Page 45 of Belong to Me
Then she picked up her phone.
She didn't think about it. If she thought about it, she wouldn't do it, and Mia Robertson hadn't flown two thousand miles to lose her nerve over a text message.
Her thumbs moved before her brain could intervene.
Your hands were shaking. That wasn't a mistake and you know it.
She hit Send.
The screen went dark. Her pulse was so loud she could hear it in her ears. Biscuit tilted his head.
"Don't give me that face," she told him. "That was brave."
He tilted his head the other direction.
"Okay, that was insane. That was the most insane thing I've ever done, and I once snuck a cat into a billionaire's penthouse."
She put the phone face-down on the counter. She wasn't going to check it. She wasn't going to stand here in his kitchen with her wrecked hair and her trembling hands and her still-unreliable knees, refreshing a screen and waiting for a man who had just walked out of his own apartment to—
The phone buzzed.
Mia's hand shot out so fast she knocked over her coffee. The mug hit the marble, the milky dregs spilling across the counter, and she didn't care, didn't even register it, because her eyes were on the screen.
One word.
From Alexei.
I know.
MORGAN
Monaco was smaller than he expected.
Smaller and louder and full of people who confused wealth with taste, which amused him, because Morgan Gurin had both, and the difference between the two was something most people spent their entire lives failing to understand.
He sat at an outdoor café on the harbour and drank his coffee black and let the Mediterranean sun warm the back of his neck. The yachts were magnificent, he had to admit. Row after row of them, white and gleaming, rocking in water so blue it hurt. He appreciated beauty wherever he found it. He always had.
The casino was called Ace Royale. He had found it within hours of reaching the city. It was exactly where the letter's trail had brought him: one body in Saint Petersburg, one folded note in a dead man's lap, one reader.
Alexei Almazov.
He turned the name over in his mind as a jeweller turned a stone, examining it from every angle. Eldest brother. Head of the family. A man who ran an empire from a building on the cliff's edge, who moved through the world with the unhurried menace of someone who had been dangerous for a very long time.
Interesting.
Morgan finished his coffee. The cup was porcelain, thin and white, and he set it down with the care of someone who understood that beautiful things deserved gentle handling. Even temporary ones.
He was in no hurry. Hurrying was for people who feared the outcome. Morgan never feared the outcome. The outcome was always the same.
He left the café. The sun hit his hair, and a woman at the next table turned her head. He smiled at her, because smiling cost nothing and made everything easier, and walked up the hill toward the casino.
He had time. He always had time.
The game would begin when he was ready.
Chapter 4
ALEXEI
