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)
And the world went white.
Not fast. Not how she'd broken that morning, sharp and sudden and overwhelming. This was slow. This was her hand on him, learning him, and his face buried in her neck and his arms locked around her waist and the sounds he was making, low and wrecked and completely beyond his control, pressed into her skin where no one else would ever hear them.
She held him through it. Her free arm around his shoulders, her lips in his hair, her voice in his ear saying his name like it was something precious, and when the tension broke, when his body arced against hers and his grip tightened and the sound he made was her name, just her name, torn from somewhere so deep it hadn't seen daylight in twenty-two years—
She held on.
The silence after was enormous.
His face was in her neck. His chest was heaving. His arms were still locked around her waist, and he couldn't let go, couldn't make his hands release her, and the trembling in his body was different now. Not tension. Something that felt dangerously close to grief, and he didn't understand it, couldn't parse it, because nothing about this should feel like grief and yet his eyes were burning and his throat was closed and the woman in his arms was warm and solid and present and the feeling of being held was so foreign to him that his body didn't know how to process it without breaking.
The way you'd calm an animal that didn't know it was safe yet. That was how Mia's fingers combed through his hair. Slow. Rhythmic.
"Stay," she whispered.
One word. The one that mattered.
Not don't leave. Not talk to me. Not tell me what this means. Just: stay.
He didn't close a door. He didn't leave the building. He didn't start the engine and drive until the shaking stopped.
Alexei Almazov sat in a chair in his kitchen with a girl in his lap and his face in her neck and his heart hammering against her palm, and he stayed.
ALEXEI
She fell asleep on the couch at eleven.
They hadn't talked about it. After the kitchen, after the chair, after she'd cleaned his shirt with a damp cloth and he'd let her, which was its own category of surrender, they had migrated to the living room like two people who didn't know what to do next but knew that separating wasn't an option. She'd turned on the television. He'd pretended to care about whatever she'd chosen. Biscuit had claimed the space between them, enormous and warm and oblivious, and within an hour Mia's head had tipped against the dog's back and her body had gone slack and her hand had gone limp on the remote.
He turned off the television.
She was curled into Biscuit's side with her bare feet tucked under a cushion and her hair falling across her face and her mouth slightly open, which she would've been mortified about if she knew, and the sight of it, the absolute defencelessness of her in his space, did something to the walls that was structural. Not a crack. A load-bearing failure.
He should carry her to the guest room. He'd done it before. Two years ago, when she was sixteen, when she'd fall asleep on this couch with a textbook on her chest, and he'd lift her and carry her down the hall and set her on the bed and leave the room and stand in the hallway with his hands against the wall.
He picked her up. She weighed nothing. She murmured something unintelligible and curled into his chest, her fingers finding his collar, gripping the fabric, and the intimacy of the unconscious gesture hit him harder than anything she'd done while awake.
Down the hall. Past his bedroom door. To the guest room. He set her on the bed. Pulled the covers over her. Biscuit lumbered in and took his spot.
Her fingers hadn't let go of his collar.
He detached them gently. One by one. And the loss of her grip was absurdly painful for something so small.
He straightened up. She was asleep. Safe. In his home, in his guest room, with her dog pressed against her side and her face soft with sleep.
He stepped into the hallway. Pulled her door closed behind him. The click was soft. Familiar. The sound of a man retreating, which was what he always did, which was the only thing he knew how to do after being close to her.
His bedroom was six steps to the left.
He took one step. Two.
Stopped.
The hallway was dark. The penthouse was silent. And the emptiness that had opened when Pavlov died, the void that had replaced twenty-two years of purpose, wasn't empty anymore. It had a shape now, and the shape was sleeping six feet away on the other side of a door he'd just closed.