Chapter 5 #2
He hung up. His hand was on the desk, and it was trembling, and the tremor was different from the ones Mia noticed.
This wasn't want or surrender or the loss of composure.
This was tactical. This was the vibration of a machine recalibrating, the gears engaging, the engine of the man he'd been for twenty-two years roaring back to life.
But the engine had a new fuel now. Not vengeance. Not purpose. Something hotter and more dangerous than both.
Her.
Someone was playing a game with the people who read the letters. Alexei had read the letter. Alexei was a target. And Mia was in his orbit, in his home, in his life, visible and unprotected and laughing behind a desk three floors below the man who wanted to kill him.
He pulled his phone from his jacket. His fingers moved before his brain could intervene.
Come home early today.
He hit Send. Then he turned the phone face-down and breathed.
Mia's reply came in thirty seconds.
Everything okay?
And underneath it, a second message:
Also, you sat in my chair for four hours. We're talking about that later. Just so you know.
His mouth twitched. The first real movement his face had made all morning. He killed it. She wasn't here to see it, and even if she was, the twitch was a vulnerability, and he'd already given her four hours of vulnerability, and that was more than he'd given anyone in his adult life.
He typed: I'm fine. Come home early.
Her reply: That's not an answer and it's not an answer. But okay.
He put the phone away.
He had four months. Maybe less. A killer he couldn't see, a chain he couldn't break, and the only leverage the man would need was sleeping in his guest room with a Rottweiler and a bare foot and no idea that the person she'd come back for was marked.
She needed to be protected. Legally. Formally. In a way that put the full weight of the Almazov name between her and whatever was coming.
The thought crystallized before he could examine it, and once it was there, it was immovable.
Marry her.
Not because he loved her. Not yet, not that word, not in a form he could say out loud without the ground opening under him. But because she was in his house and in his chest and in his life, and a man was coming, and the Almazov name was a wall, and a wife was inside the wall, and a ward was not.
Marry her.
The thought was cold. Strategic. Exactly the kind of decision Alexei Almazov made: clean, logical, designed to protect the thing that mattered most.
And underneath the strategy, underneath the logic, underneath the architecture of protection, something else was burning. Something that had been burning since she was sixteen and had nothing to do with killers or letters or walls.
He wanted her. He had always wanted her. And the wanting had been the reason he'd sent her away, and the reason he'd sat in her chair for four hours, and the reason his hands were shaking right now, and the reason that the word marry didn't feel strategic at all.
It felt like the only honest thing he'd done in twenty-two years.
MIA
She left the clinic at three.
Alexei's texts had been rattling around her head all day.
Come home early. I'm fine. The two statements contradicted each other, because Alexei Almazov didn't ask people to come home early, and a man who was fine didn't sit in a chair for four hours in the dark beside a sleeping girl and then tell her about it with the stripped honesty of someone who had stopped pretending.
Something had happened.
She didn't know what. But she knew him, and she knew that I'm fine from Alexei was the equivalent of a five-alarm fire from anyone else, and the clipped rhythm of his texts had the cadence of a man making decisions at speed.
She walked through the casino. The afternoon crowd was thin, tourists and retirees feeding slot machines, and the air smelled like carpet cleaner and expensive cologne and the particular brand of hope that separated people from their money.
"Mia."
She turned. Morgan was at the roulette table, chips stacked in neat rows, his smile warm and easy and exactly as disarming as it had been on his first day.
"Morgan, hi." She stopped, because she was Mia Robertson and she didn't blow people off, even when Alexei's texts were burning a hole in her phone and her chest was tight with something she couldn't name. "How was your session?"
"Illuminating. Dr. Vasquez is very good at making me feel like my problems are both serious and solvable, which I suspect is a talent."
She smiled. "That's kind of her superpower."
"Are you leaving early?" His eyes moved over her face, and the question felt personal in a way that made her skin prickle.
"I am. Just today."
"Nothing wrong, I hope?"
"No, everything's fine." The lie came out smooth, and she hated it, because Mia Robertson didn't lie, and the fact that she'd just done it so easily felt like something Alexei had taught her by proximity.
