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)
"This cabin," she told him without turning around, "is the most un-Alexei place I've ever seen."
"It was my father's."
She turned. Her expression changed. The teasing dropped away, replaced by the close attention she gave him whenever Daniil's name surfaced, which was rarely, because Alexei didn't talk about his father, and the not-talking was its own kind of wall that she'd learned to stand beside rather than push against.
"Your father built this?"
"He bought the land. Built the frame with Andrei and a contractor from the village. I was twelve. Artem was eight. Anton kept trying to use the hammer and hitting his own thumb."
She smiled. Not the bright, full smile. The softer one. The one she saved for the moments when the man underneath the empire was visible.
"I love it here," she said.
Two words that had nothing to do with the cabin.
He crossed the kitchen. Took the French press from her. Set it on the counter. Her eyebrows went up.
"I was using that."
"You were destroying it."
"I was making coffee."
"You were making warm milk with a French press as a witness."
She laughed. The sound filled the small kitchen the way it filled every room she entered, and the cabin absorbed it, the timber walls and the stone floor and the low ceiling holding the warmth of her voice the way a cupped hand holds water.
He was going to tell her. Right now. In this kitchen, in this cabin his father built, with the fire burning low and Biscuit on the floor and the mountains outside and the chain broken and the secret dissolved and nothing left between them but the three words he'd never spoken to anyone.
He opened his mouth.
"Alexei."
Not her voice. Her voice was in front of him, warm and laughing. This voice came from behind him, and it wasn't a voice at all. It was a sound. Biscuit, lifting his head from the floor, a low rumble in his throat that wasn't a growl but was adjacent to one. The sound the dog made when something in the house was wrong.
Mia frowned. "What's his problem?"
"Stay here."
The words came out clipped. Automatic. The twenty-two-year machine engaging before his conscious mind caught up. He was already moving, already crossing the kitchen toward the back room, toward the study, toward the desk where the bag was, and the bag was open.
He'd left it closed.
He stopped in the doorway.
Mia was standing at the desk.
Not the Mia from the kitchen. The kitchen Mia was behind him, her footsteps following his despite his instruction to stay, because Mia Robertson did not stay when she was told to stay, she followed, she pushed, she walked through every door he failed to lock.
But this was wrong. She couldn't be in two places. He blinked. The kitchen Mia was behind him. The study was empty. The bag was on the desk. Open. The files spilling out across the surface, because the bag had fallen on its side, and the photos were visible, and—
"Alexei, what is this?"
She was behind him. In the doorway. Her voice was different now. Not warm. Not laughing. The voice of a woman who had followed her husband into a room and found something that changed the shape of everything.
He turned.
She was pale. Her eyes were on the desk. On the photos. From where she stood, she could see them: the charred remains in a chair in Lyon. The star-shaped accelerant pattern in Prague. The folded letter in a dead man's lap in Istanbul. And the Saint Petersburg photos, Pavlov's townhouse, the same room Alexei had stood in the day his purpose died and a new one took its place.
"What is this?" she repeated. Her voice was thin.
He didn't answer immediately. His mind was running the calculations it always ran, sorting options, building responses, constructing the architecture of an explanation that would contain the damage. But the calculations wouldn't resolve, because every path led to the same place: the truth.
"Sit down, Mia."
"Don't tell me to sit down." Her chin came up. The bravado was there, the Mia bravado, the one that had carried her through two years of distance and a closed door and a kitchen confrontation and a proposal on a counter. But underneath it her hands were trembling. "Those are photos of dead people. On your desk. In a cabin in the mountains. And you told me we were coming here for a weekend away."
"We are here for a weekend away."
"With photos of corpses in your bag?"
"Mia—"
"Did you lie to me?" The words came out raw. Not angry yet. Frightened. The fear of a woman who had married a man from a world she'd chosen to enter and was now wondering if the world was darker than she'd been told. "Are you working with the Bratva? Is that what this is? Are those people— did you—"