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)
But on Tuesdays, Mia dragged him to lunch. On Thursdays, Anton brought Aria to the penthouse and the baby pulled books off shelves and Alexei rebuilt the shelves without complaint. On Sundays, Andrei came for dinner and didn’t speak and the silence was the warmest sound in the apartment.
The emptiness had a shape now. The shape was a girl in a kitchen murdering a French press. The shape was a dog on a floor. The shape was brothers who called and wives who stayed and a toddler who ate champagne corks and a father whose name was carved into marble on a hill above the city, home at last.
Daniil would have liked this. Not the empire. Not the casino. This. The noise. The chaos. The Tuesday lunches and the Sunday dinners and the girl who talked too fast and the brothers who showed up. He would have sat in this penthouse and held his granddaughter and offered nothing but his presence, because Daniil Almazov had been a man of few words, and his sons had inherited the economy, and the silence between them would have been the good kind.
Live good lives. That was all he’d ever wanted for them.
“Alexei.”
Her voice from the kitchen. The same voice that had called him from a car in Saint Petersburg and cracked the nothing open. The same voice that had promised “I’m not going anywhere” and meant it. The same voice that had told him she loved him on the floor of a dark cabin while he was still bleeding, because Mia spoke first, always first, before the moment was ready, because she was brave and bravery meant doing the terrifying thing with your whole chest.
“Your coffee is ready and it’s perfect and if you say it’s warm milk I will pour it on your head.”
His mouth moved. Not the twitch. The thing past the twitch. The thing his brothers had witnessed at his wedding and that he no longer killed, because there was no one left to hide it from.
He turned from the balcony. The penthouse stretched in front of him. The open door to the kitchen. Mia at the counter, barefoot, holding a mug, her hair still wrecked from the car, the mark on her neck visible above her collar.
Every door had been a barrier. His bedroom door, closed against her that first night. The study door in the cabin. The darkness that had swallowed them both. Every threshold a test, every frame a wall.
This one was open.
He walked through it.
“Home.”
The End