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)
"I was looking at the glass," Ciana said.
"Liar." Raven ate the shortbread in two bites. "It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me anything. But I’m putting it on the record: that man isn’t flying this route for the inflight menu."
Ciana said nothing. She straightened her vest, checked her chignon in the polished steel of the coffee urn, and went back into the cabin.
The redeye from Nice to Monaco was a short-haul by any standard, fifty-five minutes gate to gate, though the first-class cabin of Côte d’Azur Atlantic turned it into something that felt longer. The airline was boutique, the fleet small, the routes limited to a constellation of Mediterranean cities that catered to passengers who wanted discretion more than speed. Ciana had chosen it for the same reason she had chosen Nice, and the small flat with the view of other people’s laundry lines, and the life that required no one’s participation but her own: it was manageable. It was hers. It didn’t depend on anyone staying.
She moved through service the way she always did, anticipating, adjusting, invisible where invisibility was the kindest thing she could offer. The cabin was half-empty tonight. A German couple in 2A and 2B who had fallen asleep before she’d finished the first round. A woman in 3A reading something on her tablet with the focused stillness of a person who didn’t want to be spoken to. And 1A.
He wasn’t reading. He wasn’t sleeping. He sat with his hands on the armrests and looked at nothing. No. Not nothing. He looked at the space in front of him with the kind of attention other men gave spreadsheets or sunsets, as though the middle distance contained information he was still processing.
Ciana cleared his untouched flute. He had taken one sip, she noted, the way she noted everything, and replaced it with water. He acknowledged the exchange with a nod so slight it could have been breathing.
She should have moved on. She always moved on. Service was a rhythm, and the rhythm protected her: task, task, task, and no space in between for the kind of noticing that made her chest feel tight. But tonight the cabin was quiet and the lighting was low and the German couple were snoring in soft tandem, and for three entire seconds, Ciana stood at the edge of his row and let herself look.
His jaw. The scar. The way the overhead reading light carved the planes of his face into something that belonged on a cathedral wall. Not a saint, not a gargoyle, something in between. A figure placed high and out of reach, meant to be admired from below and never, under any circumstances, touched.
He turned his head. Looked at her.
She counted. It was what she did when she was afraid. Not of him, never quite of him, but of the sensation that bloomed behind her sternum when his eyes met hers. One. Two. Thr—
She turned away. Walked to the galley. Set the empty flute in the rack and pressed her fingertips to the counter until the tremor passed.
Three seconds. That was how long she had let herself look, and it was already too long.
Nice Côte d’Azur at one-seventeen in the morning was a particular kind of quiet. The terminal lights had that sickly fluorescent quality that made everyone look like they were recovering from something, and Ciana moved through the corridor with the efficient, slightly dissociative stride of a woman who had done this walk several hundred times and could navigate it while thinking about something else entirely.
She was thinking about his hands.
Stop it.
She was thinking about the way the scar changed when he turned his head, the silver line catching the light like a—
Stop. It.
Raven fell into step beside her, dragging her crew bag with the resigned energy of a woman who had given up on the wheels three airports ago. "Did you see the notice?"
"What notice?"
“Company email. Just came through.” Raven held up her phone, but they were walking too fast for Ciana to read it. “Côte d’Azur Atlantic has been acquired. New ownership, effective immediately. Some holding company out of—” She squinted at her screen. “—Monaco.”
Ciana felt something shift. Not alarm, not yet. A vibration, like a wine glass struck at the wrong frequency. “Acquired by whom?”
"Doesn’t say. Very private, apparently. The email’s all corporate-speak. ‘Exciting new chapter,’ ‘commitment to excellence,’ the usual nothing-words." Raven shoved her phone into her jacket pocket. "Could be worse. Could be a budget carrier. Imagine us in polo shirts."
Ciana didn’t laugh. She was looking at the departures board, but she wasn’t reading it. Acquired. The only stable thing in her constructed life—the airline, the routes, the rhythm that kept her days from collapsing into the shapelessness she remembered from before—had just been picked up and placed in someone else’s hands.