Page 102 of Ghost Ribbon

My finger moved slowly, connecting the small inked stars with invisible lines, following the pattern up toward the crescent moon at the base of his throat. “I meant it,” I said quietly.

“Hmm?”

My finger paused over one particularly bright star.

“You can’t give me all that money.” I tilted my head up slightly to look at his face.

“I already did,” he said, without opening his eyes. “So don’t argue with me.”

The finality of it was exhausting.

I sighed and let my head fall back against his shoulder. It was impossible to argue with him.

I had learned this quickly, though I kept forgetting and trying anyway. Alexei didn’t engage in arguments the way other people did. He didn’t raise his voice or repeat himself or become frustrated when I pushed back. He simply ended conversations.

The check was still on my desk. One hundred thousand dollars. For Italian lessons that had barely happened. It was absurd.

It was too much. It made something uncomfortable curl in my stomach every time I thought about it.

“Are you going to tell me why you need money?”

My finger stopped moving over his chest.

“I thought you’d know by now,” I said quietly. “It’s easy to find out if you stalk me with your connections.”

His eyes opened. “I don’t like that.”

“What?”

“That.” His arm tightened slightly around me. “The idea that I would look into your life without you telling me. That’s Dimitri’s specialty. He’s a stalker. I’m not.”

I pressed my lips together.

“I prefer if you tell me things yourself, rather than me looking for them.”

I didn’t plan to tell anyone about my problems. But if he was going to give me that much, he deserved to know why. “My mom.” My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. I cleared my throat and tried again. “My mom is sick. She has diabetes,” I continued. “She has for a while. But it’s gotten worse. A lot worse, lately. She needs new treatments. New medications. Things that our insurance doesn’t really cover, or not fully, and my dad is already working so many hours, and I try to help.”

My throat had tightened around the words, and I forced myself to breathe through the sudden pressure in my chest.

I didn’t tell him about my own treatments.

There was a limit to what I could share, a boundary I had built so carefully around my own body’s failures that even acknowledging it in my own mind felt dangerous. The checkups I skipped. The symptoms I hid. The way my vision sometimes blurred when I stood too fast, or how my hands shook when I hadn’t eaten, or the exhaustion that sat in my bones like a permanent resident no matter how much I slept.

Those were mine.

Those were not for sharing.

Alexei was silent for a long moment after I finished.

I could feel him processing, could almost see the information being filed away in whatever vast, precise archive he kept behind those green eyes.

He hummed, low in his throat. “If you need more,” he said, “I can give you more.”

“No. That’s already too much.”

“It’s not.”

“It is.”