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)
Except she did earn it. She earned it by being the first person to touch my scars without flinching, by being the girl who thinks hands are everything, by saying goodnight, Artem in a voice that made me forget what I was for three full seconds.
She earned it. And none of that matters because Mila is right. Again.
"She'll get hurt," Mila concludes. She closes the laptop gently, like closing a book she's finished. "Not by you. By everything around you. The attention, the scrutiny, the gap between her life and yours that no amount of coffee can bridge. You can protect her from a lot of things, Artem, but you can't protect her from being twenty years old and in love with a man who lives in a world she doesn't understand."
I face the laptop. The data. The work that's supposed to matter most.
"I'll handle it," I promise.
Mila nods. She doesn't smile. She reaches across the desk and squeezes my hand, brief, warm, sisterly, the hand of a woman who has been beside me since I was twenty-three and has never once steered me wrong.
"She'll recover," Mila assures me. "She's young. Give it a few weeks and she'll be laughing with Curtis again and you'll be a story she tells her friends."
A story she tells her friends.
Star Thornton, who held four-hundred-year-old lace like it was breathing and said things that were made by hand should be held by hands sometimes. Who fell asleep against my arm in the engine room while the ship hummed at sixty-two hertz. Who whispered my name outside her cabin door and the sound of it cracked me open like a fault line.
A story.
I pull my hand back. "Let's focus."
We focus. The manifests blur. The gallery is silent.
THE FRIDAY SESSION goes first.
A notification through the staff portal, impersonal, system-generated. A. Almazov, Friday 6:30 AM, Cancelled. No note. No explanation.
No coffee, either.
I take the service stairs Saturday morning instead of the corridor past the spa. Breakfast on the owner's deck, alone, facing the sea, and the mug in my hand is the thin porcelain from the suite's minibar and the coffee is the right temperature because nobody else is waiting for it, and I don't have to calculate walk times or ceramic density or the exact minute she arrives at the spa, and the simplicity of this should feel like relief.
It doesn't feel like anything.
I don't go to the engine room that night. The upper deck instead, the one where the wind is cold enough to make my hands ache. I stand at the railing and think about my father.
Daniil Almazov loved my mother with a ferocity that scared everyone who knew them. Alexei told me once that our father would've dismantled the world brick by brick if she'd asked. He didn't mean it as a compliment. He meant: love made our father reckless. Love made him visible. And visible men get killed.
My father is dead. My mother is dead. The people who destroyed them are still out there, and I'm on this ship to find them, and Star Thornton is a girl who holds lace handkerchiefs and cries about the hands that made them and she has no place in this.
None.
I cancel Tuesday.
SHE COMES TO THE SPA on Tuesday anyway.
I know because Green mentions it, offhand, in the corridor. "Thornton was asking about your schedule, Mr. Almazov. I told her cancellations are processed through the portal."
"Thank you, Green."
"She seemed..." He pauses. Reconsiders. Chooses the word of a man who has decided to stay professional when he'd rather say something else. "She's a professional. She'll manage."
Green is a decent man. He chose his words carefully and I heard the ones he didn't say, the ones that lived in the pause between seemed and professional, and they sounded like she seemed gutted and you caused that and I hired her because she was the best I'd seen in nine years and you're going to break her.
Wednesday I pass her in the staff corridor on Deck 5. She's coming from the gallery, I'm heading toward the casino, and the corridor is narrow and there's nowhere to go and I see her and she sees me and the flush starts at her throat, the same flush, the one that's been announcing her feelings since the corridor encounter, and her step falters for a quarter-second and then she straightens and her chin lifts and she walks toward me like she walks into a treatment room: shoulders square, hands at her sides, professional.
"Mr. Almazov."
Mr. Almazov. Not Artem. She's handed me back the formality like a key she's returning, and it cuts exactly as it should. Surgically. The same clean line as the scar on my shoulder blade, which her thumbs have traced forty times and will never trace again.
"Star."
I should keep walking. I keep walking.