Page 32 of Belong to Me
Jezebel Keyes had made her deal. The terms had been his, because they were always his. He had sat across from her in a room she hadn’t expected to leave and explained, with the exactness of a man who had been building toward this for fifteen years, what cooperation would cost her and what it would spare her. And she had understood that he wasn’t there to negotiate.
She had given him a name.
The name of the casino owner from Saint Petersburg who had handed their father a package and a promise and a prison sentence. The man who had ordered a staged suicide and gone on operating, undisturbed, for fifteen years, while four boys turned grief into an empire and waited. Alexei had the name now. The weight of it was exactly what he had known it would be, not heavy, not light. Precise. A key that had been cut over fifteen years finally turned in the lock.
He put the phone in his pocket.
He let himself look at the garden. His brothers, their wives. Anton with Aria against his chest now, one hand spread across the baby's back with the stunned, still-learning tenderness of a man who had not yet stopped being surprised by what he was capable of.
Soon.
He took the phone out again.
The second message was from a different number. Stored under a name he had not expected to see today, on this occasion, in this garden.
His ward.
She had finished school. She was writing to request what she had apparently been planning for some time: a gap year. At his casino. In Monaco.
He read the message. His face read it with him, and his expression did what his expression did when something required the full weight of his attention. It went still. Not blank. The particular stillness of a man recalibrating the distance between what he had expected and what had just come.
He typed one line.
“What do you plan to do with the gap year?”
He waited.
Behind him, Anton laughed. The new version, open and unguarded, the laugh of a man who had stopped performing and started living. Alexei had heard that laugh across the years and this version was different from all the others. This was what came after.
The phone lit in his hand.
He read the reply.
His face went very still.
The End
Mia Robertson changed outfits four times, burned the takeout, and told the most dangerous man in Monaco she wasn’t going anywhere.
Alexei Almazov has spent two years keeping his distance from the girl he was supposed to protect—not because she’s his ward, but because of what happens to his composure every time she’s in the room.
Mia has been in love with her guardian since she was sixteen. When they finally kiss, it’severythingshe’s ever dreamed of. But just when she dreams of forever...Alexei walks away and acts like it never happened.
Close Enough to Kiss
Chapter 1
ALEXEI
Sandro Pavlov was dead, and Alexei felt nothing.
He stood in the doorway of what used to be a sitting room in a townhouse in Saint Petersburg and forced himself to take in every detail. The charred remains in the chair. The smell, which was exactly what burning flesh smelled like and nothing else. The star-shaped pattern on the floor where the accelerant had been poured with a care that spoke less of rage and more of ritual.
Twenty-two years. He had spent twenty-two years building toward this moment. Every cent of the Almazov fortune, every encrypted file, every 3 AM phone call with his brothers, every decision he had made since he was fourteen years old and a prison guard rang their apartment in Moscow to tell him his father was dead.
All of it. For this.
And someone else had gotten here first.
