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)
Istanbul. The routing had been amended. Whatever business Andrei had in Monaco had been deferred, and the jet was now headed east instead of south. He hadn’t explained why. She hadn’t asked. They had exchanged exactly seven words since the galley, “Tea?” and “Please” and “Milk?” and “No” and “Thank you,” and each word had been a careful brick in a wall they were both pretending to rebuild because the alternative was admitting that it was already down.
They landed in the dark. Istanbul at night was a scatter of gold light across black water, the minarets lit against the sky like punctuation marks in a sentence she couldn’t read. A car took her to a hotel near the Bosphorus, not extravagant, but good. A room on the third floor with a balcony she didn’t step onto and a bed she sat on without undressing and a silence that was nothing like the silence on the jet.
She called Raven.
“We’re in Istanbul.”
“Of course you are. Normal people go to Geneva and come home. You go to Geneva and end up in a different continent. How was the snowstorm?”
“We talked.”
A pause. “You talked.”
“He told me about his family. I told him about mine.”
“Ciana Reyes. The woman who once made me play twenty questions for three months before she’d tell me her middle name. You told a Bratva prince about your father?”
“Yes.”
“And was there, anything else?”
Ciana thought about the galley. The breath. The name. The four seconds she had stopped counting. “No,” she said. “Nothing happened.”
“Liar. But I’ll let you’ve this one. Text me tomorrow.”
“Goodnight, Raven.”
“Goodnight, you impossible woman. And Ci?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever didn’t happen, I hope it happens again soon.”
She hung up. Sat on the edge of the bed. The Bosphorus was a dark ribbon beyond her window, and the lights of the Asian shore flickered like something you could reach for but never touch.
A sound at the door. Not a knock, quieter. The soft friction of paper against carpet.
She crossed the room. Looked down. A note had been slipped under her door, a single sheet of hotel stationery, folded once, written in a hand that was nothing like Andrei’s. His writing was precise, controlled, small. This was loose, confident, the kind of handwriting that belonged to someone who talked with his hands and laughed easily and had never in his life written anything without wanting it to be read.
She unfolded it.
I’ve known my brother for thirty-five years. I’ve never seen him say someone’s name the way he says yours. He’s wrong about what he thinks he’s doing. Don’t let him be.
It was unsigned. It didn’t need to be. She knew, from the handwriting, from the warmth in it, from the fact that it existed at all, that it was from the twin. The charming one. The one who saw everything.
Anton.
She read it again. Then a third time. Then she held it against her chest and stared at the ceiling and felt something crack, not in the wall she had built around herself, but in the story she had been telling herself about what was happening. The story in which she was a woman being moved around a board by a man who didn’t know how to want what he wanted. That story was still true. But Anton’s note added a line to it she hadn’t considered.
Don’t let him be.
She had spent her entire life letting people be. Letting her father drift into his absences without protest. Letting friends fall away when the effort of holding on became heavier than the loneliness of letting go. She had built a life around the principle of non-interference, if you don’t hold on, it doesn’t hurt when they leave, and it had worked, in the way that tourniquets work: by cutting off circulation to save the limb.
Now a stranger, Andrei’s twin, a man she had never met, was telling her that the man she wanted was making a mistake, and she could stop it. Not by being careful. Not by counting and waiting and holding still. By doing something. By refusing to let him be.
She set the note on the bedside table, beside the phone. The hotel room was quiet. Istanbul hummed outside the window, a city built on the fault line between two continents, a place that had survived by refusing to choose one world over the other.
Ciana lay back on the bed. She didn’t sleep. She stared at the ceiling and felt the shape of a decision forming, not yet made, not yet solid, but there. A presence in the room, like the presence of a man in a doorway, like the warmth of a breath that hadn’t quite become a kiss.
Don’t let him be.
She wasn’t going to.
Chapter 5
RAIN ON THE ISTANBUL tarmac. Warm rain, not the Swiss cold of Geneva but something Mediterranean, almost subtropical, the kind of rain that fell in sheets and smelled like tarmac and jet fuel and the particular electricity of a city built between two seas.