"Well." Morgan lifted his glass. "Same time Thursday?"
"Same time Thursday."
She walked away. His eyes were on her back.
She could feel them, the way you sense someone's attention in a silent room, and the sensation wasn't unpleasant but it wasn't comfortable either, and she didn't turn around to verify it because she was already pushing through the east exit and walking fast and her heart was hammering for reasons that had nothing to do with a blond man at a roulette table.
The penthouse was empty when she got home.
No. Not empty. Different. The air had the charged quality it always had when Alexei was processing something big.
She'd learned to read the apartment the way other people read faces: the angle of his shoes by the door told her he'd come home at some point and left again.
The coffee mug in the sink told her he'd been standing at the counter, which meant he was thinking, because he only stood at the counter when his brain was moving too fast to sit down.
And the single chair pulled out from the dining table, angled toward the window, told her he'd sat there too, which meant whatever he was thinking had more than one layer.
She showered. Changed into a soft grey dress that she told herself she chose because it was comfortable and not because of anything else, and if the hemline hit mid-thigh and the neckline draped in a way that made her collarbones look good, that was coincidental and irrelevant and she was a liar.
Biscuit was on the couch with his chin on the armrest, judging her.
"Don't," she told him.
He blinked.
"I said don't."
His tail thumped once, which was Biscuit for I've seen everything and I'm choosing silence.
She was in the kitchen pouring her coffee, the milky, ruined version that made Alexei shake his head, when the front door opened.
He walked in, and the room changed. The temperature dropped a degree. The air thickened. It had always been this way with him, since she was sixteen and too young to understand why every room he entered felt smaller and hotter and harder to breathe in.
He wasn't in a suit.
That was the first thing she noticed, and the noticing hit her in the chest, because Alexei was always in a suit. The suit was the armor. The suit was the wall between the man and the world, the same way the closed door was the wall between the man and her.
He was in a black shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and dark trousers, and his hair was slightly disordered, as if he'd run his hands through it, the same gesture she'd seen only once before, the morning after, when his hands had been on her and his world had cracked.
"Hi," she managed.
He didn't answer. His eyes found her, and the thing in them was different from every other time.
Not the guarded assessment. Not the controlled heat.
Not the desperate want that he buried and she chased.
This was something new. Something that had weight and urgency and read, if she squinted, almost like fear.
Alexei Almazov didn't do fear.
"You're scaring me," she said. Her voice was level but her heart wasn't. "The texts. The 'come home early.' The standing there without saying hello. What happened?"
He crossed the kitchen. Not the slow, lethal approach he'd used before, the one that made speed irrelevant.
This was faster. Deliberate. He stopped in front of her and his hands came up and cupped her face, both palms, his thumbs on her cheekbones, and the touch was so tender it made her eyes sting.
"Alexei—"
"Four hours."
She blinked. "What?"
"You asked how long I sat in the chair. Four hours. I walked into your room at midnight, and I sat in the chair until nearly five, and I didn't sleep, and I didn't touch you, and I didn't leave."
"I know. You told me—"
"I'm telling you again." His voice was raw. His thumbs traced her cheekbones, slow, back and forth. "Because I need you to hear what it means."
Her breath was gone. Her mug was still in her hand, the coffee going cold, and she couldn't put it down because his hands were on her face and the world had narrowed to the pressure of his palms and the unsteadiness in his voice.
"It means I'm done, Mia."
Her heart stopped.
"It means I'm done with the doors and the distance and calling it a mistake. It means I sat in a chair for four hours because being in the same room as you while you sleep is better than being anywhere else in the world, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise anymore."
The mug slipped from her fingers. It hit the counter, not the floor, and the coffee sloshed across the marble and she didn't care, she didn't care about any of it, because his eyes were on hers and they were burning and his hands were on her face and they weren't shaking.
They weren't shaking.
"Tell me to stop," he said. The same words from the kitchen. The same offer he'd given her every time, the escape hatch he kept handing her because he was Alexei and he would rather destroy himself than take something she didn't freely give.