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 mausoleum sat on a hill above Monaco, in a private cemetery in the province where the roads narrowed and the tourists didn’t come. They had built it because it was over. Not how any of them had imagined. Not the ending Alexei had spent twenty-two years engineering, the one where he stood over Pavlov’s body and felt the purpose complete itself. Instead, a stranger had killed Pavlov and then come for Alexei, and the revenge arc that had driven his entire adult life had ended in a dark cabin with a fireplace poker and his wife’s voice saying three words while he bled on the floor.
It was over. The remains had been transferred from a Russian prison cemetery where no one visited and no one mourned. Daniil Almazov was in Monaco now. In the place his sons had built from the wreckage of his death. Not in the wreckage. In the thing that grew from it.
Alexei stood at the entrance while his brothers made their goodbyes inside. He could hear them. Not the words. The tones. Andrei’s low rumble, spare and final. Anton’s uneven catch, because Anton felt things at full volume and had never learned to turn it down. Artem’s silence, which was its own kind of prayer.
The air smelled like rosemary and warm stone. November in the hills above Monaco, an afternoon so mild you forgot November existed. Behind him, four cars waited in the gravel pull-off. Not limos. Cars. Dark, armored, vehicles that didn’t announce themselves, because the Almazov brothers didn’t need to be announced.
Andrei came out first. He stopped beside Alexei. The scar from temple to jaw caught the afternoon sun and turned silver, and the size of him, even in grief, even in a dark suit, made the doorway look small.
He didn’t speak. He put his hand on Alexei’s shoulder. One squeeze. The same gesture, the same weight, the same language they’d spoken since Alexei was fourteen and Andrei was twelve and neither of them knew how to say the things that mattered so they’d learned to say them with pressure and proximity instead.
Alexei’s chin dipped.
Andrei walked to his car. Ciana was waiting beside it, golden and composed, her hand finding his the moment he was close enough to reach. He opened her door. She got in. He followed. The car pulled away.
Anton came next, Daisy beside him, and the baby on Daisy’s hip. Aria was fourteen months old and had discovered the concept of grabbing things, which currently included her father’s tie. Anton was trying to disentangle himself while simultaneously wiping his eyes with his free hand, which wasn’t working, and Daisy was watching him with the patient tenderness of a woman who had seen this man at his worst and his best and could no longer tell the difference between the two.
“Your daughter is strangling me,” Anton told her.
“She has good instincts.”
He laughed. The sound was wet and unashamed, and he kissed Daisy’s temple and then Aria’s forehead and then he caught Alexei’s eye and the grin surfaced through the grief, because Anton Almazov’s face couldn’t hold sorrow for longer than it took someone he loved to need him to smile.
“Papa would’ve liked her,” he told Alexei. Meaning Aria. Meaning the tiny girl with his eyes and her mother’s composure who was methodically destroying a silk tie and not caring.
“He would’ve spoiled her worse than you do.”
“Impossible.” Anton touched Alexei’s arm. Not a squeeze. A press. Different from Andrei’s. Warmer. Briefer. The language of a twin who spoke in exclamation points rather than full stops. “See you at home.”
They left. Artem and Star were last.
Star was crying. She’d been crying since the beginning of the service and hadn’t stopped, and Artem’s hand was on the back of her neck in a hold so gentle it contradicted everything about him, the dark sightline eyes, the hands-in-pockets posture of a man who lived on the edges of rooms. She was tucked against his side, her face damp, her hand gripping his jacket, and the two of them moved through the mausoleum entrance like a single unit, bonded at the hip, and Artem’s expression above her was the expression of a man who had found the one person in the world who felt things as deeply as he did but wasn’t afraid to show it.
He met Alexei’s eyes. A nod. The same nod from the wedding, the one that carried thirty-five years without words. Then he guided Star to the car, opened the door with one hand while the other stayed on her neck, and they were gone.
The gravel settled. The hill was silent.
Alexei turned back to the mausoleum. The marble was bright in the sun. His father’s name carved into it, and below the dates, nothing. No epitaph. They had argued about it for two days, four brothers around a table at Ace Royale, and Anton had wanted something grand and Artem had wanted something Russian and Andrei had wanted nothing at all, and Alexei had overruled them because that was what Alexei did.