Page 67 of Hold On to Me
And she ate standing up. And she folded her towels. And she stopped humming.
I'm moving before the thought finishes forming. Down the walkway, down the service stairs, through the corridor toward the staff mess. My footsteps are fast. I don't slow them. I don't check whether anyone's in the corridor. I don't run the calculation because the calculation is a lie, the calculation was always a lie, and the only true thing left is a girl with flat shoes and rolled trousers walking toward the spa with her chin up and her hands at her sides and I need to reach her before she gets there.
The corridor. Staff deck. She's thirty feet ahead of me, walking toward the spa, her flat shoes silent on the thin carpet, her hair pulled back, her uniform buttoned correctly because she's Star Thornton and she buttons her uniform correctly even when the man who kissed her in a gallery tells her she's reassigned. She buttons her uniform and she folds her towels and she eats standing up and she doesn't cry and she doesn't hum and she does her job and she is, without question, the most valuable thing on this ship.
I stop. She hasn't heard me. She's still walking. Twenty-five feet. Twenty.
"Star."
She stops. She doesn't turn around. Her shoulders are straight and her hands are at her sides and she's standing in the corridor like she stood outside my door two weeks ago. Still. Absorbing.
Fifteen feet between us. Thin carpet. Amber light. The hum of the ship under everything.
I take a step toward her.
Artem
SHE DOESN'T TURN AROUND.
Fifteen feet of corridor between us. Thin carpet, amber light, the hum of the engines through the deck plates. She's facing away from me, hair pulled back, uniform buttoned to the throat, and her shoulders are pulled in. Gone is the professional posture she wears into treatment rooms. Pulled in, curled forward, like a girl trying to take up less space in a corridor that suddenly has someone in it she wasn't expecting.
I did that. I made a girl who presses her palms to glass and weeps over handkerchiefs want to make herself smaller.
"Star."
Her shoulders flinch. A tiny contraction, there and gone. She doesn't turn.
"I have a session in twenty minutes." Her voice is small. Not cold, not angry. Small. The voice of a person who's been practising what she'd say if this moment ever came and now that it's here the script is gone and all that's left is this thin, careful sentence about a session. "I need to get to the spa."
"Mila lied to me."
Her hand, which was reaching for the wall like she reaches for glass cases when she needs something solid, stops mid-air.
Silence. Three seconds. Five.
"About what?" Almost inaudible. Still facing away.
"About you. About what you'd cost me. About what I'd do to you." My voice holds. My hands do not. I can feel them shaking at my sides, a fine tremor running through the fingers, the same fingers she traced through oil every Thursday, and I clench them into fists because she can't see that. Not yet. "Turn around. I need to say this to your face."
She turns.
Her face. Two weeks of damage, and every mark is mine. The circles under her eyes are purple, not shadow, actual purple. Her cheeks are thinner. And her mouth is doing something that puts a crack down the centre of my chest: it's trembling. This tiny quiver at the corners that she's fighting with everything she has, biting down on her lower lip to stop it, and her eyes are full, not spilling, full, held there by sheer willpower and rapid blinking and the absolute bone-deep refusal to cry in front of me.
"You have five minutes," she whispers, and her chin wobbles on the last word.
I take a step. My jaw locks. I have to physically unclench it to speak.
"Mila has worked with me for eleven years. She's not an antique consultant. She's Bratva intelligence. I hired her to track a witness connected to the man who had my father killed."
Star's mouth opens. Closes. Her eyes, which were giving me nothing, which were holding themselves blank and empty behind the trembling, go wide.
"My father was framed. Casino owner in Saint Petersburg. Rigged package, drugs and a weapon. He went to prison." Mythroat constricts. I push through it, because this is what she deserves, not the door, not the silence, this. "He died there."
Her hand goes to her mouth. Not like at the door two weeks ago, when she was bracing. This is different. This is the gesture of a girl who just heard something that hurt her FOR me, and oh God, her eyes, they've gone soft, even now, even after everything, she's looking at me with pain that isn't hers and it's the thing that finally cracks the fist I've been holding at my side, my fingers opening against my will because her face is doing the thing it always does, the thing she can't help, the thing that undid me in the first place: she's feeling something and her whole body is showing it and she doesn't know how to hide.
"Artem," she breathes. Not Mr. Almazov. My name. And her voice breaks on it and something inside me breaks with it.
"My brothers and I built everything to find the man who did it. The ship. The casino. The network." Another step. "Mila told me you'd get hurt. She told me you were too young. Too soft. That the gap between us would crush you. She told me I'd destroy you." My voice drops. I can hear it going, the steadiness draining out of it like water through a crack, and I can't stop it. "She framed it as worry. She claimed she was protecting you."
