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)
She turns.
Her face. Two weeks of damage, and every mark is mine. The circles under her eyes are purple, not shadow, actual purple. Her cheeks are thinner. And her mouth is doing something that puts a crack down the centre of my chest: it's trembling. This tiny quiver at the corners that she's fighting with everything she has, biting down on her lower lip to stop it, and her eyes are full, not spilling, full, held there by sheer willpower and rapid blinking and the absolute bone-deep refusal to cry in front of me.
"You have five minutes," she whispers, and her chin wobbles on the last word.
I take a step. My jaw locks. I have to physically unclench it to speak.
"Mila has worked with me for eleven years. She's not an antique consultant. She's Bratva intelligence. I hired her to track a witness connected to the man who had my father killed."
Star's mouth opens. Closes. Her eyes, which were giving me nothing, which were holding themselves blank and empty behind the trembling, go wide.
"My father was framed. Casino owner in Saint Petersburg. Rigged package, drugs and a weapon. He went to prison." My throat constricts. I push through it, because this is what she deserves, not the door, not the silence, this. "He died there."
Her hand goes to her mouth. Not like at the door two weeks ago, when she was bracing. This is different. This is the gesture of a girl who just heard something that hurt her FOR me, and oh God, her eyes, they've gone soft, even now, even after everything, she's looking at me with pain that isn't hers and it's the thing that finally cracks the fist I've been holding at my side, my fingers opening against my will because her face is doing the thing it always does, the thing she can't help, the thing that undid me in the first place: she's feeling something and her whole body is showing it and she doesn't know how to hide.
"Artem," she breathes. Not Mr. Almazov. My name. And her voice breaks on it and something inside me breaks with it.
"My brothers and I built everything to find the man who did it. The ship. The casino. The network." Another step. "Mila told me you'd get hurt. She told me you were too young. Too soft. That the gap between us would crush you. She told me I'd destroy you." My voice drops. I can hear it going, the steadiness draining out of it like water through a crack, and I can't stop it. "She framed it as worry. She claimed she was protecting you."
"Was she?" Star's voice is a thread.
"She was protecting the operation. You were making me visible. You were making me... distracted. You were making me someone who calculates how long a coffee stays warm and brings it in a guest mug because the staff cups are too thin." My jaw clenches again. Unclenches. "She told me loving you would get you killed like it got my father killed, and I believed her because my father is dead and I was—-"
The word sticks. Not a stammer. A wall. A thirty-four-year-old man hitting a word he's never spoken out loud to anyone, a word that doesn't exist in the operational vocabulary, a word that has no place in the mouth of the Almazov who makes problems disappear.
"You were what?" Star whispers.
"Afraid."
The word falls out of me like a stone dropping down a well. Heavy. Final. Irretrievable. And the sound it makes when it hits is the sound of Star's breath catching, a small sharp intake that she tries to swallow and can't, and her hand is still at her mouth and her eyes are spilling now, she's lost the battle, the tears are running down her face and she's not wiping them and she's not looking away.
"You were afraid," she repeats, and her voice is so small, so bewildered, as if the concept of me being afraid of anything is something she can't fit into the shape of the man she knows. "Of me?"
"Of losing you. Of loving you and having someone take you from me like they took him. Of being the reason you—-" My voice goes hoarse. Just goes. Drops out from under me mid-sentence like a floor giving way. I stop. I breathe. My hands are shaking openly now and I've stopped trying to hide it. "I closed that door to keep you safe and I know, I know it wasn't safety, it was cowardice, and you knocked on my door and asked what you did and the answer was nothing, Star, you did nothing, you did absolutely nothing wrong—-"
"Then why did you let me think I did?"
Her voice. Oh God. Cracked open and bewildered, the voice of a girl who after two weeks of standing at empty counters and putting cedarwood at the back of shelves and eating bread rolls alone, still doesn't understand what she did to deserve a closed door. Not performing hurt. Actually hurt. Actually confused. A twenty-year-old girl who's run the equation over and over in her head and it doesn't balance and she can't make it balance and it's been eating her alive.