Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
She reached him. She tipped her face up. Her eyes were bright and her chin was sure and she was the bravest person he had ever known.
"Hi," she said.
The smile came before he could calibrate it. Full. Unguarded. "Hi."
The judge cleared his throat.
The ceremony was brief and exact, the way Daisy had wanted it. No performance, no excess. Just the words and the rings and the moment when the judge said you may kiss your bride and Anton cupped her face in both hands, the same gesture as the worst night of his life, except this time his hands weren’t shaking for the wrong reasons.
He kissed her.
She made a small sound against his mouth, startled and pleased, and when he pulled back her eyes took a moment to open, and when they did they were warm and dazed and entirely, completely her.
He leaned close. His voice was very solemn.
"Tonight," he said, "we make sure Aria has a younger sibling by next year."
The chapel was small. The acoustics were excellent.
Andrei produced a sound that was not a cough. Artem's mouth pulled sideways. Blythe pressed her face into Jeff's shoulder. Daisy's mother laughed outright. Her father found the ceiling suddenly fascinating. At the back, Alexei's expression moved by a fraction, not a smile but the nearest thing to one that Alexei Almazov produced in public.
Daisy's face went the colour of the roses on the altar.
"Anton—"
"Transparent about my intentions." He offered her his arm. "Shall we?"
She took his arm. Still blushing. He was still smiling. At the end of the third pew, Aria Blythe Almazov slept through all of it.
THE RECEPTION WAS IN the garden.
Long tables beneath the cypress trees, white linen, the Mediterranean a thin blue line beyond the estate wall. The afternoon had gone golden and slow, light that made everything feel like a memory while it was still happening, and the sound of voices and laughter moved through the warm air between the trees.
Alexei stepped away from the tables.
He had always done this. Stood at the perimeter of every occasion the rest of them moved through, his father's dinners, his brothers' celebrations, the hushed family moments and the loud ones, not from coldness but from something older. The habit of a man who had learned, early and at cost, that the things you stood closest to were the things you lost.
He moved to the far end of the garden where the cypress trees thinned and the estate wall gave a view of the water, and he took out his phone.
Two messages. Both unread.
The first was from his head of security.
He read it once, then twice. He stood very still with the sounds of the reception behind him and the sea beyond the wall and he read it a third time, because some information required that.
Jezebel Keyes had made her deal. The terms had been his, because they were always his. He had sat across from her in a room she hadn’t expected to leave and explained, with the exactness of a man who had been building toward this for fifteen years, what cooperation would cost her and what it would spare her. And she had understood that he wasn’t there to negotiate.
She had given him a name.
The name of the casino owner from Saint Petersburg who had handed their father a package and a promise and a prison sentence. The man who had ordered a staged suicide and gone on operating, undisturbed, for fifteen years, while four boys turned grief into an empire and waited. Alexei had the name now. The weight of it was exactly what he had known it would be, not heavy, not light. Precise. A key that had been cut over fifteen years finally turned in the lock.
He put the phone in his pocket.
He let himself look at the garden. His brothers, their wives. Anton with Aria against his chest now, one hand spread across the baby's back with the stunned, still-learning tenderness of a man who had not yet stopped being surprised by what he was capable of.
Soon.
He took the phone out again.
The second message was from a different number. Stored under a name he had not expected to see today, on this occasion, in this garden.
His ward.
She had finished school. She was writing to request what she had apparently been planning for some time: a gap year. At his casino. In Monaco.
He read the message. His face read it with him, and his expression did what his expression did when something required the full weight of his attention. It went still. Not blank. The particular stillness of a man recalibrating the distance between what he had expected and what had just come.
He typed one line.
“What do you plan to do with the gap year?”
He waited.
Behind him, Anton laughed. The new version, open and unguarded, the laugh of a man who had stopped performing and started living. Alexei had heard that laugh across the years and this version was different from all the others. This was what came after.