Her eyes flicker to me, but she still doesn’t say anything.

“And then I had kept it from you too long to go back,” I continue. “I probably have no right to ask, but I’ll ask anyway: I need you to trust me now.”

Her eyes glint with anger before she wipes them clean. “Trust goes both ways, Kolya,” she fires back. “Why am I expected to trust you, but not the other way around?”

“You want trust?” I ask. “Fine.” I reach into my trouser pocket and pull out the little black phone that I’d found in the shithole I saved her from. “Here.”

She looks confused as she hesitantly takes the phone from my hand and pushes it into the pocket of her jeans.

“This stand-off won’t last forever, June,” I tell her. “Eventually, this will all be over.”

“Over,” she repeats under her breath. “But what will that mean? What will that look like?”

Fuck, how I wish I had an answer for her.

“I don’t know,” is all I can say. “I don’t know.”

She sighs. “Don’t you ever want to… to be someone else, Kolya?” she asks unexpectedly. “Go somewhere different? Be far away from all the bullshit? All the politics, the mind games, the violence?”

I shake my head, which is the honest truth. “I never had a choice,” I tell her. “Don Uvarov was all I was ever going to be.”

She scoffs bitterly. “‘Heavy lies the crown’ or whatever, right?”

“Some days,” I concede. “That’s when I drink.”

Her face twists into something inscrutable. Part sympathy, part sadness. “Don’t drink too much. No problem can be solved at the bottom of a bottle. I learned that the hard way.” She fidgets with her hands in front of her waist before she lets them fall and turns toward the door. “I feel a little tired. I’d better go lie down.”

Something in her slow shuffle toward the exit gives me pause, though.

Does she want me to stop her? For a moment, I’m not so sure. Her eyes flicker over me, and then they land on the piano. She slides her fingertips over the gleaming black surface and then pulls back.

“Sometimes, when he played, he seemed like a different person,” she whispers. “Same as you.”

“Is that what you’re hoping for?” I ask. “A different person?”

“I don’t know what I’m hoping for,” she replies softly.

Then she leaves me to the empty room and the old piano. I’ve kept it clean and tuned all these years, because as long as my mother’s pianos were looked after, then a part of her still lived on.

It’s a sentimental thought. Overly sentimental. And the fact that I’m thinking it now means only one thing.

I’m falling too hard for June.

As I walk out of the sitting room, I almost run headlong into Knox. “Sorry, boss,” he says quickly. “Just came to give you an update on the team that’s been tracking your brother.”