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 first night, he'd closed his bedroom door. This morning, he'd left the building. Every retreat bigger. Every wall thinner. Every door between them a lie he kept telling himself because the alternative was admitting that the only place in his empire he wanted to be was wherever she was.
He stood in the dark hallway. His hands were at his sides. They weren't shaking. For the first time in three days, his hands were completely still, and the stillness was more terrifying than any tremor, because trembling meant he was still fighting.
Still hands meant the fight was over.
Alexei Almazov turned around.
He put his hand on her door.
And opened it.
MORGAN
The roulette wheel spun, and the table held its breath.
Morgan placed his chip on seventeen. Not because seventeen was lucky. Because the woman two seats to his left had placed hers on sixteen, and he enjoyed the intimacy of adjacency. The almost-touching. The nearness of a thing without the commitment of contact.
The ball dropped. Twenty-three. Neither of them won, but the woman smiled at him anyway, because women always smiled at Morgan Gurin, and he always smiled back, because a smile was the cheapest key to every locked room in the world.
He had been inside Ace Royale for four days now. Long enough to learn the rhythms of the place. The security rotation, which changed at eleven and three. The cameras, which had two blind spots he'd mapped on his second night. The VIP corridor, which led to an office on the top floor where the eldest brother worked behind a door that required a keycard and a six-digit code.
Alexei Almazov. The man who had read the letter.
Morgan collected his remaining chips and moved to the bar. He ordered a gin and tonic, because gin was a civilized drink, and civilization was a quality he prized. The bartender was fast and competent, and the glass was cold, and the casino hummed around him with the particular energy of a place where people came to lose things they couldn't afford.
He had noticed the girl.
She worked at the clinic, the little rehabilitation annex tucked behind the east corridor. Brown hair, warm eyes, a laugh that carried. She talked too much, which he found endearing rather than tiresome, because people who talked too much were people who trusted too easily, and trust was the softest door of all.
Mia. She'd told him her name the way she told everyone her name: immediately, openly, like it cost her nothing to give it.
Everything about her was open. Her face when she listened. Her posture when she leaned across the desk. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was comfortable, a gesture so unguarded it was almost an invitation.
She would be useful.
Not yet. Not for some time. Morgan was a patient man, and patience was the only virtue he truly possessed. He would come to his appointments. He would be charming and self-aware and just vulnerable enough to earn her sympathy without triggering her suspicion. He would let her believe she was helping him, because belief was a kind of intimacy, and intimacy was a kind of proximity, and proximity was all he ever needed.
The roulette wheel spun again behind him. He didn't turn to see where the ball settled.
He already knew where everything was going to land.
ALEXEI
Chapter 5
ALEXEI
He had been sitting in the chair for four hours.
The guest room was dark. The curtains were drawn, and the only light came from the corridor behind him, a thin blade of it cutting across the marble floor and stopping just short of the bed. Biscuit had lifted his head when Alexei opened the door, assessed the situation with the ancient patience of a dog who had seen this particular human make questionable decisions before, and moved to the floor without complaint.
Mia hadn't woken.
She was on her side, one arm tucked under the pillow, her hair spread across the white sheets in a way that shouldn't have meant anything and meant everything. Her breathing was even. Her mouth was slightly open. One bare foot had escaped the covers and hung over the edge of the mattress, and the vulnerability of it, the sheer unprotected stupidity of a bare foot dangling in the dark, made his chest crack.
He hadn't touched her. He'd sat down in the chair beside the bed and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and stayed like that for a long time, not sleeping, not thinking, just being in the room. Just being close enough to hear her breathe.
At some point Biscuit had come over and pressed his enormous head against Alexei's knee, and Alexei had dropped a hand to the dog's ears without thinking, and the two of them had sat there in the dark like sentinels guarding something neither of them could name.