Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
“And when he had nothing left,” Andrei said, his voice dropping to something barely audible, “a man offered him a deal. A delivery. One package. Enough money to start over.”
He stopped. The silence in the galley was heavy.
“The package was a trap. Drugs. A weapon linked to a killing. My father walked into a setup designed to destroy him, and it worked. He was convicted. And in prison—” Another pause. Longer. His scarred hand turned on his knee, palm up, then down again. “He was killed. Made to look like something else. We were teenagers. Alexei was twenty. I was nineteen. We had nothing.”
“Who set him up?”
“Someone powerful. Someone who’s still powerful, but that’s a story for another time.” His jaw tightened. “The life we have now...our father never wanted this for us. He wanted us to have clean lives. Normal lives. When he realised, in that prison, that we’d inherit his world instead, that the system that destroyed him would shape his sons, he made the promise about you. The last good thing he could do. As though finding Nico’s daughter someone good could balance the ledger. As though one act of ordinary goodness could offset everything else.”
Ciana listened. She listened the way she had learned to listen to her own father’s stories when she was small, not for the facts, which were always unreliable, but for the shape of what was underneath. The shape underneath Andrei’s story was grief. Old grief, compressed, load-bearing. He had built a life on top of it the way cities are built on top of ruins: functional, solid, with something ancient and unresolved in the foundations.
“Four brothers,” she said.
“Alexei is the eldest. Thirty-seven. He runs everything. The family, the business, the pieces of us that don’t fit into polite conversation. He’s cold. People think that means he doesn’t care. They’re wrong. He cares so much he had to freeze it or it’d have burned him alive.”
“Anton.”
“My twin.” Something shifted in his face, not a smile, but the memory of one. The faintest warming. “Charming. Sees everything. The kind of man who can walk into a room full of strangers and leave with every one of them convinced he’s their closest friend. He manages the high-roller relations at Ace Royale. He’s very good at making people feel seen.”
“And Artem?”
“The youngest. Thirty-four. He’s—” A pause. Something complicated passed behind his eyes. “He’s what people think I am. Dangerous. But there’s something else underneath. I’ve seen it. He doesn’t let many people see it.”
“And you?”
“I’m the one who keeps them safe.” He said it simply. Without pride, without self-pity. A job description. “Head of security. It’s a polite way of saying I’m the brother people cross the street to avoid.”
“You’re also the one who bought an airline because his father asked him to look after a girl he’d never met.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not what a dangerous man does, Andrei. That’s what a man who can’t stop keeping promises does.”
He didn’t respond. But his hands, flat on the table, pressed harder against the wood.
“My father was charming,” she said. “The kind of charming that makes you forgive things you shouldn’t.”
She told him. Not everything, not the worst nights, not the landlords, not the particular humiliation of being fourteen and answering the door to a man who said your father owed him money and your father was three countries away and you didn’t know when he was coming back. But enough. She told him about the disappearances: weeks, sometimes months, gone without warning and returning with gifts and no explanation. She told him about the debts she had inherited at sixteen, when Nico Reyes had died in a hospital in Marseille with nothing in his pockets but a photograph of a woman Ciana had never been able to identify and a note written in handwriting that wasn’t his.
She stopped. That note was something she had never told anyone. She didn’t tell Andrei, either, not yet, but she felt the edge of it in the room, the awareness that there were pieces of her father’s story she didn’t have yet, and pieces of Andrei’s she hadn’t been given, and the space between them was the shape of two dead men who had apparently been friends.
“I put myself through training at twenty,” she said. “The airline was the first stable thing I ever had. Routines. A schedule. A flat I paid for myself. I built all of it from nothing, and I built it to be mine, and then you—”
She stopped again. Not because she was angry, though she was, but because the thing pressing against the back of her throat wasn’t anger. It was recognition. Two people shaped by the men who raised them, surviving in opposite ways. He had built walls. She had built routes. Both of them using structure to keep the chaos out, and both of them sitting in a grounded jet in a Swiss snowstorm because neither strategy had worked.