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)
The thought crystallized before he could examine it, and once it was there, it was immovable.
Marry her.
Not because he loved her. Not yet, not that word, not in a form he could say out loud without the ground opening under him. But because she was in his house and in his chest and in his life, and a man was coming, and the Almazov name was a wall, and a wife was inside the wall, and a ward was not.
Marry her.
The thought was cold. Strategic. Exactly the kind of decision Alexei Almazov made: clean, logical, designed to protect the thing that mattered most.
And underneath the strategy, underneath the logic, underneath the architecture of protection, something else was burning. Something that had been burning since she was sixteen and had nothing to do with killers or letters or walls.
He wanted her. He had always wanted her. And the wanting had been the reason he'd sent her away, and the reason he'd sat in her chair for four hours, and the reason his hands were shaking right now, and the reason that the word marry didn't feel strategic at all.
It felt like the only honest thing he'd done in twenty-two years.
MIA
She left the clinic at three.
Alexei's texts had been rattling around her head all day. Come home early. I'm fine. The two statements contradicted each other, because Alexei Almazov didn't ask people to come home early, and a man who was fine didn't sit in a chair for four hours in the dark beside a sleeping girl and then tell her about it with the stripped honesty of someone who had stopped pretending.
Something had happened.
She didn't know what. But she knew him, and she knew that I'm fine from Alexei was the equivalent of a five-alarm fire from anyone else, and the clipped rhythm of his texts had the cadence of a man making decisions at speed.
She walked through the casino. The afternoon crowd was thin, tourists and retirees feeding slot machines, and the air smelled like carpet cleaner and expensive cologne and the particular brand of hope that separated people from their money.
"Mia."
She turned. Morgan was at the roulette table, chips stacked in neat rows, his smile warm and easy and exactly as disarming as it had been on his first day.
"Morgan, hi." She stopped, because she was Mia Robertson and she didn't blow people off, even when Alexei's texts were burning a hole in her phone and her chest was tight with something she couldn't name. "How was your session?"
"Illuminating. Dr. Vasquez is very good at making me feel like my problems are both serious and solvable, which I suspect is a talent."
She smiled. "That's kind of her superpower."
"Are you leaving early?" His eyes moved over her face, and the question felt personal in a way that made her skin prickle.
"I am. Just today."
"Nothing wrong, I hope?"
"No, everything's fine." The lie came out smooth, and she hated it, because Mia Robertson didn't lie, and the fact that she'd just done it so easily felt like something Alexei had taught her by proximity.
"Well." Morgan lifted his glass. "Same time Thursday?"
"Same time Thursday."
She walked away. His eyes were on her back. She could feel them, the way you sense someone's attention in a silent room, and the sensation wasn't unpleasant but it wasn't comfortable either, and she didn't turn around to verify it because she was already pushing through the east exit and walking fast and her heart was hammering for reasons that had nothing to do with a blond man at a roulette table.
The penthouse was empty when she got home.
No. Not empty. Different. The air had the charged quality it always had when Alexei was processing something big. She'd learned to read the apartment the way other people read faces: the angle of his shoes by the door told her he'd come home at some point and left again. The coffee mug in the sink told her he'd been standing at the counter, which meant he was thinking, because he only stood at the counter when his brain was moving too fast to sit down. And the single chair pulled out from the dining table, angled toward the window, told her he'd sat there too, which meant whatever he was thinking had more than one layer.
She showered. Changed into a soft grey dress that she told herself she chose because it was comfortable and not because of anything else, and if the hemline hit mid-thigh and the neckline draped in a way that made her collarbones look good, that was coincidental and irrelevant and she was a liar.
Biscuit was on the couch with his chin on the armrest, judging her.
"Don't," she told him.
He blinked.
"I said don't."
His tail thumped once, which was Biscuit for I've seen everything and I'm choosing silence.
She was in the kitchen pouring her coffee, the milky, ruined version that made Alexei shake his head, when the front door opened.