Page 35 of Belong to Me
“I’m asking you to let me stay,” she whispered.
The car hummed. The wipers beat against the windshield. Two thousand miles of airspace between them, and she might as well have been sitting next to him for how hard those words hit.
Joshua Robertson had gripped his hand in a hospital bed three days before he died and asked Alexei to take care of his daughter.And Alexei had said yes, because Joshua and Carol Robertson had been the only people in the world kind enough to help Daniil Almazov when kindness was something that cost you, and saying no to a dying man who loved his daughter more than breathing was not something Alexei was capable of.
He had kept that promise. He had given her the best schools, the best security, the safest distance he could manage.
The distance was the important part. Because somewhere between Mia’s sixteenth birthday and the day he put her on the plane to Whitmore, the girl he had agreed to protect had turned into the single most dangerous person in his life. Not because she threatened him.
Because she made him want things he had no business wanting.
And now she was in his home. With her bags unpacked. And her slot at Whitmore gone. And nowhere else to go.
“Stay where you are,” he told her. His voice gave away nothing. “I’ll be there tonight.”
“That’s not a yes.”
“It’s not a no.”
“That’s what you told me when I asked for a puppy at sixteen.”
“And you didn’t get a puppy.”
“I got a Rottweiler named Biscuit and you pretended not to notice for three weeks.”
His mouth twitched. He killed it immediately, but the damage was done. The driver kept his eyes on the road.
“Stay where you are, Mia.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Her voice dropped. Not to a whisper. To something honest. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Alexei. I’m not going anywhere.”
The line went dead. She didn’t say goodbye. She’d learned that from him.
He lowered the phone. The screen went dark. The grey outskirts of Saint Petersburg scrolled past the window, and Alexei saw none of it.
Pavlov was dead. The purpose was gone. The empire was pointless. And a girl he hadn’t seen in two years was sitting in his penthouse, waiting for him to come home.
“Faster,” he told the driver.
Chapter 2
MIA
She had changed outfits four times.
Four. In the span of three hours. Which was pathetic, because this was Alexei, and Alexei didn’t notice what women wore. Alexei noticed security vulnerabilities and financial irregularities and the exact moment someone was lying to him, but he did not notice dresses.
Probably.
Mia threw the fourth outfit on the bed, grabbed the first one off the floor, and put it back on. A white sundress. Simple. Nothing special. A dress a girl wore when she absolutely, definitely, was not trying to impress anyone.
She caught her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse and groaned. Who was she kidding? She was trying so hard it was embarrassing.
Two years. She’d been gone two years, and in that time she’d told herself a hundred different stories about what would happen when she came back. In some versions, she was cool and composed. In others, she was devastating in heels and red lipstick. In the version she’d rehearsed most often, lying in her dorm bed at 2 AM with her phone pressed to her chest after listening to one of his two-sentence voicemails, she walked in and he took one look at her and the walls just...came down.
In none of those versions was she standing barefoot in his living room at nine o’clock at night with her hair still damp from the shower she’d taken because she’d sweated through the first outfit.
Get it together, Mia. You’re a grown woman. You’ve been planning this for six months. Stop acting like—
