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)
He walked through the cabin. Past the owner’s seat. Past the four seats where Justina had sat and laughed and touched his hand and he had endured it, endured it, because endurance was the word for what he had done, sitting beside a woman he felt nothing for while the woman he loved poured champagne three feet away with a smile that had nothing behind it.
Justina was no one. A favour. An acquaintance from the Monaco circuit whom he had called that morning and asked to fly with him for the day. She had agreed because Justina was kind and uncomplicated and had no idea she was being used as a blunt instrument to destroy the last remaining connection between Andrei Almazov and the only woman who had ever made him understand why his father had believed in promises.
He had regretted it before the wheels left the ground.
He had regretted it when Ciana said you’re welcome, Mademoiselle and her voice was warm and professional and not for him. He had regretted it when she smiled at Justina, genuinely, because Ciana wasn’t capable of cruelty even when cruelty was being done to her, and he had seen the warmth in that smile and known that it was the same warmth she had given him, once, in a galley in a snowstorm, before he had destroyed everything.
He had regretted it when Justina touched his hand and he hadn’t pulled away, and across the cabin Ciana’s face had done something he’d never be able to un-see: it had gone still. Not angry. Not hurt. Still. The stillness of a woman watching the last door close.
He walked to the galley. Her galley. He stood where she had stood, hands on the counter, head bowed, the posture a mirror of every moment she had spent in this space processing what he had done to her life. The counter was clean. She had left it immaculate, because she was Ciana and even in the act of leaving she wouldn’t leave a mess for someone else to manage.
He picked up the champagne glass.
Not his, Justina’s. It was still on the table where Ciana had set it during the clearance. The crystal was clean except for a faint crescent of lipstick on the rim, coral, the shade Justina wore, a colour he couldn’t have identified if his life depended on it and would remember for the rest of it.
He stared at the glass.
The lipstick on the rim. The crystal in his scarred hand. The empty cabin. The counter where he had broken apart under her touch and the silence where her presence used to be and the blue light that had illuminated the worst and best moments of his life in the same twenty-four hours.
He hurled the glass at the bulkhead.
The impact was sharp and bright, crystal detonating against the leather wall, fragments spraying across the cabin in a constellation of glass that caught the blue light and scattered it into a hundred broken points. The sound was enormous in the empty cabin. Violent. Honest. The first honest sound he had made with his own hands since she had left.
He stood in the dark. Surrounded by broken crystal. The fragments glittered on the carpet like something precious that had been destroyed beyond repair.
He sat down. In her galley. On the floor. His back against the counter, his scarred hands on his knees, his head bowed.
He knew, with absolute clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives too late, that illuminates the wreckage after the act rather than the path before it, that he had destroyed the only real thing in his life.
The blue light pulsed. The cabin ticked. Somewhere in Nice, a woman who had offered him everything was walking away, and she wasn’t coming back, and the man who loved her was sitting in the dark surrounded by broken glass because he had decided, with the ruthless, misguided, catastrophic logic of a man who believed he was a monster, that breaking her heart was the kindest thing he could do.
He had been wrong about everything.
The crystal glittered. The cabin was empty. The night was very long.
Chapter 9
THREE WEEKS LATER, she sat across from a good man in a restaurant in Nice and tried very hard to feel something.
His name was Paolo Sabbatini. He was thirty-one, Sicilian, with dark eyes and an easy smile and hands that moved when he talked, open, expressive, the hands of a man who had nothing to hide and no reason to grip the edges of anything. He worked for Interpol’s Monaco liaison office. He had left Sicily at nineteen because he’d seen what the old world did to good people and had decided to be the kind of man who stopped it instead of perpetuating it. He was kind. He was present. He reached across the table and took her hand and his skin was smooth and unmarked and warm in the way that skin is warm when it’s never been scarred.