Not the encrypted line. The personal one. The number that only four people in the world had, and three of them had just texted.
Mia.
His eyes opened. His jaw tightened. And something in his chest did a thing he refused to name, because naming it would mean admitting that an eighteen-year-old girl he hadn’t seen in two years could do more damage to his composure in a single phone call than a dead body could.
He could let it ring. She’d leave a voicemail. She always did. Long and rambling and full of stories about classes and friends and some stray cat she’d found, and he would listen to it later on the plane, alone, like he always did, where no one could see his face while she talked.
But ignoring her call would make him a coward, and whatever else Alexei Almazov was, he wasn’t that.
He answered. “Speak.”
“There you go again, issuing orders before saying hello.”
Her voice hit him the way it always did. Right in the chest. He set his jaw harder.
“Hello, Mia. Now speak.”
She laughed, and the sound filled the car, and the nothing in his chest cracked just a little. Just enough to let the warmth in. Just enough to piss him off.
“So, please don’t be mad.”
Those five words had never once in the history of their relationship preceded anything that didn’t make him exactly that. “What did you do this time?”
“I’ve already informed Whitmore—”
Her college. The one he had personally selected. The one with the best security infrastructure of any university in Europe, which he had verified himself before signing the tuition check.
“—that I’m taking a year off, and they’ve already given my slot to someone else.”
Alexei took a breath. Then another one.
“There’s more,” she added cheerfully.
There was always more with Mia.
“I’m already here.”
“Here,” he repeated.
“In Monaco.”
He didn’t speak.
“As in your home.” He could hear her smiling. He could always hear her smiling, and it drove him out of his mind that he could. “Surprise?”
The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. Whatever he saw in his employer’s face made him look away immediately.
“Mia.”
“Before you say anything—”
“Mia.”
“—I already have a plan, okay? You know the program at Ace Royale? The one Artem told me about, where you help people with gambling problems? I want to work there. Gap year. I’ve thought about this, Alexei, I’ve really, really thought about it, and I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say it isn’t safe, or it isn’t appropriate, or I need to be in school, and I get it, I do, but I’m eighteen, and I’ve already given up my slot, so you can’t send me back even if you wanted to, which means—”
“Breathe.”
She stopped. And in the silence that followed, the bravado fell away, and what was left was the voice he heard in his head at 3 AM when he couldn’t sleep. The voice of the girl who had shown up in his office at sixteen with a suitcase and a bruised chin because she’d tripped getting out of the taxi, and eyes so bright with unshed tears that he’d had to leave the room for a full minute before he trusted himself to speak.
