The cigarette burns to the filter. She grinds it out on the railing and drops it into the sea.
In her cabin, the laptop is waiting. The satellite window opens in forty minutes.
There are things to report.
Artem
SHE CATCHES ME OFFguard.
One moment she's standing in the middle of Suite 12, still in her uniform, hair damp from the spa, that particular fire in her eyes. The next her hands are on my face and she's kissing me.
There's no warning. No build. She reaches up, takes my jaw in both hands the way I took hers in the corridor three days ago, and presses her mouth to mine, and the kiss is the most contradictory thing I have ever felt. Passionate and innocent at the same time. Certain and trembling. A girl who has decided exactly what she wants and has very little idea how to ask for it, and so she asks the only way she knows, with both hands and her whole heart and no plan beyond this.
Something in me gives. The locked thing. The glass I've held everything behind for thirty-four years, already cracked in that corridor when she called me a gargoyle, finally goes.
I take over.
I turn the kiss, slow her down, gather her in against me with one arm while my other hand cradles the back of her head, and I feel the small startled sound she makes against my mouth when she realises the lead has changed hands. She came in here brave. I let her be brave for exactly as long as it takes me to remember that I've spent two weeks not touching her, and that I'm done with restraint.
The desk lamp throws gold across the room. Her hands fist in my shirt. And whatever I've been holding myself back from since the first time her hands found my scars and didn't flinch, I stop holding it back now.
After, she's tucked against my chest in the gold lamplight, her cheek over the scar she found first, the long one, and I can feel her breath going slow and even against my skin. My hand is in her hair. The ship hums at sixty-two hertz. Neither of us has said anything in a while and the silence is the good kind, the kind her hands make in a treatment room, the kind I haven't had in thirty-four years.
"Your hands," I tell her, when I can, "are not the only valuable thing about you."
She turns her face into my chest and I feel her smile against my skin, and the smile is so warm it makes my eyes burn.
I TELL HER EVERYTHING.
We're on the balcony. Two AM. She's wearing my shirt because hers is somewhere on the sitting room floor and the night air is warm for the Mediterranean but not warm enough for bare skin and I gave her the shirt before I gave her the information, which is the correct order of operations: cover the girl, then confess the crimes.
She buttoned it wrong. The same way she buttoned her uniform wrong when I walked her home from the spa. I'm not going to correct it. I'm never going to correct it. She can button every shirt she owns in the wrong order for the rest of her life and it will undo me every single time.
"Ace Royale," I begin. "The casino. It's the front."
She's sitting in the deck chair with her knees pulled up, my shirt falling past her thighs, her bare feet on the cushion. She's listening like she listens during sessions, with her whole body, that complete attention that made me yield to her in the first session and hasn't stopped making me yield since.
"The casino generates enough revenue to fund the real operation. Shipping routes, port contacts, intelligence networks. We track the money that flowed out of my father's case. Bribes, payoffs, the men who turned the other way while a casino owner in Saint Petersburg fed my father to the system."
"The witness," she says. Not a question. She's been assembling this since the corridor. Filing the pieces in that planner of hers, fitting them together like her hands find what's hidden in a body.
"Someone who can identify the man who gave the order. We've been tracking them for three years. Mila's primary assignment."
Star doesn't flinch at Mila's name. Two weeks ago she would have. The name would have carried its own weather. Now she just nods and waits, and the fact that she can hear that name without reacting tells me more about the steel in this girl than any word she's ever spoken.
"Four brothers," I continue. "Alexei runs the operation. Strategy, finance, the decisions nobody wants to make. Andrei handles security. Physical protection, threat assessment, the work that requires someone who doesn't flinch at violence." I pause because the next part is mine and it tastes different when I'm saying it to her. "I handle enforcement. The people who owe the casino money, the debtors, the ones who disappear."
"The ones you send to rehab."
I go still. "How do you know that?"
"You told me your father was a gambler who lost everything. You told me a casino owner destroyed him. And you told me you make people disappear." She's studying me with those eyes, clear, unblinking, reading me like she reads a body on her table, and I can see her assembling the final pieces, turning them over, checking the fit. "You're not killing them. You're saving them. You're doing for strangers what nobody did for your father."
I have been assessed by intelligence officers. By military psychologists. By Alexei himself, who can dismantle a man's motives in three questions. None of them saw it that fast. None of them delivered it with that much certainty, like it were obvious, like the math were simple and she'd finished it before I'd set up the equation.
I'm sitting across from her with my chest cracked open and she's in my shirt with her knees pulled up and she just named the thing I have never named to anyone, the real reason, the actual reason I do what I do, and she spoke it like she was reading it off my ribs.
"And Anton?" she asks.
