Page 55 of Belong to Me
At some point Biscuit had come over and pressed his enormous head against Alexei's knee, and Alexei had dropped a hand to the dog's ears without thinking, and the two of them had sat there inthe dark like sentinels guarding something neither of them could name.
Four hours. The longest Alexei Almazov had been still in twenty-two years.
Not the stillness of control. Not the stillness of strategy or patience or waiting for the right moment to act. This was the other kind. The kind he'd felt at the end of last night, when his hands had gone still on the couch and the fight had drained out of him like water. Surrender stillness. The stillness of a man who had stopped pretending he wanted to be anywhere else.
Her foot twitched. She murmured something. Her hand moved across the sheets, searching, and her fingers found the edge of the pillow and curled around it, and she settled again.
He stood up.
It was nearly five. He needed to shower. He needed coffee. He needed to be out of this chair and back inside his own skin before she woke, because if she opened her eyes and found him here, in the dark, in a chair he'd occupied for four hours, there would be no wall left to rebuild. No version of this he could file under guardian or protector or mistake.
She would see him. The real him. The one who sat in chairs at 3 AM because the girl down the hall was the only thing that made the emptiness bearable.
He moved toward the door.
"You stayed."
Her voice was thick with sleep. Raw. She hadn't opened her eyes.
He stopped. His back was to her. His hand was on the doorframe, and his knuckles tightened against it, and he didn't turn around.
"Go back to sleep, Mia."
"You were in the chair."
Not a question. She'd known. Felt him, maybe. Or smelled his cologne, or heard the difference in the room when another body was in it. She'd always been too good at knowing where he was. At sixteen, she could tell when he'd come home just from the way the air in the penthouse changed, and the first time she'd told him that, he'd left the room because the intimacy of it was unbearable.
"Go back to sleep."
"That's not an answer."
"It's an instruction."
A pause. The sheets rustled. "How long?"
He should have lied. He should have said an hour, or thirty minutes, or I just came to check on you. Any of those would have been survivable. Any of those would have left him room to breathe.
"Four hours."
The silence that followed was enormous.
He didn't wait for her to respond. He walked out. Down the hall. Into his bathroom. He turned the shower to cold and stood under it until his breathing evened out, and then he dressed andmade coffee and stood at the kitchen counter and drank it and didn't taste it.
Four hours. He'd told her four hours. Like handing someone a loaded weapon and trusting them not to pull the trigger.
She would pull the trigger. She was Mia Robertson, and she always pulled the trigger.
BY SEVEN HE WAS ATAce Royale, which was the only place in Monaco where his brain functioned in a way he recognized. The office was high-ceilinged and glass-walled and overlooked the casino floor, and from here the world made sense. Numbers made sense. Security reports made sense. The encrypted emails from his contacts in Moscow and London and New York made sense.
What didn't make sense was the feeling in his chest that had been there since Saint Petersburg and was no longer empty. It had a shape now, and the shape was a girl asleep in a guest room with her bare foot hanging off the bed, and the shape was warm, and the warmth was terrifying, because Alexei Almazov had built his entire life on cold.
He worked. Reports, calls, the quarterly review for the casino's offshore accounts. Normal. Mechanical. The architecture of an empire that ran whether he was present or not, which was a fact he'd always taken pride in and now found vaguely pointless.
His phone rang just after nine.
The encrypted line. Not the personal one. The number that meant Moscow, or Saint Petersburg, or trouble.
"Sir." Kotov's voice was clipped. The detective sounded different. Tighter. "I have an update on the Pavlov matter."
