Page 61 of Hold On to Me
I brought her coffee in a guest mug because the staff cups are thin and cool in two minutes and I wanted it still hot when she found it. I calculated the walk time from the guest lounge to Deck 7 and added forty-five seconds for the elevator and chose the thickest mug they had because ceramic retains heat longer than porcelain. I did this at five-thirty in the morning while reviewing port manifests and I did it without thinking, same as Iused to strip a weapon without thinking, same as my hands used to do things my brain hadn't authorised because they'd been trained to.
My hands have been trained by Star Thornton. That should alarm me. It does alarm me. I'm alarmed and making coffee.
"It's coffee," I insist.
"It's not coffee. It's you telling every crew member on Deck 7 that the owner of this ship is hand-delivering breakfast to a twenty-year-old therapist." She lets that sit. "You think people don't notice? You think Green doesn't notice?"
Green notices everything. Green has the eyes of a man who's spent thirty years in hospitality and can read the politics of a room from how people arrange themselves at a buffet. If I'm bringing Star coffee in guest mugs, Green knows. If Green knows, the staff knows. If the staff knows, Star becomes a target. Gossip, resentment, the particular cruelty that service hierarchies inflict on anyone who appears to be receiving treatment she didn't earn.
Except she did earn it. She earned it by being the first person to touch my scars without flinching, by being the girl who thinks hands are everything, by sayinggoodnight, Artemin a voice that made me forget what I was for three full seconds.
She earned it. And none of that matters because Mila is right. Again.
"She'll get hurt," Mila concludes. She closes the laptop gently, like closing a book she's finished. "Not by you. By everything around you. The attention, the scrutiny, the gap between her life and yours that no amount of coffee can bridge. You can protecther from a lot of things, Artem, but you can't protect her from being twenty years old and in love with a man who lives in a world she doesn't understand."
I face the laptop. The data. The work that's supposed to matter most.
"I'll handle it," I promise.
Mila nods. She doesn't smile. She reaches across the desk and squeezes my hand, brief, warm, sisterly, the hand of a woman who has been beside me since I was twenty-three and has never once steered me wrong.
"She'll recover," Mila assures me. "She's young. Give it a few weeks and she'll be laughing with Curtis again and you'll be a story she tells her friends."
A story she tells her friends.
Star Thornton, who held four-hundred-year-old lace like it was breathing and saidthings that were made by hand should be held by hands sometimes.Who fell asleep against my arm in the engine room while the ship hummed at sixty-two hertz. Who whispered my name outside her cabin door and the sound of it cracked me open like a fault line.
A story.
I pull my hand back. "Let's focus."
We focus. The manifests blur. The gallery is silent.
THE FRIDAY SESSIONgoes first.
A notification through the staff portal, impersonal, system-generated.A. Almazov, Friday 6:30 AM, Cancelled.No note. No explanation.
No coffee, either.
I take the service stairs Saturday morning instead of the corridor past the spa. Breakfast on the owner's deck, alone, facing the sea, and the mug in my hand is the thin porcelain from the suite's minibar and the coffee is the right temperature because nobody else is waiting for it, and I don't have to calculate walk times or ceramic density or the exact minute she arrives at the spa, and the simplicity of this should feel like relief.
It doesn't feel like anything.
I don't go to the engine room that night. The upper deck instead, the one where the wind is cold enough to make my hands ache. I stand at the railing and think about my father.
Daniil Almazov loved my mother with a ferocity that scared everyone who knew them. Alexei told me once that our father would've dismantled the world brick by brick if she'd asked. He didn't mean it as a compliment. He meant: love made our father reckless. Love made him visible. And visible men get killed.
My father is dead. My mother is dead. The people who destroyed them are still out there, and I'm on this ship to find them, and Star Thornton is a girl who holds lace handkerchiefs and cries about the hands that made them and she has no place in this.
None.
I cancel Tuesday.
SHE COMES TO THE SPAon Tuesday anyway.
I know because Green mentions it, offhand, in the corridor. "Thornton was asking about your schedule, Mr. Almazov. I told her cancellations are processed through the portal."
"Thank you, Green."
