Chapter 5
ALEXEI
He had been sitting in the chair for four hours.
The guest room was dark. The curtains were drawn, and the only light came from the corridor behind him, a thin blade of it cutting across the marble floor and stopping just short of the bed.
Biscuit had lifted his head when Alexei opened the door, assessed the situation with the ancient patience of a dog who had seen this particular human make questionable decisions before, and moved to the floor without complaint.
Mia hadn't woken.
She was on her side, one arm tucked under the pillow, her hair spread across the white sheets in a way that shouldn't have meant anything and meant everything.
Her breathing was even. Her mouth was slightly open.
One bare foot had escaped the covers and hung over the edge of the mattress, and the vulnerability of it, the sheer unprotected stupidity of a bare foot dangling in the dark, made his chest crack.
He hadn't touched her. He'd sat down in the chair beside the bed and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and stayed like that for a long time, not sleeping, not thinking, just being in the room. Just being close enough to hear her breathe.
At some point Biscuit had come over and pressed his enormous head against Alexei's knee, and Alexei had dropped a hand to the dog's ears without thinking, and the two of them had sat there in the dark like sentinels guarding something neither of them could name.
Four hours. The longest Alexei Almazov had been still in twenty-two years.
Not the stillness of control. Not the stillness of strategy or patience or waiting for the right moment to act.
This was the other kind. The kind he'd felt at the end of last night, when his hands had gone still on the couch and the fight had drained out of him like water.
Surrender stillness. The stillness of a man who had stopped pretending he wanted to be anywhere else.
Her foot twitched. She murmured something. Her hand moved across the sheets, searching, and her fingers found the edge of the pillow and curled around it, and she settled again.
He stood up.
It was nearly five. He needed to shower.
He needed coffee. He needed to be out of this chair and back inside his own skin before she woke, because if she opened her eyes and found him here, in the dark, in a chair he'd occupied for four hours, there would be no wall left to rebuild.
No version of this he could file under guardian or protector or mistake.
She would see him. The real him. The one who sat in chairs at 3 AM because the girl down the hall was the only thing that made the emptiness bearable.
He moved toward the door.
"You stayed."
Her voice was thick with sleep. Raw. She hadn't opened her eyes.
He stopped. His back was to her. His hand was on the doorframe, and his knuckles tightened against it, and he didn't turn around.
"Go back to sleep, Mia."
"You were in the chair."
Not a question. She'd known. Felt him, maybe.
Or smelled his cologne, or heard the difference in the room when another body was in it.
She'd always been too good at knowing where he was.
At sixteen, she could tell when he'd come home just from the way the air in the penthouse changed, and the first time she'd told him that, he'd left the room because the intimacy of it was unbearable.
"Go back to sleep."
"That's not an answer."
"It's an instruction."
A pause. The sheets rustled. "How long?"
He should have lied. He should have said an hour, or thirty minutes, or I just came to check on you. Any of those would have been survivable. Any of those would have left him room to breathe.
"Four hours."
The silence that followed was enormous.
He didn't wait for her to respond. He walked out. Down the hall. Into his bathroom. He turned the shower to cold and stood under it until his breathing evened out, and then he dressed and made coffee and stood at the kitchen counter and drank it and didn't taste it.
Four hours. He'd told her four hours. Like handing someone a loaded weapon and trusting them not to pull the trigger.
She would pull the trigger. She was Mia Robertson, and she always pulled the trigger.
BY SEVEN HE WAS AT Ace Royale, which was the only place in Monaco where his brain functioned in a way he recognized.
The office was high-ceilinged and glass-walled and overlooked the casino floor, and from here the world made sense.
Numbers made sense. Security reports made sense.
The encrypted emails from his contacts in Moscow and London and New York made sense.
What didn't make sense was the feeling in his chest that had been there since Saint Petersburg and was no longer empty.
It had a shape now, and the shape was a girl asleep in a guest room with her bare foot hanging off the bed, and the shape was warm, and the warmth was terrifying, because Alexei Almazov had built his entire life on cold.
