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)
“It’s a promotion, Ciana. Private charter is the most prestigious division in the company.”
“What company? We were acquired three days ago. I don’t even know who signs my paycheque anymore.”
A pause. Then, carefully: “The new ownership has specifically requested you for this account. I’m told it’s a compliment.”
“It doesn’t feel like a compliment. It feels like a reassignment I didn’t ask for, to a client I can’t identify, on an aircraft I’ve never seen.”
Another pause, longer. “Ciana. Take the assignment. Please.”
The please had done it. Not because it was persuasive but because it was afraid. Janice, brisk, capable, fifteen-year veteran Janice, had sounded afraid. And Ciana had learned a long time ago that when the people above you started sounding afraid, the ground beneath you had already moved.
So she was here. On a private apron she had never been cleared to access, staring at an aircraft that wasn’t on any commercial register she could find. She had checked. She had spent an hour on her laptop last night, searching tail numbers and charter registrations and corporate fleet databases, and the jet in front of her didn’t exist in any system available to a cabin attendant with a Wi-Fi connection and a growing sense that her life was being rearranged by someone who didn’t intend to explain why.
She climbed the stairs. Her spine was straight. Her fury was quiet.
The cabin stopped her.
She had worked first class for four years. She had served on aircraft configured for twelve with lie-flat suites and heated floors and champagne chillers built into the armrests. She had seen luxury deployed as a weapon, as a way of telling passengers that their money had purchased not just a seat but a small, temporary kingdom.
This was different. This wasn’t a kingdom built for guests. This was a kingdom built for one.
The A350 had been stripped and rebuilt. Where a commercial configuration would seat three hundred, this cabin held six seats—six—arranged in a configuration that was less a seating plan than a statement. The forward cabin was a single suite: one seat, one table, one reading lamp that cast warm amber light on leather so dark it was nearly black. Behind it, four seats faced each other across a low table of polished walnut. The sixth seat sat alone near the galley, angled toward a window, as though someone had wanted the option of solitude within an aircraft already designed for solitude.
The carpet was charcoal. The walls were upholstered in something that looked like raw silk. The galley, her galley, if she accepted this, if she stayed, was larger than the one she’d worked for four years and stocked with crystal she recognised from photographs in design magazines she couldn’t afford.
Everything was immaculate. Everything was dark. And on the forward bulkhead, so subtle she almost missed it, a small emblem had been embossed into the leather: a single diamond, outlined in gold, surrounded by what might have been flames or might have been petals. She couldn’t tell. It looked like something that belonged on a signet ring or a family crest, not on the interior wall of a private jet.
She set her crew bag in the galley. Opened the catering manifest. The provisions were extensive, enough for a full-service transatlantic crossing, though the route today was Monaco to Athens and back. Six hours. Someone had ordered enough food and wine for a week.
She was inventorying the champagne, a case of Dom Pérignon that cost more than her monthly rent, when she heard the airstairs shift under weight.
Heavy weight. The stairs didn’t creak for most passengers. They creaked for this one.
She knew before she turned around.
The man from 1A filled the cabin door the way a stone fills an archway, not decoratively but structurally, as though the frame had been built around him and not the other way. He wore a dark suit, no tie, the collar open at the throat in a way that should have been casual but wasn’t. His scar caught the morning light through the cabin windows and turned silver, then white, then silver again as he moved.
He stopped when he saw her.
She stopped when she saw him stop.
Three seconds. She counted them the way she always counted, not because the number mattered but because counting was the thing she did instead of feeling, and right now the feeling was a tide coming in fast.
This isn’t a reassignment.
The thought arrived fully formed, the way certain truths do, not built from evidence but dropped whole into the mind, irrefutable. She had been moved from her airline, from her routes, from her cabin, and placed on this jet. His jet. And the black-liveried aircraft that didn’t exist on any register, and the emblem on the bulkhead, and the six seats configured for one: all of it clicked into place with the quiet, devastating precision of a lock engaging.