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 phone lit in his hand.
He read the reply.
His face went very still.
The End
Close Enough to Kiss
Chapter 1
ALEXEI
Sandro Pavlov was dead, and Alexei felt nothing.
He stood in the doorway of what used to be a sitting room in a townhouse in Saint Petersburg and forced himself to take in every detail. The charred remains in the chair. The smell, which was exactly what burning flesh smelled like and nothing else. The star-shaped pattern on the floor where the accelerant had been poured with a care that spoke less of rage and more of ritual.
Twenty-two years. He had spent twenty-two years building toward this moment. Every cent of the Almazov fortune, every encrypted file, every 3 AM phone call with his brothers, every decision he had made since he was fourteen years old and a prison guard rang their apartment in Moscow to tell him his father was dead.
All of it. For this.
And someone else had gotten here first.
He should have felt something. Rage that the kill wasn’t his. Relief that it was done. Satisfaction, at the very least, that the man who had destroyed his father’s life was now unrecognizable in a chair.
But there was just...nothing. A blankness where the purpose used to be. And the blankness was worse than grief, because grief at least had a shape, and this had none.
“Sir.”
Detective Kotov was in the corridor, unwilling to step inside the room uninvited. Smart man. In this part of Russia, a detective who wanted to keep his career intact learned early which rooms belonged to him and which belonged to the Almazovs. Behind him, the scene was working: uniformed officers at the perimeter, forensic techs in the stairwell, a guard logging evidence by the front entrance. All of them deferring. In this part of Russia, everyone deferred.
“We found something.”
Kotov held up the evidence bag. Alexei pulled on gloves and took it.
Inside was a folded sheet of paper with burnt edges. He opened it. The words were written in blood. Pavlov’s, most likely. The handwriting was neat. Almost elegant.
Cursed are you who reads this.
Alexei read it twice. Then he folded the paper, put it back in the bag, and handed it to Kotov.
“I’d appreciate a copy in my inbox.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Any leads?”
“The accelerant is military grade. My men are canvassing. This wasn’t amateur work.”
“Keep me updated.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexei walked out of the building without a backward glance. The street was grey and wet. November in Saint Petersburg, which meant the air tasted like diesel and river water and a cold that got into your bones whether you wanted it to or not.
He got in the car. Typed the message.
Sandro Pavlov is dead. Someone else got to him first.
He hit Send.
Andrei’s reply came in less than a minute. Good.
Artem: It’s over.
Anton: Tell me you’re coming home.
Three brothers. Three replies. For them, this was enough. The man was dead. The chapter was closed. They were ready to move on with their lives.
Alexei wasn’t.
And he couldn’t explain why. It wasn’t about wanting to be the one who did it. It wasn’t injured pride or some unsatisfied bloodlust. It was simpler and worse than that: for twenty-two years, this had been the reason he got out of bed. The reason Ace Royale existed. The reason he had turned himself into a man who could stand in a room with a burnt corpse and feel nothing at all.
Take that away, and what was left?
A billionaire with an empire and no reason to run it.
He put his phone away. The driver pulled onto the motorway without being told where to go. The airport. Where else.
The grey city thinned into grey suburbs. Alexei leaned back and closed his eyes and tried to figure out what a man was supposed to do with the rest of his life when the thing that had driven it was gone.
His phone rang.
Not the encrypted line. The personal one. The number that only four people in the world had, and three of them had just texted.
Mia.
His eyes opened. His jaw tightened. And something in his chest did a thing he refused to name, because naming it would mean admitting that an eighteen-year-old girl he hadn’t seen in two years could do more damage to his composure in a single phone call than a dead body could.
He could let it ring. She’d leave a voicemail. She always did. Long and rambling and full of stories about classes and friends and some stray cat she’d found, and he would listen to it later on the plane, alone, like he always did, where no one could see his face while she talked.
But ignoring her call would make him a coward, and whatever else Alexei Almazov was, he wasn’t that.
He answered. “Speak.”
“There you go again, issuing orders before saying hello.”
Her voice hit him the way it always did. Right in the chest. He set his jaw harder.