Page 62 of Belong to Me
She pulled back. Just enough to see his face. "I'm going to be the worst wife. I burn risotto. I talk too much. I snuck a cat into your penthouse and I'm probably going to do it again."
"I know."
"And I'm going to make you say it."
His brow creased. "Say what?"
"You know what." She pressed her palm to his chest. His heart was hammering. "Not today. Not now. But someday. You're going to say it, and it's going to cost you everything, and I'm going to be there when it does."
His throat worked. He didn't speak. He pressed his forehead to hers and closed his eyes, and his arms came around her, pulling her against his chest, and she could feel the rise and fall of hisbreathing and the stillness of his hands, and the stillness was the answer she needed even if the words weren't ready yet.
They stayed like that. On the counter, in the kitchen, with cold coffee on the floor and a dog licking it up and the Monaco sun turning the marble gold. Her face in his neck. His arms around her. Two people who had found each other in the wreckage of closed doors and opened ones, and the wreckage was beautiful, and the silence was full, and somewhere underneath the warmth of his arms and the beat of his heart against her cheek, Alexei Almazov was holding the thing he hadn't told her.
The letter. The chain. The man who was coming.
The reason his proposal wasn't just love.
She didn't know. Her face was in his neck and her arms were around him and her yes was still warm in the air, and she didn't know that the man holding her had a four-month clock in his chest, and the clock was ticking, and he had just wrapped the Almazov name around her like a fortress and not told her why.
He held her tighter.
His eyes were open over her shoulder. Fixed on the window, on the Mediterranean, on the city where a blond man with blue eyes was sitting at a roulette table three miles away.
And Alexei made his decision.
He wasn't going to tell her.
Chapter 6
MIA
His hands were the thing that undid her.
Not the room, which was the Ace Royale penthouse and flooded with afternoon light, and not the officiant, who was French and brief and spoke with the brisk cadence of a man who had married enough Monaco billionaires to know that brevity was a luxury they paid extra for. Not the dress, which was ivory silk and which she'd bought three hours ago because Alexei Almazov didn't do long engagements. He did efficiency. He did decisions that moved continents, and when he'd told her the wedding was happening today, she'd opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again, because of course it was today. Three days after the proposal. Three days of paperwork and phone calls and Alexei speaking rapid French into his phone while she sat on the kitchen counter with Biscuit's head in her lap and tried to comprehend the fact that she was marrying a man who organized weddings the way other people organized dinner reservations.
None of that was what undid her.
It was his hands. Holding hers. Both of them. His fingers wrapped around her fingers, and they were still.
Not the shaking-and-fighting-it stillness from the kitchen. Not the deliberate stillness from the night he'd touched her on this same counter. This was new. This was the stillness of a man who had stopped running so completely that his body had forgottenwhat running felt like, and the calm of it, the bone-deep stillness in his grip, made her eyes burn before the officiant had finished his first sentence.
She was going to cry. She was absolutely, categorically going to cry, right here, in front of his entire family, in an ivory dress she'd owned for three hours, and there was nothing she could do about it because Alexei Almazov was holding her hands and they weren't shaking.
The room was small. Deliberately. Alexei didn't do spectacle, and Mia hadn't asked for it, because the truth was that she would have married him in the underground garage with Biscuit as the officiant and a parking ticket as the marriage certificate. The setting was irrelevant. The man was the point.
But the people in the room were not irrelevant, and Mia had spent the last half hour trying not to stare at them and failing.
Anton was grinning. She'd met him twice, both times briefly, and both times the grin had been present, as if his face's default setting was delight and anything less required conscious effort. He stood to Alexei's left with a glass of champagne he'd poured before the officiant began, because Anton Almazov did not wait for occasions to begin before celebrating them, and beside him was Daisy, who was small and auburn-haired and holding a baby against her shoulder with the practised grip of a woman who colour-coded her days and scheduled her joy and was still, somehow, incandescent with it. The baby was six weeks old and had her father's eyes and her mother's composure, and she was asleep, which was the smartest decision anyone in the room had made.
Andrei was by the window. Enormous. A scar running from temple to jaw that caught the afternoon light and turned silver.Ciana was beside him, golden and poised, her hand in his, and the two of them stood together with the particular stillness of people who had already survived the worst thing love could do to them and had come out the other side holding on. He hadn't spoken. He didn't need to. His presence was its own statement, the way a cathedral didn't need to explain why it was there.
And Artem. The youngest. Dark-eyed, standing slightly apart from the group with his hands in his pockets, the posture of a man who occupied the edges of rooms because the edges had the best sightlines. Star was next to him, and Mia couldn't stop glancing at her, because Star Thornton was doing the thing Mia was trying very hard not to do, which was cry. She was crying openly and without shame, tears streaming down her face, her hand gripping Artem's arm, and Artem's free hand had come up to cover hers, and the gesture was so gentle on a man who seemed able to dismantle a building with the other hand that Mia's own composure took a direct hit.
Don't cry. Don't cry. You are Mia Robertson and you are marrying Alexei Almazov and you will NOT be the second crybaby bride in Bratva history—
His thumbs traced her knuckles.
She cried.
