He’s not reading.
His screen is on the table, face down. His body is angled toward me. Not fully, not obviously, but enough that I can feel the shift in his attention like a change in air pressure.
And he’s looking at me.
Not a glance this time. Not a stolen moment that could be explained away as coincidence. He is watching me with those pale, unreadable eyes, and there is nothing casual about it.
My breath catches.
“Your Highness?”
It comes out barely above a whisper. I don’t mean for it to. I mean for it to be brisk and slightly confused, the appropriate response of an employee who has noticed her employer looking at her. But my voice apparently has other plans.
He doesn’t answer. Not with words.
Instead, he leans forward.
Just slightly. Just enough that the distance shrinks from professional to something else. It makes my blood rush and my thoughts scatter and every sensible instinct I have scream at me to lean back, look away, break whatever is happening right now before it becomes something I can’t undo.
But I don’t lean back.
I don’t look away.
Because his eyes are on mine, and they’re not unreadable anymore. For the first time, I can see what’s in them, vast and deep and barely contained, like looking down into dark water and realizing it goes much, much further than you thought.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
Just for a second.
And my heart stops. Actually stops. I feel it stall in my chest like an engine cutting out, and the world narrows to the space between us, which is shrinking, which is almost nothing now, which is—
“Your Highness, this is Captain Fishburne. We’re beginning our final descent into Miami. Please ensure your seatbelts are fastened. We’ll be on the ground in approximately twelve minutes.”
The intercom crackles and goes silent.
Alexei leans back.
The distance returns. The air thins. The moment, whatever it was, whatever it almost was, dissolves like fog in morning light.
He picks up his screen. His expression is already resettled into that impenetrable calm, as if nothing happened, as if the last thirty seconds were a figment of my imagination.
And maybe they were.
Maybe I imagined the whole thing. The leaning, the look, the way his gaze dropped to my mouth like it was pulled there by something he couldn’t control. Maybe my broken heart isplaying tricks on me, conjuring connection where none exists, because feelinganything,even terror and impossibility, is better than feeling nothing at all.
I fasten my seatbelt with fingers that are categorically not shaking.
I don’t look at him.
I look out the window, where Miami is spreading beneath us in a glittering sprawl of coastline and concrete and sunlight, and I tell myself very firmly that I imagined it.
All of it.
I imagined it, and I don’t want it to be real.
I don’t.
Because I know what happens when you want something to be real. I know the exact shape of that hope, and I know the exact sound it makes when it breaks.
