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)
“Thank you,” the woman said. Her voice was warm. Low, musical, the kind of voice that had been shaped by good schools and easy confidence and a life in which champagne on a private jet wasn’t remarkable. She smiled at Ciana, a real smile, full of the casual kindness of a woman who had no idea she was a weapon.
“You’re welcome, Mademoiselle—?”
“Karpov. Justina.” Another smile. “Please, just Justina.”
Ciana smiled back. “Of course. Please let me know if you need anything at all.”
She turned to him. He was in the seat beside Justina, not the forward suite, not the owner’s chair where he always sat. He had moved. He had rearranged himself in his own cabin to sit beside this woman, and the displacement was so deliberate, so unmistakably staged, that Ciana felt a brief, incandescent flare of something that might have been fury if it hadn’t been immediately smothered by something colder.
“Champagne, sir?”
“Please.”
She poured. His fingers arrived first: the exclusion zone, the perimeter, the careful margin of air that he had maintained since the first night on the commercial flight. Two centimetres. The same two centimetres. As though nothing had changed. As though last night, the galley, the dark, her hands on his skin, his fist on the wall, the sound that would live inside her until she died, had been a dream she’d had alone.
She retreated to the galley. Drew the curtain. Pressed her hands flat on the counter.
Six hours. Monaco to somewhere, she hadn’t looked at the routing, didn’t care, would fly to the edge of the world and back if that was what the manifest said because the manifest was the only part of this situation she could still read without her vision blurring. Six hours of service. Of champagne and coffee and meal courses and warm smiles for the beautiful woman in the cabin and professional composure for the man beside her and nothing, not one tremor, not one crack, not one visible sign, that would give him the satisfaction of seeing her break.
She straightened her vest. Checked her chignon. Went back to work. And if anyone had been watching her the way Andrei was watching her, from the corner of his eye, over the rim of a glass he wasn’t drinking, they would have thought the same thing he was thinking.
She was magnificent.
She didn’t know this. She wouldn’t have used the word. But the service she delivered over the next six hours was the finest work of her career, not because she was performing but because she had retreated so far behind professionalism that it had become a kind of armour, and inside the armour she was untouchable and outside it she was perfect.
She anticipated Justina’s preferences with an intuition that bordered on clairvoyance. The woman liked her champagne cold but not glacial; Ciana adjusted the chiller. She ate slowly, savouring; Ciana timed the courses to give her room. She spoke with her hands, animated and warm, and twice she gestured too broadly and nearly caught her glass; Ciana had already moved it.
She smiled each time Justina spoke to her. Not the tight, formal smile of a crew member enduring a shift, but a genuine smile, full, warm, the smile of a woman who understood that Justina Karpov wasn’t the enemy. Justina was a prop. A beautiful, innocent, completely unsuspecting prop in a performance directed by the man beside her, and Ciana wasn’t going to punish an actress for a script she hadn’t written.
“You’re wonderful at this,” Justina said, halfway through the second course. “How long have you been flying?”
“Four years.”
“You must love it. The travel.”
“I do.” She set the bread basket on the table with the ease of a woman who had been placing things at exact angles her entire professional life. “It suits me.”
“Andrei is lucky to have you.” Justina glanced at him with a smile that was, and this was the detail that almost undid Ciana’s composure, fond. Familiar. The smile of a woman who knew him, or thought she did, and liked what she knew. “He never talks about the people who work for him, but I can tell. This operation is—” She gestured at the cabin, the crystal, the immaculate service. “Seamless.”
“Thank you,” Ciana said. “That’s very kind.”
She didn’t look at Andrei. She didn’t need to. She could feel him the way she always felt him, like a change in pressure, like weather on the other side of a wall. He hadn’t spoken since the champagne. He sat in his displaced seat beside a beautiful woman and he was watching Ciana, and she knew this because his gaze had weight, had always had weight, and she could feel it on the side of her face like sunlight through glass.
She didn’t give him the satisfaction of turning.
It happened in the fourth hour.