But they still hit me strangely hard.
Maybe because I had not thought beyond the plane. Beyond his hand in mine. Beyond this strange little bubble where, despite everything, we had somehow become anus.
The cars, the men, the hospital waiting somewhere in the city for him. It all reminds me very quickly that his world did not pause just because he took me to the beach.
“Can I come?” I ask.
The words leave my mouth before I can second-guess them.
His gaze searches my face. For uncertainty, maybe. Hesitation. Some sign that I’m saying it out of obligation rather than want.
I let him look.
Finally, he nods once. “Yes.”
The answer settles something in me I hadn’t realized was braced for rejection.
He opens the rear door of the first car himself this time. I slide in, and a second later he’s beside me, one hand already on his phone again, giving clipped instructions as the convoy pulls away from the terminal.
The city rolls toward us in stages. Highway lights. Gray dawn.
Hospitals always seem to exist in a different color than the rest of the world, and this one is no different when we pull up. Glass and steel and white fluorescent light waiting behind the entrance doors like a warning.
The moment the car stops, everything in Aleksei changes again. He is not the man from the villa now. Not the man from theplane. Not the man who just paid me enough money to buy a new life.
He is someone’s son. And he is afraid.
Not visibly, not in a way most people would catch. But I can feel it in the way he gets out too fast, the way his jaw is set too hard, the way his hand closes around the car door once before he lets it go.
Inside, the hospital smells like antiseptic and coffee and bad news.
A woman at the front desk looks up and recognizes him instantly. Not from celebrity. From expectation.
“Mr. Vasiliev,” she says, standing. “They’re waiting upstairs.”
He nods. “Condition?”
“She’s stable. The doctor will speak with you.”
Stable. The word helps. A little.
He turns to me then, like he’s only just remembered I’m here. “You don’t have to do this.”
I look at him—at the way he’s trying to dismiss his own need for support before it has a chance to exist.
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
For one second, the mask slips.
He looks tired enough to break my heart. Then he nods once and leads me toward the elevator.
We ride up in silence.
When the doors open onto the private floor, I see them immediately. More men. Security. A nurse at the station pretending not to stare. A doctor in scrubs speaking in low tones to one of Aleksei’s people. This whole wing feels like it has already rearranged itself around his family.
Aleksei speaks briefly to the doctor, too low for me to hear, and I stay back where I am, near the windows, feeling like I’ve stepped into a place too intimate and too dangerous all at once.
Then he turns and motions me forward. His mother’s room is at the end of the hall.
