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)
Nothing. Just the name. Just the dates. Because Daniil Almazov didn’t need words on a stone. He needed his sons to stop avenging him and start living.
That was the thing Alexei understood now, standing on a hill a year after Morgan’s body had been carried out of a cabin in the Alps. Daniil had never needed avenging. If their father had been given the chance to speak to them from the grave, he wouldn’t have asked for blood. He wouldn’t have asked for justice. He would have told them to live good lives. To find women who made them less cold. To have children and argue at dinner tables and let the empire run itself on Tuesdays so they could take their wives to lunch.
He would have told them to be happy. And the simplicity of that, the ordinary human request of a father for his sons, was something Alexei had needed twenty-two years and a serial killer and a girl with a fireplace poker to understand.
He touched the marble. Once. His palm pressed to his father’s name.
Then he walked to the car.
MIA
She was asleep before they hit the motorway.
She hadn’t meant to be. She’d meant to stay awake, to hold Alexei’s hand, to be present for him as he’d been present for her in every dark room and every difficult morning and every moment where the weight of his world pressed against his ribs and his response was to carry it alone.
But the car was warm and the leather was soft and his shoulder was right there, and the service had been long, and she’d spent the whole thing trying not to cry because Star was crying enough for all of them and someone had to hold it together, and the effort of holding it together had used up whatever reserve of consciousness she had left.
She was out. Gone. The deep, boneless sleep of someone whose body had made the decision without consulting her brain, which was typical, because Mia Robertson’s body had been making decisions without consulting her brain since the night she’d shown up in a billionaire’s penthouse in a white sundress and discovered that two years of pining hadn’t, in fact, prepared her for the reality of Alexei Almazov in a dark coat.
Mia Almazov now. She still forgot sometimes. She’d be signing something or introducing herself and the Robertson would come out first, muscle memory, and then the correction would follow, and each time the correction hit, a warmth bloomed in her chest that she suspected would never get old.
She slept.
Alexei closed his eyes. Not to sleep. To rest. The service had cost him something he couldn’t name, something that lived in the place where grief and relief overlapped, and the weight of it pressed behind his eyes, and he thought he’d just sit here in the dark behind his eyelids for a moment and let the road carry them home.
When he opened his eyes, the light had changed.
He recognized the stretch of motorway. The particular curve where the road hugged the coast before turning inland toward Monaco. An hour had passed. The partition was up.
He glanced down.
Mia had migrated in her sleep. She was lying across the back seat with her head in his lap, one hand curled against his thigh, her hair fanning across his legs in the pattern he’d memorized in a hundred different contexts but never got tired of seeing. Her mouth was slightly open. Her mascara was smudged from the service. One of her shoes had come off.
Beautiful. Desirable. And for the first time in the history of everything between them, no longer forbidden.
She was his. He was hers. There was no guardian clause. No age on a document. No bedroom door between them. No distance he had manufactured to protect himself from the thing he wanted most. She was his wife, asleep in his lap, in a car driving home from his father’s memorial, and the combination of grief and love and the ordinary miracle of her weight against his legs did something to the inside of his chest that rearranged what he thought he knew about peace.
He needed her.
Not later. Not at home. Not in the deliberate, patient manner he’d learned to need things, the Alexei method, filing desire under strategy and scheduling it for an appropriate moment. He needed her now, in this car, with the coast blurring past and an hour of road left and his father’s name still warm under his palm.
He lowered his mouth to hers.
Mia woke to the feel of her husband’s mouth against hers, and she was already in his lap, knees on either side of his thighs, and the transition from sleep to this was so fast her brain couldn’t catch up to what her body already knew.
His hands were on her hips. His mouth was on hers. And the warmth between them had gone from zero to everything in a single pulse.