Page 71 of Belong to Me
"It's nothing, Mia."
"Stop saying nothing. Your jaw is doing the thing it does when you're—"
"When I'm what?"
"When you're the other you." Her voice was gentle. Not afraid. Mia Robertson didn't do afraid. But gentle, the way you handle something you love and don't fully understand. "The one your brothers know. The one who makes rooms go cold. I've never been on this side of it before."
He held her gaze. And the thing inside him, the thing that wanted to tell her everything, to sit her down and say there's a man and he's playing a game and I read a letter and I'm marked and I married you because I love you and also because the Almazov name is a wall and the wall is the only thing between you and what's coming, that thing pressed against his ribs so hard he couldn't breathe.
He didn't tell her.
He crossed the kitchen. Put his hands on the counter on either side of her. His face was inches from hers and her eyes were wide and searching and she was trying to find him behind whatever she was seeing, and he kissed her forehead.
"Order dinner," he told her. "Your choice. I need to make a call."
He walked out of the kitchen.
He felt her eyes on his back. The same way she'd felt Morgan's eyes in the casino, except hers were the opposite of threat. Herswere the eyes of a woman who had just seen a door in her husband's house that she didn't know existed, and the door was closed, and Mia Robertson did not leave doors closed.
He went to his office. Closed the door. Pulled his phone out.
Not Kotov. Not this time. The other number. The one that connected to his head of security at Ace Royale.
"I need a full background on a client at the rehabilitation clinic. First name Morgan. Blond. Blue eyes. Mid-to-late twenties. Started coming in approximately four weeks ago. I want everything. Family, finances, travel history, known associates. And I want it tonight."
He hung up.
His hands were fists on the desk.
Not shaking. Not still. Fists. The hands of a man who had spent twenty-two years building an empire and had just heard a sentence that didn't fit, and the not-fitting was louder than any alarm.
You and I have that in common, Mia.
No, Alexei thought.
We don't.
MORGAN
The guard was dead, and Morgan hadn't touched him.
He'd heard about it the way he heard about most things: by listening. A construction crew outside Nice, a body in afoundation pour, a method that bore a passing resemblance to his own work. Sloppy resemblance. The staging was wrong. The accelerant was commercial, not military. And there was no letter, which meant whoever had killed the guard had understood the aesthetic but not the purpose, the way a forger could copy brushstrokes but not intent.
Someone with a grudge. A debt, perhaps. The world the guard had occupied was full of men who owed and men who collected, and eventually the arithmetic caught up.
But the beauty of it. The exquisite, unearned beauty of it. They would blame Morgan. The detective, the Almazov machine, everyone who was tracking the chain would see a dead guard and a foundation pour and conclude that Morgan Gurin had moved on to his next target. They would lower their guard, so to speak, and the phrase delighted him, because language was full of small cruelties if you knew where to find them. The guard's death would lower their guard. Fate had a sense of humor. Morgan appreciated that in a collaborator.
It didn't concern him that someone else had done the killing. It concerned him that the killing would make his work easier. Alexei Almazov would read the report and feel the threat recede, and a man who believed the threat had passed was a man who stopped bracing, and a man who stopped bracing was a man you could reach.
The guard had never been his target. The guard had been a minor piece on a board that only Morgan could see, one of a dozen officers at the scene who had handled evidence and filed reports and never known what they were touching. Irrelevant. The man who mattered was the one who had come after, whohad taken the bag and unfolded the paper and read every word and whose face hadn't changed.
Alexei Almazov. Always Alexei Almazov.
The game was almost ready.
The timeline was his to choose. He could move tomorrow or next month or three months from now, and the choosing was its own pleasure, because anticipation was the thing Morgan loved most.
Not the kill. Never the kill. The kill was a conclusion, and conclusions were inherently disappointing. What Morgan loved was the architecture of the approach. The slow assembly of proximity. The way a smile became a conversation became a confidence became a trust, and the trust was always, always the last door you opened before the final room.
