He almost smiled. "Generous interpretation is your specialty."
"It really is." She opened the fridge. Closed it. Opened it again. "There's nothing in here."
"I said we'd order in."
"Right. Bribe dinner." She hoisted herself onto the counter, the same counter, always the same counter, and her legs swung and her bare feet dangled and the casualness of it, the absolute comfort of a woman sitting on a surface that held the memory of everything they'd done, was its own kind of intimacy.
"How was your day?" she asked.
"Productive."
"That's a vault answer. Give me a real one."
"I reviewed projections. Took three calls. Ate lunch at my desk."
"What did you eat?"
"I don't remember."
"Alexei Almazov doesn't remember what he ate. That's either a lie or a crisis. Which is it?"
"A sandwich."
"See? Was that so hard?" She swung her legs. "Morgan asked about you today."
The name struck his chest like a blade.
He didn't move. His face gave nothing away, because his face had been trained for twenty-two years to give nothing away, and the training held even when the blade was inside him.
"Did he?"
"Mm. He was at his session, and I was filing his notes, and he said the strangest thing." She pulled the pen from behind her ear, twirled it between her fingers the way she did when she was remembering. "He said he'd heard I'd just married the man who runs Ace Royale, and he was happy for me, and then he said—" She paused. Smiled at the memory. "He said, 'I understand what it's like to lose a father and find someone who fills the space. You and I have that in common, Mia.'"
The kitchen went cold.
Not the temperature. The air was the same, and the evening light was the same, and Mia was still on the counter with her swinging legs and her pen and her open face. But Alexei's blood had stopped moving.
I understand what it's like to lose a father.
Mia's parents were public enough. Anyone who worked with her, talked to her, earned her trust for thirty seconds would hear about Joshua and Carol Robertson. She gave that information freely, because that was who she was.
But "find someone who fills the space" wasn't about Mia's loss. It was about his. It was about a boy whose father died in a prison when he was fourteen. And that wasn't information you picked up in a rehabilitation clinic from a chatty intake coordinator. That was information you found because you went searching.
You and I have that in common.
Morgan had lost a father. Or claimed to. And was drawing a line between his loss and Mia's. Creating a bond. Building a bridge made of shared grief, which was the oldest manipulation in the world, and Mia had walked across it smiling because Mia walked across every bridge smiling because she didn't know that some bridges were traps.
"Alexei?"
Her voice. Uncertain now. The swinging legs had gone still. The pen had stopped twirling. She was reading him, the way she always read him, and whatever she was seeing on his face was something she'd never seen before.
"What just happened?" she asked. "Your face just—"
"Nothing."
The word came out controlled. The voice of the man who ran Ace Royale, not the man who held her in the kitchen at six AM. And she heard the difference. He could see it in the way her body went still on the counter, in the way her eyes narrowed, in the way her hands gripped the marble edge.
"That's not nothing. You went somewhere just now and I don't know where."
