Chapter 4 #4
She kissed him again. Deeper this time. Her hands in his hair, her body leaning into him, and the chair scraped back and he pulled her down onto his lap, and her knees were on either side of him and her weight settled against him and a groan tore from his throat that he couldn't have stopped if his life depended on it.
"Mia—"
"Shh." Her mouth was on his neck. His collar. The hollow of his throat where his pulse was hammering. Her fingers worked the buttons of his shirt, and every brush of her knuckles against his chest sent a tremor through him that he felt in his spine.
He gripped the edge of the chair with one hand.
His other arm was around her waist, and his face was pressed against her shoulder, and he was breathing hard, and the control was gone, and the wall was gone, and there was nothing left between them but the thin fabric of his open shirt and the warmth of her hands on his skin.
She touched him like she'd been studying him. Like the mental spreadsheet of his tells extended to this, to the places that made him seize, to the spot below his collarbone where her fingertip traced a line and his entire body locked.
"Tell me if this is okay," she breathed.
"It's—" His voice was gravel. He couldn't finish the sentence because her palm was on his chest, over his heart, and she held it there, and the simple act of feeling his heartbeat under her hand was more intimate than anything they'd done that morning.
"Your heart is so fast," she whispered.
He couldn't answer. Her hand slid lower. Over his ribs. Along the ridge of muscle at his stomach, and his body reacted before his mind could intervene, his hips pressing upward, and the contact tore a sound from both of them.
"Mia." A warning. A plea. He didn't know which.
"I've got you." Her voice held even though her hands were trembling. "Alexei. I've got you."
Her hand moved.
And the world went white.
Not fast. Not how she'd broken that morning, sharp and sudden and overwhelming.
This was slow. This was her hand on him, learning him, and his face buried in her neck and his arms locked around her waist and the sounds he was making, low and wrecked and completely beyond his control, pressed into her skin where no one else would ever hear them.
She held him through it. Her free arm around his shoulders, her lips in his hair, her voice in his ear saying his name like it was something precious, and when the tension broke, when his body arced against hers and his grip tightened and the sound he made was her name, just her name, torn from somewhere so deep it hadn't seen daylight in twenty-two years—
She held on.
The silence after was enormous.
His face was in her neck. His chest was heaving.
His arms were still locked around her waist, and he couldn't let go, couldn't make his hands release her, and the trembling in his body was different now.
Not tension. Something that felt dangerously close to grief, and he didn't understand it, couldn't parse it, because nothing about this should feel like grief and yet his eyes were burning and his throat was closed and the woman in his arms was warm and solid and present and the feeling of being held was so foreign to him that his body didn't know how to process it without breaking.
The way you'd calm an animal that didn't know it was safe yet. That was how Mia's fingers combed through his hair. Slow. Rhythmic.
"Stay," she whispered.
One word. The one that mattered.
Not don't leave. Not talk to me. Not tell me what this means. Just: stay.
He didn't close a door. He didn't leave the building. He didn't start the engine and drive until the shaking stopped.
Alexei Almazov sat in a chair in his kitchen with a girl in his lap and his face in her neck and his heart hammering against her palm, and he stayed.
ALEXEI
She fell asleep on the couch at eleven.
They hadn't talked about it. After the kitchen, after the chair, after she'd cleaned his shirt with a damp cloth and he'd let her, which was its own category of surrender, they had migrated to the living room like two people who didn't know what to do next but knew that separating wasn't an option.
She'd turned on the television. He'd pretended to care about whatever she'd chosen.
Biscuit had claimed the space between them, enormous and warm and oblivious, and within an hour Mia's head had tipped against the dog's back and her body had gone slack and her hand had gone limp on the remote.
He turned off the television.
She was curled into Biscuit's side with her bare feet tucked under a cushion and her hair falling across her face and her mouth slightly open, which she would've been mortified about if she knew, and the sight of it, the absolute defencelessness of her in his space, did something to the walls that was structural. Not a crack. A load-bearing failure.
