Page 49 of Belong to Me
He didn't stop walking. Didn't change his pace. Didn't let his body betray what had just detonated in his chest, because Alexei Almazov had spent twenty-two years learning how to be the surface of still water while everything beneath it burned.
But he registered it. Every detail. The man's expensive watch. His relaxed shoulders. His head tilted when he spoke to her, like she was the most interesting thing in the room. And Mia's face, bright and open and laughing, and her hand coming up to tuck her hair behind her ear, the gesture she defaulted to when she was comfortable with someone.
The corridor ended. He turned the corner. He kept walking.
It was nothing. A client at the clinic, talking to the new intake coordinator. Professional. Unremarkable. He had no claim on her. He had no right to the thing that was tearing through his ribcage, hot and chemical and so violent it made his vision narrow.
She wasn't his.
He had made certain of that. He had sent her to Whitmore. He had kept a continent between them. He had kissed her and called it a mistake and put his hands on her and called it a mistake and walked out of his own building because the alternative was admitting that the distance was a lie and the control was a performance and the only reason he kept walking away was because every time he got close to her, the rest of his life made less sense.
And then she'd texted him. And he'd replied. I know.
Two words. A door left open. And now a man was leaning against her desk and making her laugh, and the rational response was nothing, the rational response was to walk to his office and take his calls and run his empire and stop thinking about the angle of a stranger's body toward a girl he had no right to want.
Alexei walked to his office. He took his calls. He ran his empire.
He didn't stop thinking about it.
By five, the thing in his chest had hardened into something with edges. Not rage. Rage was manageable. Rage had an object, a target, a direction. This was worse. This was the knowledge that someone else could walk up to her and lean against her desk and make her smile, and he had no grounds to stop it, because he was the one who had built the wall between them. He was theone who kept calling it a mistake. He was the architect of his own exclusion, and the blueprints were flawless, and he hated every one of them.
He left Ace Royale at seven. The drive home was short. The penthouse door opened to the smell of something cooking, actual cooking, not takeout in a fancy pot, and music playing from the kitchen, something acoustic and warm, and Biscuit padding across the marble to greet him with a nuzzle against his knee and then padding back to his spot by the island without urgency, like this was routine, like this was just what happened every evening.
Mia was at the stove.
Not in the sundress. She was wearing jeans and a loose white shirt that fell off one shoulder, and her hair was up in something messy and imprecise that shouldn't have done anything to him but did, and she was stirring something in a pot with her back to him and humming along with the music and she hadn't heard him come in.
He stood in the doorway. He should have announced himself. He should have put his keys on the hook and walked to his room and changed out of his suit and come back armoured for whatever this evening was going to be.
Instead, he stood there and let the scene hit him.
Her in his kitchen. Her music on his speakers. Her dog on his floor. The smell of food she'd cooked in his pots, real food this time, and the evening light through the windows turning everything gold. A life. Not his empire. Not his revenge. Not the cold machinery of purpose that had kept him upright fortwenty-two years. Just a woman in his kitchen, cooking dinner, humming to herself like this was home.
The emptiness in his chest, the one that had opened when Pavlov died and the purpose vanished, did something it hadn't done before.
It ached.
Not from absence. From proximity. From the unbearable nearness of something he could have if he stopped being the man he'd made himself into.
Biscuit's tail thumped against the floor. Mia turned.
"Oh!" "How long have you been standing there?"
"Just arrived."
"You move like a ghost, you know that? One day I'm going to put a bell on you." She turned back to the stove. Casual. Easy. Playing the part of a woman for whom that morning hadn't happened, for whom he hadn't had his hands on her against this very counter eight hours ago. "I made risotto. Actual risotto, from scratch. I called Artem and asked him how, and he walked me through it, and it only took two and a half hours and three separate panic attacks, but it exists. It's real. I made food."
She was babbling. She always babbled when she was nervous, and the bravado of it, the performance of ease when he could see the tension in her shoulders and her hand gripping the spoon too tight, cracked something behind his ribs.
She was trying. She was standing in his kitchen making him dinner, and she wasn't pushing. She wasn't bringing up the morning. She wasn't confronting or provoking or grabbing hiswrist. She was just here, offering him something warm and simple, and the gentleness of it was worse than any fight, because he had armour for fights and he had nothing for this.
"Sit down," she told him, still not turning around. "It's almost ready. And take off your coat. You're making the apartment feel like a boardroom."
He took off his coat.
He didn't know why. It was a small act of obedience, meaningless in the catalogue of compromises a man made in a day, but it felt larger than it was. Like putting down a weapon. Like admitting that this room, this evening, this woman with her back to him and her burnt risotto and her off-key humming, wasn't something he needed to defend against.
He sat at the dining table. The same table where he'd sat that morning with his tablet and his armour, pretending she wasn't there. She brought two plates over. The risotto was overcooked and slightly brown on one side and clearly the product of someone who had never made risotto before in her life and had attacked the task with the same reckless conviction she brought to everything.
