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)
Anton studied her for a long moment. Then he smiled, a real smile, the first full one she had seen on a face that looked like Andrei’s, and it was dazzling. The kind of smile that explained why he managed high-roller relations. The kind that made you understand why people trusted him with their secrets.
“You’re exactly what my brother needs,” he said. “And he’s an idiot. Both of these things are true.”
He left. The door closed. The wine was half-finished on the table and the kitchen was quiet and Ciana sat in her chair and pressed her hand to her collarbone and felt the ghost of a touch that had never been there and waited.
The text came at seven the next morning.
She was in a crew hotel in London, a layover on the Nice–Paris–London route, the kind of anonymous, efficient hotel that existed solely to give flight crews eight hours of horizontal rest before sending them back into the sky. She had slept badly. She had dreamed about the galley, not the A350 galley but a version of it, larger, darker, and he was there, and she was there, and neither of them could find the door.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Raven.
He’s here.
She stared at the screen. The letters were sharp and bright against the dark of the room.
At the crew hotel. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a month. He asked for your room number. They said no. He’s sitting in the lobby.
A pause. Then:
He says he’ll wait.
Ciana set the phone down. Picked it up. Set it down again.
He was here. Not in Monaco, not in a hangar, not on the other end of a phone call with his brother. Here. In London. In the lobby of a crew hotel that he had no business being in, at seven in the morning, looking like he hadn’t slept in a month and asking for her room number and being told no and deciding, with the implacable, infuriating, devastatingly Andrei logic of a man who had once bought an airline to be near her, that he’d wait.
She put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
She lay back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling.
He had come. Without Anton telling him. Without a brother or a promise or an excuse. He had figured it out on his own, or he hadn’t, and it didn’t matter because he was here and he was waiting and the decision she had been holding since Istanbul, since the note, since don’t let him be, was no longer forming. It was formed.
She was going to go down to that lobby.
But not yet.
She was going to make him wait.
Chapter 10
SHE MADE HIM WAIT FOUR hours.
Not out of cruelty, or not entirely. She showered. She dressed. She stood in front of the hotel bathroom mirror and looked at the woman looking back at her and took her time because the last time she had been in a room with this man, she had put her hands on him in a galley at two in the morning and given him the first intimate act of her life, and twelve hours later he had brought another woman onto their plane, and the woman in the mirror needed to be ready for whatever was about to happen in the lobby.
She dried her hair. She put on clothes that weren’t a uniform: jeans, a black sweater, boots. She looked like herself. Not a cabin attendant. Not a woman on a private jet pouring champagne with dead eyes. Just Ciana Reyes, twenty-four, sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in London, drinking terrible coffee from a paper cup and breathing.
She texted Raven.
I’m going down.
The reply was immediate.
He hasn’t moved. Four hours, Ci. He’s been sitting in that chair for four hours. The front desk tried to ask him to leave twice. He just looked at them. They stopped asking.
A pause. Then:
Whatever you decide, I’m on the third floor. Room 312. If you need me, I’m here.
Ciana set the phone down. Stood. Checked the mirror one final time, not for vanity but for armour. She needed her face to be steady. She needed her hands to be still. She needed to walk into that lobby and sit across from the man who had destroyed her and not collapse before he’d earned the right to see her collapse.
She went down.
He was where Raven had said. By the window.
The hotel lobby was small and functional: beige carpet, institutional furniture, the anonymous efficiency of a place designed for transient sleep. He was in a chair by the window, and he didn’t belong there the way a cathedral doesn’t belong in a parking lot. He was too large, too dark, too entirely himself. He was still in the clothes he must have driven through the night in, dark trousers, a black shirt, no jacket. His hair was uncombed. The scar was livid against skin that hadn’t seen sun in weeks. He looked like a man who had been living underground, or indoors, or in a hangar where a grounded jet sat on a tarmac and an empty galley held the ghost of a woman who had walked away.