Page 81 of Belong to Me
“She was meant to be mine.”
The room exhaled.
Anton laughed first, because Anton always laughed first, and the laugh broke the tension as his laughs always did, and Daisy shook her head, and Star made a sound that was half sob and half giggle because Star’s emotional range didn’t include neutral, and Ciana raised her wine glass a fraction in a toast that was so understated it was practically invisible and was, for that reason, exactly right.
After that there was chaos.
The good kind. The kind that happened when four Almazov brothers and the women who’d broken them open occupied the same room and the grief from the memorial mixed with the wine and the noise and the particular alchemy of a family that had spent decades in the cold and was learning, one evening at a time, what warmth felt like.
Mia stood by the kitchen island with a glass of something bubbly and took it in.
Anton was on the floor with Aria, who had gotten hold of a champagne cork and was attempting to eat it. He was narrating the attempt in real time. “And she approaches the cork. She circles it. She assesses the structural integrity. She makes her move. Ladies and gentlemen, the cork is in the mouth. The cork is— Daisy, the cork is in the mouth.”
“I can see that,” Daisy told him from the sofa, where she was reading a novel with colour-coded tabs fanning from the pages. Not case files. Not Keyes briefs. A novel. The tabs were purple, which Mia had learned meant “favourite passages,” and the fact that Daisy Fletcher Almazov still colour-coded her joy was the most Daisy thing in the world.
By the window, Andrei and Ciana occupied a silence that needed no filling. He was enormous beside her, the afternoon light turning his scar to silver, and Ciana’s hand rested on his forearm with the casual possession of a woman who had earned every inch of proximity. They weren’t talking. They were just there, next to each other, in the particular stillness of two people who had survived the worst thing love could do to them and had come out the other side holding on. Ciana caught Mia’s eye and the ghost of a smile crossed her face, warm and knowing, the smile of a woman who had walked into this family through an impossible door and was still here.
Artem was at the edge of the room, where Artem always was, because the edges had the sightlines. His posture was the posture of a man who occupied margins, not centers, who loved from the periphery with a fierceness that didn’t require proximity to prove itself. And Star was beside him, pressing herface into his arm because Aria had just taken three consecutive steps toward her and Star had caught her and the act of catching a toddler had, predictably, made Star cry.
Artem’s free hand came up to cover hers. The gesture was so gentle on a man who could dismantle a room with the other hand that Mia’s own composure took a hit.
These people. This family. These impossible, beautiful, terrifying men and the women who had loved them into something softer. A year ago, Mia had shown up in a penthouse in a white sundress and changed outfits four times and burned takeout in a pot that cost more than her tuition. Now she was standing in the kitchen of a home she shared with the man who had sent her away and let her come back and married her on a counter and fought a killer in the dark, and his brothers were on the floor and by the window and at the edges, and their wives were reading and crying and raising wine glasses, and a toddler was eating a champagne cork, and this was her family.
Not bad for a gap year.
ALEXEI
The penthouse emptied at ten.
Not because he asked. Because Anton read the room, as Anton always read the room, and touched Daisy’s arm, and Daisy touched Star’s arm, and within fifteen minutes the cars were called and the coats were on and the goodbyes were brief because they’d all be here again next week.
Andrei was last. He stopped at the door. Turned. His eyes found Alexei’s across the room, and something passed between themthat was thirty-seven years old and had no words, something composed of shared grief and shared silence and the language of men who loved each other in a register that didn’t require sound.
His chin dipped. A single nod.
Alexei returned it.
The door closed. The penthouse was silent.
Mia was in the kitchen, doing something violent to the French press, because Mia Robertson Almazov didn’t make coffee so much as commit acts of aggression against it, and Biscuit was asleep on the marble by the island in the spot he’d claimed four years ago when he was a puppy Alexei had pretended not to notice, and the apartment was full of sounds that had nothing to do with an empire. Clink of ceramic. Hiss of water. The click of a dog’s paw twitching in a dream.
He crossed to the balcony.
Monaco spread below him. The harbour, the yachts, Ace Royale on the cliff’s edge with its diamond-and-flame crest lit against the dark. His kingdom. The thing he’d built from wreckage, from a phone call when he was fourteen, from the nothing where purpose used to be.
A year ago, he’d stood in a charred room in Saint Petersburg and felt nothing. The blankness where the drive should have been. A billionaire with an empire and no reason to run it.
The blankness was gone.
Not because of the empire. Not because of Ace Royale or the offshore accounts or the encrypted files. Those things were stillthere. They still ran. They still needed him on Mondays and Wednesdays and most of Friday.
But on Tuesdays, Mia dragged him to lunch. On Thursdays, Anton brought Aria to the penthouse and the baby pulled books off shelves and Alexei rebuilt the shelves without complaint. On Sundays, Andrei came for dinner and didn’t speak and the silence was the warmest sound in the apartment.
The emptiness had a shape now. The shape was a girl in a kitchen murdering a French press. The shape was a dog on a floor. The shape was brothers who called and wives who stayed and a toddler who ate champagne corks and a father whose name was carved into marble on a hill above the city, home at last.
Daniil would have liked this. Not the empire. Not the casino. This. The noise. The chaos. The Tuesday lunches and the Sunday dinners and the girl who talked too fast and the brothers who showed up. He would have sat in this penthouse and held his granddaughter and offered nothing but his presence, because Daniil Almazov had been a man of few words, and his sons had inherited the economy, and the silence between them would have been the good kind.
Live good lives. That was all he’d ever wanted for them.
