Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
He was choosing not to say that Ciana Reyes had transferred off his jet eleven weeks ago and he could still smell her in the cabin. Cedar and something clean, something that was just her, embedded in the leather of the seat she never sat in and the galley counter she polished every flight and the air that had held the shape of her presence and refused to let it go.
Eleven weeks. He had bought a three-hundred-million-euro airline to keep her close, and she had walked away with a transfer request and a spine made of steel, and he had approved the transfer because she had asked him to and he had never once in his life been able to deny Ciana Reyes anything except the one thing she actually wanted.
Him.
“She’s still flying,” Andrei said. He didn’t need to clarify who. There was only one she between them, the way there had only been one she in every conversation Andrei had had for the past year. Ciana had colonized his language the way she had colonized everything else—quietly, completely, without permission.
On the porch in Nebraska, Luciano leaned against the rail. The wood was cold under his forearms. “The flight attendant.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
Another pause. Longer. Andrei stared at the blue dot on his screen. In four hours, Ciana would walk through the cabin of a commercial aircraft—not his jet, not the matte-black A350 he had rebuilt for one, but a standard first-class cabin with six passengers instead of him alone—and she would pour champagne with effortless grace and smile that cabin-professional smile and no one on that flight would know that the man who owned the airline was six hundred miles away, watching her route on a screen, unable to stop.
He had tried to stop. He had given the tracking access to his security team and told them to handle it. That had lasted four days. On the fifth day, he had reinstalled the feed on his personal terminal and sat in the dark and watched the blue dot cross the Mediterranean and hated himself with a precision that bordered on craftsmanship.
“She’s... difficult,” Andrei said.
Luciano closed his eyes. Tilted his head back. The Nebraska sky was enormous above him, just starting to lighten at the eastern edge, and a sound came out of him—quiet, rueful. The sound a man makes when he recognizes his own disease in another man’s symptoms.
“They usually are,” Luciano said. “The ones worth it.”
Andrei said nothing. The silence told Luciano everything the words wouldn’t.
Andrei was thinking about a galley in a snowstorm. About the three inches of air between his mouth and hers and the way her name had come out of him like a wound—Ciana—low, involuntary, the first honest thing he had said in months. He was thinking about the tarmac in Istanbul, the rain on her face, her fists in his shirt pulling him down to her, and the sound she had made against his mouth that had dismantled every wall he had spent thirty-five years building. He was thinking about the morning after, when he had called Alexei and said accelerate the search in a voice that didn’t sound like his own, because if he couldn’t find Ciana someone good—someone clean, someone safe, someone who wasn’t the head of security for a Bratva family with blood in the foundations—then the alternative was keeping her, and keeping her meant pulling her into the dark, and he would burn every remaining good thing about himself before he let the dark touch Ciana Reyes.
He had tried the clean option. Paolo Sabbatini—decent, steady, Sicilian, hands without scars. He had watched Ciana sit across from Paolo at a restaurant near the port and smile and talk and try. He had watched from a surveillance feed he shouldn’t have been watching, in a room he shouldn’t have been sitting in, and when Paolo had reached for her hand across the table, Andrei’s own hand had closed into a fist so tight that the knuckle scars went white.
She had ended it with Paolo. Andrei had heard—through channels, because everything about Ciana reached him through channels now, a man reduced to gathering intelligence on the woman he loved because he had forfeited the right to hear it from her directly.
And then Justina. His worst mistake. A kind, oblivious woman he had invited onto the jet for one day—one day—because he needed Ciana to see him with someone else, to believe he had moved on, to let go of whatever she was holding onto so she could walk toward the clean life he had built for her. Justina had touched his hand in the cabin. He had let her. And across the aisle, Ciana’s face had gone still—not hurt, not angry, still—and the stillness was the worst thing he had ever seen on a human face, and he had seen men die.