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)
"Mia—"
"Was any of it real?" The question came out raw. Not loud. The opposite of loud. The voice of a woman asking the only question that mattered, and the answer would either rebuild the room or level it.
The lights went out.
Not a dimming. The cabin went black, total and immediate, as if the mountain had swallowed them. The fire in the other room was embers, throwing no light into the study. The window showed nothing but darkness, because the Alps at night without power were the darkest place on earth.
Mia's voice cut off. The anger vanished. What replaced it was silence, and the silence was wrong.
Biscuit wasn't growling. Biscuit wasn't making any sound at all, and Biscuit always made a sound, and the absence of the dog's noise was louder than any alarm.
Alexei's hand found her wrist in the dark. His grip was iron. He pulled her behind him, and his body was between her and the door, and his free hand was reaching for the desk drawer where he kept the weapon he'd brought to a cabin he told her was for a weekend away.
"Alexei—" Her whisper was barely a breath.
"Don't move."
And in the half-second before the silence became something else, she saw his face in the fading glow of the embers through the doorway, the last sliver of orange light painting his features, and what was on it wasn't fear.
It was the expression of a man who had just understood that the chain hadn't moved on at all. The guard's death had nothing to do with Morgan. Someone else had killed the guard, for reasons that had nothing to do with letters or chains or games, and Alexei had read the report and built a cathedral of safety on a coincidence. The logic that had felt so clean this morning, the sequential chain, the forked path, the freedom, was a story he'd told himself because he'd wanted it to be true. Morgan had never moved on. Morgan had never stopped. Morgan had been coming for him the whole time, patient and unhurried, and Alexei had brought his wife to a cabin in the mountains with no security and no walls because he'd believed in a death that meant nothing.
The trap wasn't Morgan's. The trap was his own relief.
Chapter 9
MIA
His grip on her wrist was the only thing that told her which direction was alive.
The dark was total. Not the dark of a bedroom with city lights on the ceiling. Not the dark of the penthouse hallway at 3 AM with the corridor glow under the doors. This was mountain dark. Alpine dark. The dark of a place that had no neighbors and no streetlights and no Monaco glow on the horizon, and the window that Alexei had left cracked was letting in nothing but cold air and the smell of pine and a silence so deep it had texture.
She couldn't see him. He was in front of her, his hand locked on her wrist, and she could feel the heat of his body and the tension running through his arm like a current, and that was all. The man she'd been screaming at thirty seconds ago, the man she'd accused of marrying her for strategy, had become a shape in the dark and a grip on her wrist and a wall between her and whatever had killed the lights.
Biscuit whined. Once. Low. From somewhere near the floor, near the study door, and then he went silent again, and the silence was worse than any sound.
"Don't speak." Alexei's voice was barely there. Not a whisper. Lower than a whisper. The voice of a man communicating through the minimum vibration of air required to carry meaning.
She didn't speak. Her heart was slamming against her ribs so hard she was certain it was audible, and her breath was fast and shallow and she was trying to control it and failing, because the anger had been replaced by something more primal, something her body understood before her mind caught up: they were not alone in this cabin.
His hand moved her. Backward. Slow. One step. Two. Her bare feet on the cold floor, each step a negotiation with the dark, and his body stayed in front of hers, always in front, and she could feel the weapon in his other hand, the weight of it changing his posture, the way his shoulder dropped when he raised it.
A sound.
Not from them. Not from Biscuit. From the front of the cabin, from the main room, from somewhere near the door. A creak. Wood settling under weight. The specific, unmistakable sound of a floorboard accepting a foot.
Someone was inside.
Her hand found the back of Alexei's shirt. Her fingers curled into the fabric, and the grip was the same grip from the first night, both fists in his coat, except that night she'd been pulling him closer and tonight she was holding on because the dark was enormous and the sound was real and someone was in the house.