He made it to the car before his hands stopped shaking.
The underground garage was cold and grey and smelled like concrete and exhaust, and the leather of the steering wheel was smooth under his palms, and he gripped it with both hands and didn't start the engine. His lungs were still wrong. Uneven. Refusing to obey, which was a problem, because Alexei Almazov's body had always obeyed him. It was the one machine in his empire that never malfunctioned.
Until her.
He had touched her. He had put his hands on her in his kitchen at seven in the morning with her dog sleeping three feet away and the Monaco sun pouring through the windows. He had touched her and she had come apart in his arms and the sound of his name in her mouth was never going to leave him.
A mistake.
He had stood there with the taste of her skin on his lips and the scent of her hair in his lungs and called it a mistake.
It wasn't a mistake. That was the problem. A mistake was something you did by accident, something born of carelessness, and nothing about the last ten minutes had been careless. He had felt her grab his wrist and his body had made the decision his mind had been refusing for two years, and he had turnedaround and touched her with a deliberateness that made the word mistake a lie.
He'd known exactly what he was doing. Every second of it.
His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
Joshua Robertson had been forty-one when he died. Brain tumour. Three months from diagnosis to funeral. Mia was sixteen and had no one left, and Joshua had gripped Alexei's hand and asked him to take care of his daughter, and Alexei had given his word. Not because of obligation. Because Joshua and Carol Robertson had done something for his father that no one else in the world had been willing to do, and their daughter deserved better than a system.
She deserved better than this, too.
A thirty-seven-year-old man with blood on his ledger and a dead rival in Saint Petersburg and an empire built on decisions that kept him awake at 3 AM. She deserved someone who hadn't spent twenty-two years turning himself into something cold.
She deserved someone whose hands didn't know the things his knew.
He started the engine.
The problem, the real problem, the one he'd been driving away from for two years, was that none of that mattered to her. She didn't care about the age or the blood or the empire. She cared about him. The actual him, the one who poured her orange juice before she asked and remembered her allergies and listened to her voicemails on the plane where no one could see his face.
She saw him. She'd always seen him.
And this morning, in his kitchen, with her back against the counter and her fingers in his shirt, she'd been right about every word.
His phone buzzed.
He shouldn't check it. He was driving. He was on the ramp between the garage and the motorway, and the Monaco traffic required attention, and he was a man who didn't check his phone while driving because discipline was the architecture of his entire life.
He checked it.
One message. From Mia.
Your hands were shaking. That wasn't a mistake and you know it.
His foot hit the brake. The car stopped in the middle of the ramp. A horn blared behind him. He didn't hear it.
He read it twice. Three times. The words were simple and merciless, because Mia Robertson had never learned to pull her punches, and the worst part, the part that made his chest crack open right there in a concrete ramp with a Fiat screaming past him, was that she was right.
His hands had been shaking. It wasn't a mistake. He knew it.
He sat there for ten seconds. Fifteen. He was typing before he could stop himself.
I know.
He hit Send. Pulled the car into gear. Drove.
Two words. The most dangerous two words he'd ever typed, because I know wasn't a denial. It wasn't a wall. It was a door left open, and Mia Robertson was a girl who walked through every door he failed to lock.
He tightened his grip on the wheel and drove to Ace Royale and didn't let himself think about what he'd just done.
