Page 41 of Reckless Heir
The crowd parts near the door.
Aleksei stands there.
He's not in the suit. He's in jeans and a black shirt and the absence of the suit is somehow more alarming than the presence of it, because the suit is armor he wears for the world and what's underneath it is something rawer and less managed. He looks like he moved through whatever he was doing tonight with speed and purpose and arrived here with the energy of both still in his body.
His eyes find mine in about four seconds.
Run,he mouths.
I drop the cup. The vodka splashes on my boots. I'm already moving.
The night air hits like cold water — November in New Hampshire, the specific bitterness of a campus that holds the cold in its stone. I sprint across the wet grass toward the tree line, and I know objectively that this is absurd, that running from him is not a plan it's a reaction, but the reaction is genuine and so is the running.
"One," his voice carries from behind me.
I sprint harder. My boots are wrong for this — heeled, not practical — and I yank them off mid-stride and carry them, socks on wet grass, faster.
"Two."
He's counting. Giving me a head start. The fact that he's counting means this is something he's decided is a game rather than a punishment, and I don't know what that means and I don't have time to think about it because the trees are close.
"Three."
I can hear him now. Not panic — his footsteps are measured, not desperate, the rhythm of someone who runs as part of his physical training and has therefore made a calculation about how long he wants to give me before he catches up. He's letting me run. He's watching me run.
"Ten."
The arm catches my waist before I hit the tree line. Not a tackle — he catches me the way you catch something you don't want to damage, arm around my middle, momentum absorbed, the two of us going down into the wet grass in a controlled collapse that leaves me on my back with him above me and both of us breathing hard.
He looks down at me.
His eyes aren't cold. They're wild — a version of him I haven't seen before, something that got loose from the control duringthe run and hasn't entirely gone back. The containment is still there but it's working harder than usual.
"You ran," he says.
"You chased me!"
"I always catch what I chase."
He pulls me up without letting go of my arm and we walk — or I walk and he moves me, which is a distinction he's comfortable with — to the McLaren parked on the service road. He opens the passenger door. I get in because the alternative is standing in wet socks on a dark road arguing with a man who has already decided where we're going.
He drives like a controlled detonation.
The McLaren on the mountain road is not transportation — it's a demonstration, an argument in the language of physics about what this machine and this man can do together. The trees blur into a tunnel. The hairpins arrive and are taken at the precise edge of adhesion, not a millimetre over, which is somehow worse than being reckless because recklessness you can argue with. Precision is just the car doing what it was designed to do with someone at the wheel who has the specific madness of a person who knows exactly how much is too much.
I grip the door and say nothing. Sayingslow downis giving him something. I am not giving him anything.
He slides the car to a stop at the overlook — cliff edge, valley below, the lights of the valley a bowl of amber in the dark. The tyres scream and the car stops six inches from the nothing and silence comes down on us like a dropped weight.
I get out before he tells me to.
The wind at the top is fierce. It hits me full in the face and whips my hair across it and I tip my head back and breathe it in and for one second I am nothing but a person on a cliff in the dark and it's almost enough.
Then he's there.
He rounds the hood. He takes my arm and turns me and my back meets the warm metal of the hood and he's close, very close, and his expression has shifted — the wildness is still there but there's something else underneath it, something I've been catching glimpses of for weeks and losing the moment I try to look directly at it.
"You disobeyed me," he says.
