of salt."
Her face broke open into a grin so wide it rearranged the whole room. "You remember that?"
He remembered everything. Every meal she'd burned.
Every voicemail she'd left. Every exam she'd stressed about.
Every time she'd fallen asleep on his couch while he worked late, and he'd carried her to bed, and she'd curled into his chest in her sleep and murmured something that wasn't quite words, and he'd set her down and left the room and stood in the hallway with his hands against the wall and his eyes closed.
He remembered all of it. That was the problem.
"I have a decent memory," he offered.
"You have a terrifying memory. You once reminded me about a dentist appointment I'd made eight months earlier."
"You would have missed it."
"I would have missed it," she confirmed. "Because I forgot about it thirty seconds after making it."
They ate in something that wasn't silence and wasn't conversation. It was the space between, the domestic hum of two people sharing a meal, and it was so ordinary and so dangerous that Alexei felt it in his teeth.
She didn't bring up the morning. She didn't push.
She didn't mention the text. She told him about her first day at the clinic, about Dr. Vasquez and the broken espresso machine and the nine intake forms and the one she'd spilled coffee on.
She talked about the counsellors, about the clients, about the courtyard with the fountain.
"I met someone interesting," she added, collecting the plates.
"A client. Morgan. Blond, charming, very self-aware about his gambling issues.
He actually brought up the dopamine-and-anticipation thing before I could explain it to him.
" She carried the plates to the sink. "I think he'll do well in the programme. "
The blond man. At her desk. Leaning in. Making her laugh.
"He's starting Tuesdays and Thursdays," Mia continued from the kitchen, running water over the plates. "Dr. Vasquez assigned him to the group sessions, but he asked if I'd be the one doing his check-ins. I told him I'd ask."
"No."
The word came out before he could stop it. Hard and sharp and stripped of every layer of composure he'd rebuilt during the drive home.
Mia turned off the water. She turned around. Her eyebrows were up.
"No?"
"His check-ins should go through a certified counsellor. You're not trained for individual sessions." The justification was flawless. Professional. Entirely rational. And entirely a lie.
"I wouldn't be running the session," she clarified, reaching for a towel. "I'd just be doing the intake follow-ups. Scheduling. Basic stuff."
"It's not appropriate."
"Why not?"
Because he leaned against your desk. Because he made you laugh. Because his body was angled toward you like a man who wanted something, and you didn't notice, because you never notice, because you give your warmth to everyone and it will be the death of me.
"Because you've been there one day, Mia."
She held his gaze. And he could see it, the moment she decided not to push. The moment the fight drained from her shoulders and something softer took its place, and she nodded. "Okay."
Just that. Okay.
No argument. No challenge. No wrist-grabbing or truth-telling or backing him against the ropes until his composure cracked.
She put the towel down and came back to the table and sat across from him, and her eyes were gentle, and her voice was gentle, and the gentleness was a weapon more lethal than anything in his arsenal.
"Alexei."
He didn't answer. His chest was tight. The evening light was fading.
The kitchen was dim and warm and smelled like burnt risotto and the lemon soap she'd used on the dishes, and she was sitting three feet away from him with her hair falling out of its knot and her shoulder bare and her eyes on his, and she wasn't pushing.
She wasn't pushing, and it was destroying him.
"You had a long day." Her voice was low. Not a whisper. Something between a whisper and a statement. "I can see it."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. Your hands have been fists since you sat down."
He unclenched them. She noticed. She always noticed.
"I'm not going to bring up this morning," she told him. "I know you think I'm going to, but I'm not."
He didn't speak.
"I just want to sit here with you." Her voice was so soft it hurt. "Can I do that? Can we just sit here?"
He should have refused. He should have stood up and gone to his room and closed the door, because the door was his weapon, the retreat was his strategy, and every minute he spent in this warm kitchen with this girl who saw through every wall he'd ever built was another brick removed.
"Yes," he heard himself say.
She didn't move. Didn't close the distance. Didn't reach for him. She sat across the table with her bare shoulder and her messy hair and her gentle eyes, and she let the silence hold them.
And Alexei Almazov, who had built an empire on control and spent twenty-two years turning himself into something unbreakable, felt the cracks spread.
Because this was worse than the kiss. Worse than the morning. Worse than her grabbing his wrist and telling him not to walk away. This was a girl making him dinner and asking nothing. This was domesticity. This was what his life could be, every night, if he let it.
He could see it. The map of it. Her at his table, her music on his speakers, her burnt risotto, her laughter. Biscuit on the floor. Her bare feet on the marble in the morning. Her voice in every room, filling the spaces that had been empty so long he'd forgotten they were there.
A life. Not an empire. A life.
"Mia."
She met his eyes. Patient. Waiting. Not pushing.
"Come here."
Two words. The first time he'd ever spoken them to her without a reason attached. Not come here, you need to sign this. Not come here, your flight leaves in an hour. Just: come here.
Her lips parted. Her eyes went bright. And she stood, slow, like she was afraid any sudden movement would spook him, and came around the table, and stood in front of him.
Close. Close enough that he could smell the lemon soap and the burnt risotto and the shampoo that had been in his lungs all day. Close enough that if he reached out, his fingertips would brush the bare skin of her shoulder.
He didn't reach out.
She did.
Her hand rose. Slow. She pressed her palm to the side of his face, and the touch was so light it barely registered, and his eyes closed before he could stop them.
Alexei Almazov hadn't been touched with tenderness in twenty-two years.
Not since his father. Not since the phone call from the prison guard, the one that had ended his childhood and started the engine that drove everything after.
His brothers loved him, but the Almazov men didn't touch each other.
They didn't hold or comfort or reach across the distance.
They texted good and it's over and tell me you're coming home, and the words carried the weight of all the things they couldn't do with their hands.
And now a girl was standing in front of him with her palm against his cheek, and the warmth of it was searing, and his body didn't know what to do with gentleness, and the sound that came from his chest was barely human.
"It's okay," she murmured. "I've got you."
His words. His words, from that morning. I've got you. She was giving them back, and the echo of it broke something in him that he didn't know was holding.
Her thumb traced his cheekbone. Her other hand came up, and both palms were on his face now, and she was tilting his head up to meet her eyes, and the reversal of it, the sheer inversion of their positions, him sitting and her standing, her hands on his face and his hands in his lap, undid him more completely than any kiss.
"Let me," she whispered.
He didn't ask what she meant. He knew. His body knew before his brain caught up, because his hands were trembling, and she could see it, and he couldn't hide it, and the inability to hide was its own surrender.
She leaned down and kissed him.
Not how he'd kissed her. Not desperate, not explosive, not the collision of two years of denial. She kissed him like someone who wasn't afraid of losing him, slow and warm and sure, and her fingers slid into his hair, and the sound he made against her mouth was the sound of a man giving up.
His hands came up. They found her waist, and his grip was too tight, he knew it was too tight, but his fingers wouldn't obey, because they'd spent twenty-two years gripping steering wheels and desks and the edges of his own control, and they didn't know how to hold something gently.
"You're shaking," she murmured against his mouth.
"I know."
"Let me take care of you."
He pulled back. Just enough to see her face. Her eyes were brown and bright and full of something so fierce it wrecked him, and he should have refused, he should have closed the door, he should have done any of the things that the man he'd built himself into would have done—
"Yes."
One word. The most terrifying word he'd ever spoken, because he had given orders that moved millions and made decisions that ended careers, and none of them had cost him what this single syllable cost.