He worked. Reports, calls, the quarterly review for the casino's offshore accounts. Normal. Mechanical. The architecture of an empire that ran whether he was present or not, which was a fact he'd always taken pride in and now found vaguely pointless.
His phone rang just after nine.
The encrypted line. Not the personal one. The number that meant Moscow, or Saint Petersburg, or trouble.
"Sir." Kotov's voice was clipped. The detective sounded different. Tighter. "I have an update on the Pavlov matter."
"The Pavlov matter is closed."
"That's what I thought, sir. Until this morning." A pause. Papers shuffling. "We've identified the accelerant used in the Pavlov scene. It's a match for three other crime scenes across Europe in the last eighteen months. Lyon. Prague. Istanbul."
Alexei set his coffee down. "Three other scenes."
"Three other murders. Same method. Same accelerant. Same staging. And sir—" Kotov's voice dropped. "Same letter."
The room contracted.
"Explain."
"Each scene had a body in a chair. Each body was burned with the same military-grade accelerant in the same star-shaped pour pattern. And each body had a letter in the lap, written in the victim's blood, with the same words."
Alexei's hand was a fist on the desk. "Cursed are you who reads this."
"Yes, sir."
"A chain."
"That's what my people are calling it. He kills the target, leaves the letter. Multiple people see the letter at each scene, but he chooses one. One target per scene. The rest walk away. Lyon to Prague to Istanbul to Saint Petersburg. In each city, one reader was selected, and that reader is dead."
Alexei's mind was doing what it always did: sorting, connecting, building the architecture of a threat.
Lyon. A mid-level fence named Roux, found eighteen months ago.
Prague. A retired SVR officer, found twelve months ago.
Istanbul. A shipping magnate with Bratva ties, found six months ago.
Each one dead in a chair. Each one with a letter they shouldn't have read.
And then Pavlov. In Saint Petersburg. In a townhouse. In a chair.
And Alexei had walked in and taken the letter from Kotov's evidence bag and unfolded it and read it.
"He knows who reads the letters," Alexei said. His voice was level. His pulse wasn't. "How?"
"We don't know yet. My theory is that each scene is monitored. A camera. A contact. Someone who reports back. But sir, there's more."
"Go on."
"The intervals are shrinking. Lyon to Prague was six months. Prague to Istanbul was six months. Istanbul to Saint Petersburg was four months. He's accelerating."
Alexei stood. The casino floor spread below him, bright and buzzing, a thousand people feeding coins into machines and not knowing the world had just rearranged itself.
"You're telling me I'm a target."
"I'm telling you that in every city, the person he selected is dead within four months." Kotov's voice was stripped. "And you read the Pavlov letter three days ago. If he's chosen you, sir, the clock is already running."
Three days. He'd read it three days ago, standing in a charred room in Saint Petersburg, and he'd felt nothing. No fear. No dread. Just the blankness where purpose used to be.
The blankness was gone now. Filled in. Shaped like a girl at a desk in a clinic three floors below him, answering intake forms and spilling coffee and not knowing that the man she'd given everything to had a death sentence in his pocket.
"What do we know about the killer?"
"Almost nothing. Male. European, probably Russian based on the letter's Cyrillic phrasing in the earlier scenes.
Well-funded. The accelerant alone would cost more than a car.
And sir, he's not doing this for money or territory.
There's no financial motive in any of the kills. My profiler thinks it's—"
"A game."
Silence. "Yes, sir."
A game. A man was playing a game with corpses and letters and the people who read them, and Alexei had walked into the latest round without knowing the rules, and now the clock was running.
Four months. Maybe less, if the intervals kept shrinking.
He thought of Mia in the chair that morning, asleep, her foot hanging off the bed. He thought of her at the clinic, behind the intake desk, open and warm and visible to anyone who walked through the door.
He thought of a blond man leaning against her desk, making her laugh.
His blood went cold.
"Kotov. I need everything you have on every person who's entered Monaco in the last two weeks. Russians, Europeans, anyone with travel patterns that match the killer's timeline. I want names, photos, and backgrounds on my desk by tonight."
"That's thousands of people, sir."
"Then start now."