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)
Her watch read twelve fifty-three when Star came out. Hair loose. Tunic buttoned wrong. Face carrying an expression that didn't need translation.
Artem followed thirty seconds later, his shirt untucked, his hair disordered, and on his face an expression Mila has never seen in eleven years. The guarded blankness gone. The operational focus gone. Even the grief she saw at his father's funeral, gone. Something open. Something ruined and rebuilt. Something that resembled, from the mezzanine, a man who has stopped hiding.
She checked the time. Twelve fifty-four.
The cigarette burns to the filter. She grinds it out on the railing and drops it into the sea.
In her cabin, the laptop is waiting. The satellite window opens in forty minutes.
There are things to report.
Artem
SHE CATCHES ME OFF guard.
One moment she's standing in the middle of Suite 12, still in her uniform, hair damp from the spa, that particular fire in her eyes. The next her hands are on my face and she's kissing me.
There's no warning. No build. She reaches up, takes my jaw in both hands the way I took hers in the corridor three days ago, and presses her mouth to mine, and the kiss is the most contradictory thing I have ever felt. Passionate and innocent at the same time. Certain and trembling. A girl who has decided exactly what she wants and has very little idea how to ask for it, and so she asks the only way she knows, with both hands and her whole heart and no plan beyond this.
Something in me gives. The locked thing. The glass I've held everything behind for thirty-four years, already cracked in that corridor when she called me a gargoyle, finally goes.
I take over.
I turn the kiss, slow her down, gather her in against me with one arm while my other hand cradles the back of her head, and I feel the small startled sound she makes against my mouth when she realises the lead has changed hands. She came in here brave. I let her be brave for exactly as long as it takes me to remember that I've spent two weeks not touching her, and that I'm done with restraint.
The desk lamp throws gold across the room. Her hands fist in my shirt. And whatever I've been holding myself back from since the first time her hands found my scars and didn't flinch, I stop holding it back now.
After, she's tucked against my chest in the gold lamplight, her cheek over the scar she found first, the long one, and I can feel her breath going slow and even against my skin. My hand is in her hair. The ship hums at sixty-two hertz. Neither of us has said anything in a while and the silence is the good kind, the kind her hands make in a treatment room, the kind I haven't had in thirty-four years.
"Your hands," I tell her, when I can, "are not the only valuable thing about you."
She turns her face into my chest and I feel her smile against my skin, and the smile is so warm it makes my eyes burn.
I TELL HER EVERYTHING.
We're on the balcony. Two AM. She's wearing my shirt because hers is somewhere on the sitting room floor and the night air is warm for the Mediterranean but not warm enough for bare skin and I gave her the shirt before I gave her the information, which is the correct order of operations: cover the girl, then confess the crimes.
She buttoned it wrong. The same way she buttoned her uniform wrong when I walked her home from the spa. I'm not going to correct it. I'm never going to correct it. She can button every shirt she owns in the wrong order for the rest of her life and it will undo me every single time.
"Ace Royale," I begin. "The casino. It's the front."
She's sitting in the deck chair with her knees pulled up, my shirt falling past her thighs, her bare feet on the cushion. She's listening like she listens during sessions, with her whole body, that complete attention that made me yield to her in the first session and hasn't stopped making me yield since.
"The casino generates enough revenue to fund the real operation. Shipping routes, port contacts, intelligence networks. We track the money that flowed out of my father's case. Bribes, payoffs, the men who turned the other way while a casino owner in Saint Petersburg fed my father to the system."
"The witness," she says. Not a question. She's been assembling this since the corridor. Filing the pieces in that planner of hers, fitting them together like her hands find what's hidden in a body.
"Someone who can identify the man who gave the order. We've been tracking them for three years. Mila's primary assignment."
Star doesn't flinch at Mila's name. Two weeks ago she would have. The name would have carried its own weather. Now she just nods and waits, and the fact that she can hear that name without reacting tells me more about the steel in this girl than any word she's ever spoken.