Chapter 6 #3
He said nothing for a long time. Her finger traced back and forth along his collarbone, patient, unhurried, and the patience of it was its own answer to a question she hadn't asked: I'm not going anywhere. Take your time.
"I was thinking about your foot," he said.
"My foot."
"It was hanging off the bed. Bare. And I was sitting in that chair trying to understand how a bare foot could be the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen."
She pressed her face into his chest. He felt her smile.
"And I was thinking," he continued, his voice lower now, "that the emptiness was gone. That the thing I'd been running from since Saint Petersburg wasn't empty anymore. That it had a shape, and the shape was you, and I was afraid of that. More than I've been afraid of anything."
Her hand tightened on his chest. Her smile was gone. What replaced it was something fiercer.
"Alexei."
"Mm."
She lifted her head. Her eyes found his in the dark. Brown and bright and full of the thing she'd been carrying since she was sixteen, the thing she'd flown two thousand miles for, the thing she'd unpacked her bags and dropped out of college and grabbed his wrist and demanded he not walk away from.
"I'm going to steal your heart."
Not a declaration. Not a tease. Not the playful bravado of a girl who talked too fast and blurted the truth.
This was the woman. The one underneath the babbling and the panic and the self-deprecating jokes.
The one who had sat across a kitchen table and not pushed, and the not-pushing had been more lethal than any confrontation.
"I'm going to steal your heart," she repeated. "And you're going to let me. And it's going to be the best thing that ever happened to you. And I know you can't say it yet, and I don't need you to, but I need you to know that I'm here. And I'm staying. And you don't get to close any more doors."
His arm tightened around her. His throat was closed.
The words she wanted, the three words, the ones she'd told him he'd have to say someday, were pressing against his ribs like something alive, and he couldn't release them yet, couldn't open that door yet, because the last time he'd opened a door it had cost him everything he'd ever built and the next time he opened one it would cost him more.
But he could hold her. He could pull her against his chest and bury his face in her hair and feel her heartbeat against his, and the silence was not empty, and the arms around her were not shaking.
She settled against him. Her breathing slowed. Her hand stayed on his chest, over his heart, and her fingers curled against his skin, and the curl was unconscious and possessive and entirely Mia.
His eyes closed.
Not a decision. Not a surrender. His eyes simply closed, the way a door closes when there's no one left pushing against it, and the darkness behind his eyelids was warm, and her breathing was even, and the weight of her on his chest was the only anchor he needed, and for the first time in twenty-two years, Alexei Almazov slept.
Not the surface sleep of a man who kept one ear on the encrypted phone and one hand near the edge of the bed.
Not the strategic rest of a man who rationed his unconsciousness the way he rationed everything else.
He slept the way she slept: completely. Defenselessly.
With his face in her hair and his arms around her and his heartbeat slowing to match hers.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
The sound pulled him up from somewhere deep. Deeper than he'd been in years. He surfaced with the disorientation of a man who had forgotten what real sleep felt like, and the room was dark, and the city lights were dimmer, and the woman on his chest was stirring.
She reached for the phone without opening her eyes, the way she reached for everything, instinctively, with the absolute confidence of a woman who expected the world to hand her what she needed.
She squinted at the screen. The light of it painted her face blue.
"Hm."
"What?"
"Morgan." She smiled, sleepy and warm. "He says congratulations on the wedding."
The name hit Alexei like a bullet.
Morgan. Blond. Blue-eyed. First name only.
Leaning against her desk. Making her laugh.
Playing roulette in his casino. Coming to appointments at the clinic where Mia worked.
And now texting her. On her wedding night.
With her phone number, which she gave to everyone because that was who she was, open and trusting and warm, and the warmth was going to—
"That's sweet of him," Mia murmured. She typed a quick reply, put the phone down, and pressed her face back into his chest. "He's a nice guy. You'd like him."
She was asleep in thirty seconds.
Alexei was not.
The sleep was gone. Shattered by a name on a screen, replaced by the cold machinery of the man he'd been for twenty-two years, and the twenty-two-year machine was awake now, fully awake, running calculations behind his eyes while his wife breathed against his chest.
Morgan.
He didn't move. He didn't reach for her phone.
He didn't wake her. He lay there with his arms around her and his eyes on the ceiling and the four-month clock hammering in his chest, and the name was in the room now, in the bed, in the space between his heartbeat and hers, and she didn't know what it meant and he couldn't tell her and the holding was no longer just love.
It was a wall.