Page 57 of Belong to Me
He thought of a blond man leaning against her desk, making her laugh.
His blood went cold.
"Kotov. I need everything you have on every person who's entered Monaco in the last two weeks. Russians, Europeans, anyone with travel patterns that match the killer's timeline. I want names, photos, and backgrounds on my desk by tonight."
"That's thousands of people, sir."
"Then start now."
He hung up. His hand was on the desk, and it was trembling, and the tremor was different from the ones Mia noticed. This wasn't want or surrender or the loss of composure. This was tactical. This was the vibration of a machine recalibrating, the gears engaging, the engine of the man he'd been for twenty-two years roaring back to life.
But the engine had a new fuel now. Not vengeance. Not purpose. Something hotter and more dangerous than both.
Her.
Someone was playing a game with the people who read the letters. Alexei had read the letter. Alexei was a target. And Mia was in his orbit, in his home, in his life, visible and unprotected and laughing behind a desk three floors below the man who wanted to kill him.
He pulled his phone from his jacket. His fingers moved before his brain could intervene.
Come home early today.
He hit Send. Then he turned the phone face-down and breathed.
Mia's reply came in thirty seconds.
Everything okay?
And underneath it, a second message:
Also, you sat in my chair for four hours. We're talking about that later. Just so you know.
His mouth twitched. The first real movement his face had made all morning. He killed it. She wasn't here to see it, and even if she was, the twitch was a vulnerability, and he'd already given her four hours of vulnerability, and that was more than he'd given anyone in his adult life.
He typed: I'm fine. Come home early.
Her reply: That's not an answer and it's not an answer. But okay.
He put the phone away.
He had four months. Maybe less. A killer he couldn't see, a chain he couldn't break, and the only leverage the man would need was sleeping in his guest room with a Rottweiler and a bare foot and no idea that the person she'd come back for was marked.
She needed to be protected. Legally. Formally. In a way that put the full weight of the Almazov name between her and whatever was coming.
The thought crystallized before he could examine it, and once it was there, it was immovable.
Marry her.
Not because he loved her. Not yet, not that word, not in a form he could say out loud without the ground opening under him. But because she was in his house and in his chest and in his life, and a man was coming, and the Almazov name was a wall, and a wife was inside the wall, and a ward was not.
Marry her.
The thought was cold. Strategic. Exactly the kind of decision Alexei Almazov made: clean, logical, designed to protect the thing that mattered most.
And underneath the strategy, underneath the logic, underneath the architecture of protection, something else was burning. Something that had been burning since she was sixteen and had nothing to do with killers or letters or walls.
He wanted her. He had always wanted her. And the wanting had been the reason he'd sent her away, and the reason he'd sat in her chair for four hours, and the reason his hands were shaking right now, and the reason that the word marry didn't feel strategic at all.
It felt like the only honest thing he'd done in twenty-two years.
