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 waswatching 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 theexpression 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.
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, wassomething 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.
