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)
She had filed the transfer that night. And he had approved it. And the jet had been empty for eleven weeks and the champagne flutes gathered dust and the exclusion zone—the two centimetres of air between their skin that he had maintained since the first night in 1A—had expanded to six hundred miles, and it still wasn’t enough distance to stop him feeling her.
“You’ll figure it out,” Luciano said. “Or she’ll figure it out for you. That’s how it works. You build your walls, and she walks through them, and you stand there wondering how it happened and the answer is that it was always going to happen. You were just the last one to know.”
“That sounds like experience.”
“It sounds like a man who spent two years watching a girl draw circles in the third row of his lecture hall and told himself he was maintaining professional distance.” Luciano opened his eyes. The farmhouse light was still on. “I was an idiot. Don’t be an idiot.”
A sound on the other end. Not a laugh—Andrei Almazov didn’t laugh the way other men laughed. A vibration. An acknowledgment. The closest thing to warmth that a voice like his allowed.
In his office, Andrei turned from the window. The flight tracker pulsed on his desk—the blue dot motionless for now, Ciana still on the ground in Nice, still in the flat she had moved back to after leaving the apartment in Cimiez. The smaller flat. The one without the security panel. The one that didn’t have parquet floors or a bedroom window that let in golden evening light or a photograph of her mother positioned at the exact angle she kept it, because she had left the photograph behind when she left him, and he had picked it up and held it and put it back exactly where it was and hadn’t moved it since. He couldn’t. Moving it would mean admitting she wasn’t coming back.
“I have something for you,” Andrei said.
Luciano’s hand tightened on the porch rail. There were very few things Andrei Almazov would phrase that way. Very few debts between them that remained open. Andrei had built the invisible perimeter around one woman’s life for Luciano—three shell companies, one airline, the kind of financial engineering that made a three-hundred-million-euro acquisition look like routine corporate restructuring. In return, Luciano had asked him for one thing.
“The girl,” Andrei said.
Luciano went still. Not his heart—his heart continued, because it had no choice—but the rest of him. The part that had been keeping watch on a man for twenty-four years from a distance that was never far enough and never close enough. Watching him grow. Watching him build something from nothing. Watching him become someone Luciano could never be—someone clean, someone with a name that didn’t carry the weight of a stone room.
Watching him fall for a girl. Watching him ruin it. Watching him throw her out and then spend weeks tearing his own life apart looking for her, the way a man throws away the one thing he needs and then can’t understand why the house is empty.
Luciano knew the pattern. He had invented the pattern.
“Where?”
Andrei told him. Luciano filed the information in the place where he kept things that mattered—alongside lecture notes and Elsa’s coffee order and the sound she made when she said his name and the exact angle of Martha Lively’s photograph on her nightstand.
“I’ll make sure it reaches him,” Luciano said. “Without a source.”
“Of course.”
“And the rest of it—the acquisition, the restructuring—that stays buried.”
“It was never unburied.”
“Good.”
A pause. The last one. The kind that came at the end of a conversation between two men who had said everything they needed to say and didn’t waste words on the parts that lived in the silence.
“Congratulations,” Andrei said. “On the wedding.”
“Thank you.”
“She’s good for you.” A beat. “The ones from simple places usually are. They don’t carry what we carry. They carry something else. Something lighter. And they teach you how to set yours down.”
In Monaco, Andrei set the phone down. The flight tracker pulsed. The blue dot was still motionless—Ciana, on the ground, four hours from departure, alive and flying and out of his reach and not out of his reach at all, because Andrei Almazov’s reach was the problem, had always been the problem, a man with scarred hands and a three-hundred-million-euro cage who couldn’t stop reaching for a woman he had promised to give away.
He turned back to the window. The Mediterranean had gone from silver to pale gold. It was going to be a beautiful day in Monaco. He wouldn’t notice.
LUCIANO STOOD ON THE porch. The phone was warm in his hand. The sky was lighter now—pale blue at the edges, the colour of Elsa’s dress, the colour of the flowers her mother had planted along the fence that he could see from here. Nebraska was waking up around him. Somewhere in the distance, a tractor engine started. Somewhere closer, a bird he couldn’t name said something to another bird he couldn’t name, and the exchange sounded urgent and domestic and impossibly normal.