He should carry her to the guest room. He'd done it before.
Two years ago, when she was sixteen, when she'd fall asleep on this couch with a textbook on her chest, and he'd lift her and carry her down the hall and set her on the bed and leave the room and stand in the hallway with his hands against the wall.
He picked her up. She weighed nothing. She murmured something unintelligible and curled into his chest, her fingers finding his collar, gripping the fabric, and the intimacy of the unconscious gesture hit him harder than anything she'd done while awake.
Down the hall. Past his bedroom door. To the guest room. He set her on the bed. Pulled the covers over her. Biscuit lumbered in and took his spot.
Her fingers hadn't let go of his collar.
He detached them gently. One by one. And the loss of her grip was absurdly painful for something so small.
He straightened up. She was asleep. Safe. In his home, in his guest room, with her dog pressed against her side and her face soft with sleep.
He stepped into the hallway. Pulled her door closed behind him. The click was soft. Familiar. The sound of a man retreating, which was what he always did, which was the only thing he knew how to do after being close to her.
His bedroom was six steps to the left.
He took one step. Two.
Stopped.
The hallway was dark. The penthouse was silent. And the emptiness that had opened when Pavlov died, the void that had replaced twenty-two years of purpose, wasn't empty anymore. It had a shape now, and the shape was sleeping six feet away on the other side of a door he'd just closed.
The first night, he'd closed his bedroom door. This morning, he'd left the building. Every retreat bigger. Every wall thinner. Every door between them a lie he kept telling himself because the alternative was admitting that the only place in his empire he wanted to be was wherever she was.
He stood in the dark hallway. His hands were at his sides. They weren't shaking. For the first time in three days, his hands were completely still, and the stillness was more terrifying than any tremor, because trembling meant he was still fighting.
Still hands meant the fight was over.
Alexei Almazov turned around.
He put his hand on her door.
And opened it.
MORGAN
The roulette wheel spun, and the table held its breath.
Morgan placed his chip on seventeen. Not because seventeen was lucky. Because the woman two seats to his left had placed hers on sixteen, and he enjoyed the intimacy of adjacency. The almost-touching. The nearness of a thing without the commitment of contact.
The ball dropped. Twenty-three. Neither of them won, but the woman smiled at him anyway, because women always smiled at Morgan Gurin, and he always smiled back, because a smile was the cheapest key to every locked room in the world.
He had been inside Ace Royale for four days now.
Long enough to learn the rhythms of the place.
The security rotation, which changed at eleven and three.
The cameras, which had two blind spots he'd mapped on his second night.
The VIP corridor, which led to an office on the top floor where the eldest brother worked behind a door that required a keycard and a six-digit code.
Alexei Almazov. The man who had read the letter.
Morgan collected his remaining chips and moved to the bar.
He ordered a gin and tonic, because gin was a civilized drink, and civilization was a quality he prized.
The bartender was fast and competent, and the glass was cold, and the casino hummed around him with the particular energy of a place where people came to lose things they couldn't afford.
He had noticed the girl.
She worked at the clinic, the little rehabilitation annex tucked behind the east corridor.
Brown hair, warm eyes, a laugh that carried.
She talked too much, which he found endearing rather than tiresome, because people who talked too much were people who trusted too easily, and trust was the softest door of all.
Mia. She'd told him her name the way she told everyone her name: immediately, openly, like it cost her nothing to give it.
Everything about her was open. Her face when she listened. Her posture when she leaned across the desk. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was comfortable, a gesture so unguarded it was almost an invitation.
She would be useful.
Not yet. Not for some time. Morgan was a patient man, and patience was the only virtue he truly possessed.
He would come to his appointments. He would be charming and self-aware and just vulnerable enough to earn her sympathy without triggering her suspicion.
He would let her believe she was helping him, because belief was a kind of intimacy, and intimacy was a kind of proximity, and proximity was all he ever needed.
The roulette wheel spun again behind him. He didn't turn to see where the ball settled.
He already knew where everything was going to land.
ALEXEI