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)
“You’re serious.”
“The introduction will be on your next layover. Alexei will arrange it.”
“You’re serious.”
He looked at her. And in the half-second before the mask finished forming, in the hairline crack between what he was saying and what his eyes were screaming, she saw it. The devastation. The cost. The look of a man committing an act of violence against himself and calling it honour.
Then the mask closed. The crack sealed. He sat down. Picked up his folio. Opened it to a page he wasn’t going to read.
“You should get some rest,” he said. “We land in three hours.”
She stood in the aisle. The air where his forehead had been against hers was cold. The Russian he had murmured against her mouth was fading, not the memory of it, which would never fade, but the vibration, the physical resonance, the way her lips had felt the words even though she hadn’t understood them.
She didn’t speak. She went to the galley. Drew the curtain.
She stood in the dark with her hands on the counter and her eyes closed and the taste of him still on her mouth and she thought: He kissed me like I was the only thing in the world and he’s still going to give me away.
She thought: I’m not going to let him.
She thought: Whatever Alexei has found, whoever this man is, whatever clean, law-enforcement, connection-free candidate they put in front of me, I’ll sit across from him and I’ll smile and I’ll be polite and I’ll think about the sound Andrei Almazov makes when his walls come down, and I’ll know that no amount of clean hands will ever make me forget it.
She pressed her forehead against the cold steel of the galley cabinet.
Three hours to landing.
The taste of him didn’t fade.
Chapter 7
SHE WAS DONE PLAYING by his rules.
The candidate introduction was scheduled for the Lisbon layover, four days away, three flights between now and then, three sealed cabins in which Andrei Almazov would sit in his seat and work and drink coffee and maintain the exclusion zone and pretend that he hadn’t kissed her in the dark and murmured Russian into her mouth and shaken against her like a man coming apart at the seams. Three flights in which he’d be composed and professional and armoured and she’d pour his champagne and clear his cup and be a good crew member and accept, gracefully, the slow-motion humiliation of being handed to a stranger by a man who had held her face in his trembling hands and called her oxygen.
She wasn’t going to be graceful about it.
She wasn’t going to be professional.
She was going to make every minute of the next three flights so unbearable for Andrei Almazov that by the time Alexei’s clean, law-enforcement-background, no-connections-to-our-world candidate sat across from her in some Lisbon restaurant, the man who had put her there would know exactly what he was losing.
The first flight was Monaco to Zurich. Three hours. Routine.
She didn’t change her service. She didn’t add words or touches or any of the obvious escalations that would have given him the ability to name what she was doing and ask her to stop. She changed the geometry.
The cabin was small. She had navigated it for weeks without unnecessary contact: the professional choreography of a crew member who understood that the aisle belonged to the passenger and her job was to pass through it like weather, present, functional, impersonal. She abandoned the choreography.
She stood where he’d have to move around her. She paused in the aisle at the precise angle that forced him to adjust his shoulders when she passed. She reached for things, the overhead bin, the reading light panel, the curtain tie, that required her to extend her arm across his field of vision, her sleeve close enough for him to feel the displacement of air without the alibi of contact. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t need to. She made his body aware of hers in the space, and then she let the space do the work.
He navigated. That was the word, not avoided, not retreated, but navigated, the way a ship navigates a channel that has suddenly narrowed. He adjusted his shoulders when she passed. He turned his body in his seat to give her room she hadn’t asked for. He held his coffee cup closer to his chest, compressing himself, making himself smaller in a space that was already too small for a man his size and was becoming, with every pass she made, smaller still.
By the second hour, he had stopped working. The folio was open but his pen hadn’t moved. His eyes tracked her movements the way a man tracks weather he can feel building, not watching her, exactly, but aware of her with every cell, the way you’re aware of a storm front even when you’re looking at something else.