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)
Dead behind the eyes.
She watched him see it. Watched the recognition move through him, not shock, not guilt, something worse. Fear. For the first time since she had known him, since the first night in 1A, since the security monitor, since the jet and the flat and the photograph of her mother at the correct angle, Andrei Almazov looked afraid.
Not of her anger. Not of her tears. Of her composure. Of the professionally warm, personally vacant, absolutely finished woman standing in front of him with a champagne bottle in her hand and nothing left in her eyes for him to find.
Justina returned. Ciana served dessert. The flight continued.
She didn’t look at him again.
The jet landed in Nice at seven in the evening. The sky was the colour of a bruise, purple-gold, the Mediterranean flat and dark below the airfield lights. Justina disembarked first, kissing Andrei on the cheek at the door with the easy affection of a woman saying goodbye to a friend, and Ciana watched the kiss graze the cheek below his scar and felt nothing. Not nothing as an absence. Nothing as a presence: a solid, immovable, occupying-every-room nothing that had replaced the part of her that used to feel things about Andrei Almazov.
He stopped at the galley curtain on his way out. She was stowing the crystal. She didn’t turn.
“Ciana.”
“Goodnight, sir. I hope you and Mademoiselle Karpov had a pleasant flight.”
She heard him stand there. She heard the breath he took, deep, uneven, the breath of a man gathering himself to say something he hadn’t rehearsed. She waited for it. She gave him the silence. She gave him every second he needed.
He said nothing.
He left.
She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. Heavy. Slow. Not the long strides of his usual departure but the measured, deliberate steps of a man walking away from something he didn’t want to leave. The stairs shifted under his weight. The tarmac received him. The car door opened and closed.
Silence.
She stood in the galley. Their galley. The counter where his fist had hit the wall and his head had gone back and the sound had come out of him like something being born. She pressed her hands flat on that counter, his counter, their counter, the surface where everything had happened and nothing could be undone, and she made a decision.
The quiet, final kind.
She filed the transfer request from her phone. Standing in the galley, thumbs moving across the screen, navigating the airline’s internal portal to the reassignment form. Reason for request: personal. Preferred assignment: commercial routes. Effective date: immediate.
She sent it.
Then she called Raven.
“I need you to do something for me.”
Raven’s voice went sharp. Not with alarm, with the particular alertness of a woman who could hear the absence of something in her best friend’s voice and was trying to identify what was missing. “What happened?”
“The colleague. The one you mentioned last month, your friend from the Interpol liaison programme. The kind one. You said he asked about me.”
A pause. “Paolo. Paolo Sabbatini. Ci, what happened on that jet?”
“Set it up.”
“Ciana—”
“Set it up. Please.”
Raven was quiet for a long time. Ciana could hear her breathing, the slow, rationed breathing of a woman who wanted to ask twenty questions and was restraining herself because she understood, the way only a best friend could understand, that the steadiness in Ciana’s voice wasn’t strength. It was the last wall standing.
“Okay,” Raven said. Softly. “I’ll set it up.”
“Thank you.”
“Ci?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m here. Whatever it is. I’m here.”
Ciana closed her eyes. “I know.”
She hung up. Set the phone on the counter. Stood in the empty galley on the empty jet and listened to the silence where his presence used to be.
Then she collected her crew bag, descended the stairs, and walked across the tarmac without looking back.
He came back to the jet at midnight.
The airfield was dark. The ground crew had gone home. The A350 sat on the private apron like a sleeping animal, its cabin lit only by the low blue accent lighting that ran along the floor panels, the same light that had illuminated the galley the night before, when she had put her hands on his skin and he had let himself be broken.
He climbed the stairs. Entered the cabin. Stood in the aisle where she had stood, in the space where she had passed him a hundred times, where her shoulder had grazed his and her hip had turned toward his seat and her presence had occupied every molecule of air until he couldn’t breathe without breathing her.
The cabin was empty.
She was gone. Not just from the jet, from his operation, from his world, from the sealed, pressurised universe he had built around them both. He had received the transfer request at eight-fifteen. He had stared at it on his phone for forty minutes. He hadn’t approved it. He hadn’t denied it. He had driven back to the airfield because the jet was the only place that still smelled like her.