Page 69 of Belong to Me
"Come here," he told her.
She smiled. Set her mug down. Stepped into him, and his arm went around her waist, and her face pressed into his chest, and the morning sun was turning the marble gold and the coffee wasgetting cold and Biscuit was asleep on the bedroom floor and the encrypted phone was face-down on the counter and the four-month clock was ticking and she didn't know and he held her and the holding was everything and it was a lie.
Every day. Every morning in this kitchen. Every evening on the couch. Every night in his bed with her body curled against his and Biscuit at their feet and the city lights on the ceiling. Every moment of the happiness was built on the thing he hadn't told her, and the thing was growing, and the lie was growing, and the longer he held both, the heavier they became.
He had increased security without telling her. A second team on the penthouse perimeter. A tracker on her phone, buried in the system, invisible. He'd pulled the casino's surveillance logs and was reviewing them nightly after she fell asleep, scanning for patterns, for faces, for the blond man at the roulette table who came and went on Tuesdays and Thursdays and made her laugh at the intake desk.
Morgan. First name only. The client she mentioned the way she mentioned all her clients: warmly, openly, without suspicion. He comes to his sessions. He's doing well. He asked about the courtyard fountain today, whether we could add music. He brought coffee for the counsellors.
Every mention was a needle. Every casual reference a reminder that someone was circling, and Alexei didn't know who, and the not-knowing was eroding the architecture of his control in a way that no enemy had ever managed, because the erosion wasn't external. It was internal. It was the growing impossibility of holding two truths at once: I love this life, and I'm lying to protect it.
He hadn't said the words. She'd told him she'd make him say it, and he knew she would, and the pressure of the unsaid thing was constant, a stone in his chest that got heavier every time she pressed her palm to his heart and smiled against his neck.
I love you. Three words. The three she was waiting for. The three he couldn't say, not because they weren't true but because saying them while holding the lie would turn the words into something rotten, and she deserved better than rotten words from a man who was using their marriage as a fortress.
He pressed his mouth to the top of her head. She hummed against his chest. The sound was warm and unsuspecting and it cracked him.
"I need to go in early," he said.
"You always go in early."
"Earlier than usual."
She pulled back. Her eyes searched his face with the forensic attention she'd been applying to him since she was sixteen, the mental spreadsheet running, cataloguing every micro-expression. He felt her studying him and gave her nothing, because he'd spent twenty-two years learning to give nothing, and the fact that she could sometimes see through it anyway was the most dangerous quality she possessed.
"You're doing the thing," she told him.
"What thing?"
"The vault thing. Where your face goes blank and I can tell you're thinking something enormous and you won't tell me what it is."
"I'm thinking about the quarterly reports."
"Liar." She poked his chest. "Left eye."
He caught her hand. Held it. Brought it to his mouth and kissed her knuckles, not because it was a romantic gesture but because it was the closest he could get to an apology he wasn't ready to make.
"Tonight," he told her. "We'll order in. Your choice."
"That's a bribe."
"It's dinner."
"It's a bribe disguised as dinner and I accept." She kissed his jaw, quick and casual and devastating, and padded back down the hall with her coffee, and Biscuit's nails clicked on the marble as the dog followed her, and the penthouse was full of sounds that had nothing to do with an empire and everything to do with a life, and Alexei stood at the counter and drank his cold coffee and felt the weight of the secret pressing against his ribs like something that was going to break through whether he wanted it to or not.
SHE CAME HOME AT SIX.
He heard her before he saw her: the door, the shoes kicked off, Biscuit's greeting thump as his tail hit the wall, her voice saying "Yes, hello, I love you, you enormous baby, I was gone for eight hours, not eight years, calm down."
The same choreography every evening. The same sounds. He'd memorised the sequence the way he memorised security rotations, except this one he didn't want to change. This one he wanted to run on loop for the rest of his life.
She came into the kitchen. She was still in her clinic clothes, her hair pulled back, a pen behind her ear she'd forgotten about. Her face was bright. Her day had been good. He could read her days the way she read his tells: the pen behind the ear meant she'd been writing, which meant intake, which meant new clients, which meant she'd spent her afternoon talking too fast and making people feel like their worst decision wasn't as bad as they thought.
"Guess what?"
"What?"
"Dr. Vasquez said I'm her best intake coordinator. Her actual words were 'adequate,' but that's Vasquez for 'best,' and I'm choosing to interpret generously."
