Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
He didn’t defend himself. Not once. He sat in the beige hotel chair with his hands on his knees and his scar livid in the grey London light and he took every word she gave him and he didn’t flinch again because he was done flinching. He was done hiding. For the first time since she had known him, since 1A, since the exclusion zone, since the fortress of silence and distance he had built around the fact that he loved her, he let someone see him without armour.
When she finished, the silence was long.
“You’re right,” he said. “About all of it. The cage. The woman. The cowardice. I was afraid. Not of the promise, of what I’d become if I let myself have you and then lost you.” He paused. “I’m not good. I’m not the ‘someone good’ my father meant. I know this. But I love you. I’ve loved you since the first time you handed me a glass of champagne and looked at me as though I were just a man. And Alexei—” His voice cracked. Hairline. Barely audible. “Alexei told me that I had misunderstood. That my father didn’t want clean hands. He wanted someone who keeps trying. And I stopped trying. I built walls and I hid behind them and I let you walk away because I decided I was the monster my face says I am.”
She didn’t move.
“I don’t need you to be good,” she said. Quietly. The steadiness was still there but it was thinner now, worn translucent by the weight of what he was giving her and what she was about to give back. “I need you to stay.”
Something moved across his face. Not hope, he was too damaged for hope, too certain of his own unworthiness. But something. A tremor at the fault line. The first vibration before the earthquake.
“Take me there,” she said. “To Ace Royale. To your world. If you want me to choose you, I need to see all of it.”
He drove her to Monaco.
Neither of them spoke. The car, not the black Mercedes, not the driver, just him, an Aston Martin in charcoal grey that he drove with the same unsettling precision he brought to everything, followed the coast road east, and the Mediterranean was silver in the late afternoon light and the silence between them wasn’t the armed silence of the jet or the grieving silence of the separation. It was a new kind of silence. A threshold. The quiet before a door opens.
They arrived at night.
Ace Royale rose from the Monaco coastline like a dark jewel, all black marble and gold light, the entrance framed by columns of polished stone that reflected the evening in long, liquid streaks. Above the doors, cast in bronze and lit from below, the insignia: crossed swords behind the ace of spades. The same emblem she had seen on the jet’s bulkhead. The same crest she had found on the internet in her kitchen in Cimiez, sitting with her tea, her blood going cold. Here, it wasn’t a crest. It was a declaration.
He parked. Opened her door. Offered his hand, the scarred one, and she took it and the contact was brief and electric and neither of them acknowledged it because acknowledging it’d have broken the threshold silence and they weren’t ready.
They walked in.
Crystal chandeliers fractured light across floors so polished they reflected her like dark water, she could see herself in the black marble, a pale figure walking beside a dark one, and the image was disorienting, as though she were watching two other people enter a world that was both beautiful and dangerous and undeniably real. Rose petals in crystal bowls at every doorway, blood-red against black stone, a tradition she didn’t yet know the origin of but felt instinctively was more than decoration. Frosted glass partitions etched with the family crest: the diamond wreathed in flames. Leather chairs branded with the Almazov “A.” The air smelled like old money and fresh flowers and something darker underneath: possibility, or power, or the particular scent of a place that had been built by men who answered to no one.
Security in tailored suits inclined their heads as Andrei passed. Not deference, something deeper. Recognition. The acknowledgment of a man who had built their world and kept it safe and was now walking through it with a woman none of them had seen before, and every one of them was watching her with the careful, assessing attention of professionals who reported directly to the man beside her.
She saw it all. The throne room. The kingdom. The life that came with loving this man.
She didn’t look away.
The elevator to the penthouse was glass. Private. It required a biometric scan, Andrei’s palm on a panel, and the silent approval of the security detail flanking the entrance. The doors opened. They stepped inside.