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)
Artem stood by the window. Quiet. Watchful. The youngest brother, the enforcer, the one whose ruthless facade hid something Ciana had glimpsed only once, in the lobby, when a waitress had stumbled and his hand had been gentle. He stood apart from the others, hands in his pockets, dark eyes on the ceremony with an expression that wasn’t cold but careful. Guarded. The face of a man watching other people’s happiness with the focused attention of someone who didn’t expect it for himself.
And Alexei.
He stood at the far end of the room, as he had stood at the far end of every room she had ever seen him occupy, separate, contained, the temperature around him several degrees lower than the rest of the penthouse. He wore black. His face gave nothing away. He hadn’t spoken since he arrived, and Ciana had the impression that Alexei Almazov didn’t speak unless the words he had to offer were worth more than the silence they’d replace.
The officiant spoke. The words were French and brief and legal. Andrei held her hands, both of them, his scarred fingers wrapped around hers, and his grip was firm and his eyes were wet and he said “oui” in a voice that was raw and reverent and absolutely certain.
She said “oui” and meant it the way she had never meant anything.
And when it was done, when the officiant closed his book and Anton whooped and Raven wiped her eyes and the penthouse filled with the sound of champagne being opened, Ciana looked across the room at Alexei.
He was watching her. The eldest. The coldest. The one who had reinterpreted a dead man’s promise and sent his brother to a hotel lobby in London at seven in the morning. He looked at Ciana, this woman who had seen his kingdom and his brother’s scars and the worst cruelty the Almazov world could produce and had chosen to walk in anyway, and he did something no one had ever seen him do.
He smiled.
Small. Brief. Gone before anyone else caught it. But Ciana saw it, and she understood that it wasn’t warmth, Alexei didn’t do warmth, it was acknowledgment. The approval of a man who had spent his life building a kingdom and had just watched a woman prove she was strong enough to live in it.
She smiled back.
The jet was waiting on the Monaco tarmac at sunset.
The same jet, the matte-black A350 she had boarded with her spine straight and her fury quiet on the first morning of her new life. The cabin hadn’t changed: six seats, dark leather, the diamond wreathed in flames on the forward bulkhead. Nor had the galley, where she had pressed her hands to the counter and counted her way through every impossible thing this man had done to her life.
She boarded first. Not to the galley.
She sat in 1A. The owner’s seat. His seat.
He boarded after her. Saw where she was sitting. Stopped.
The look on his face, she’d keep that too. Alongside the smile. Alongside the sound he had made when she laced her fingers through his. A collection she was building, piece by piece, of the moments when Andrei Almazov’s walls came down and the man underneath was visible, and he wasn’t a monster, and he wasn’t stone. He was a man who had just married a woman who was sitting in his seat, in his jet, wearing a simple white dress she had bought that afternoon in Monaco, and looking at him as though he were just a man.
He sat beside her. The engines spooled.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. Up.”
The ground fell away.
Monaco receded beneath them, the coastline a ribbon of gold, the sea black and vast, the sky opening above them like a door into something limitless. The cabin was warm. The lights were low. They were alone at forty thousand feet, and the world below was a map of lights that meant nothing because everything that mattered was here.
She stood.
Not to serve. Not to pour or clear or retreat to the galley. She stood because this was her cabin now, hers and his, and she wanted to be standing when it began. She wanted him to see her choose this. Not stumble into it. Not be carried by turbulence or proximity or the narrow geography of an aisle that had been pushing them together for months. She wanted to stand in front of him in a white dress at forty thousand feet and let him watch her decide.
He looked up at her from his seat. The reading light was off. The only illumination was the blue accent lighting along the floor panels, the same blue light that had lit the galley the night she had put her hands on his skin, and in that light his face was all planes and shadows and the scar was a silver line from temple to jaw and his eyes were dark and open and terrified in a way she had never seen them.