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)
As the elevator rose, the casino floor fell away beneath them through the glass walls, and Ciana looked down into the kingdom and saw them.
Three men.
In the lobby below, standing near the main bar like figures in a painting they had composed without effort, the Almazov brothers.
Artem first. The youngest. Dark-eyed, watchful, standing slightly apart from the others with his hands in his pockets and an expression that would have read as dangerous if she hadn’t caught the moment, brief, unguarded, when a waitress stumbled near him and he steadied her tray with a hand so gentle it contradicted everything about the rest of his posture. He caught Ciana’s gaze through the glass and gave her a nod. A single nod. Not friendly, not cold. Welcome.
Beside him, Anton. Grinning. Of course he was grinning. The twin who saw everything, who had slid a note under her door in Istanbul and appeared at her flat with wine and the truth, was standing in the lobby of his family’s casino watching his brother’s woman rise through the glass elevator and he was grinning like a man whose most reckless bet had just paid off.
And at the far end of the room, separate, still, Alexei.
The eldest. The coldest. The one who had given Andrei the words that had brought him to a hotel lobby in London at seven in the morning. He stood by the window with a drink he didn’t appear to be drinking, and he looked up at Ciana through the glass with an expression she couldn’t read. His face was carved and precise and gave nothing away: the face of a man who entered rooms and the temperature dropped, who gave orders that shaped lives, who had looked at his brother and said you misunderstood Father with the devastating clarity of a man who felt everything at a temperature that would kill the rest of them.
He didn’t smile. But he didn’t look away.
The elevator rose. The brothers receded below. The casino floor became a map of light and marble and then the glass went dark as they passed into the private floors and Ciana turned from the window and looked at Andrei, who had been watching her watch his world, and his face was open. Exposed. The face of a man who had shown a woman the ugliest, most beautiful, most honest part of his life and was waiting to see if she’d stay.
The penthouse was glass and steel over the Mediterranean.
Spare. Controlled. Beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful: every surface precise, every angle intentional, nothing wasted and nothing hidden. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling and the sea was black and silver beyond them, and Monaco glittered along the coastline like a circuit board, and the room was the most Andrei room she had ever seen. Clean. Quiet. Built by a man who had spent his life eliminating everything that wasn’t essential.
He stood at the window. His back to her. His reflection in the glass, the scar, the shoulders, the hands at his sides that were still shaking, was a ghost overlaid on the lights of the city he had helped build.
She stood in the doorway.
The room between them was perhaps twenty feet. The longest twenty feet of her life.
She thought about the first night. The champagne flute in his scarred hands. The way she had noticed. The way she had been furious with herself for noticing.
She thought about the turbulence. Three seconds. One, two, three. His palm against her waist. The heat.
She thought about Geneva. The knuckle on her cheekbone. The burn.
She thought about the galley in the snowstorm. Her name in his mouth. The four seconds before she lost count.
She thought about the rain. His mouth opening against hers. The sound.
She thought about the Russian in the dark. The shaking hands framing her face. The words she’d never ask him to translate.
She thought about the galley at two a.m. The scars under her hands. His fist on the wall. The wrecked sound. The most honest thing she had ever heard.
She thought about Justina’s hand on his. The door closing.
She thought about three weeks without him. The bruise that wouldn’t fade. Paolo’s unmarked hands across a restaurant table and the nothing she felt when he touched her.
She thought about Anton’s note. Don’t let him be.
She crossed the room.
It was the longest walk of her life.
She stopped in front of him, and when he turned from the window, she took his hand.
His scarred, enormous, shaking hand. The one she had noticed the very first time, wrapped around a champagne flute on a redeye to Monaco. It had caught her in turbulence and held for three seconds, grazed her cheekbone in Geneva, gripped the counter in the galley while she took him apart. And it had settled on Justina Karpov’s armrest and broken something inside her that she was only now allowing to mend.