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)
And on the bedside table in the bedroom, positioned with a care that made her throat close: the photograph of her mother.
It was a small frame. Silver, slightly tarnished. Her mother at twenty-six, two years older than Ciana was now, laughing at something off-camera in a garden Ciana had never been able to identify. It was the only photograph she had. Her father, in one of his rare moments of tenderness, had given it to her on her tenth birthday. She had kept it on her bedside table in every flat she’d lived in since she was sixteen, through every move, every new address. It was the first thing she unpacked and the last thing she packed and she had never told anyone, not even Raven, how much it meant to her.
Someone had touched it. Someone had lifted it from her old bedside table and carried it here and placed it on this new one, and they had set it at the same angle she always kept it, slightly turned, so her mother’s face was the first thing she saw when she woke up.
Ciana sat on the edge of the new bed. The mattress was better than her old one. The sheets were better. Everything was better, and that was the problem, because better wasn’t the same as chosen, and none of this, not the flat, not the jet, not the six hours sealed in a cabin with a man who caught her when she fell and let go exactly when she didn’t want him to, none of it had been her choice.
She picked up the photograph. Held it. Her mother’s face smiled at something Ciana would never see.
She set it back down. Same angle. Same position.
Some things, at least, she could still control.
The security panel was by the front door.
She hadn’t noticed it on the way in, too stunned by the sight of her own belongings in a stranger’s flat to notice the small touchscreen mounted at eye level beside the entrance. It was new. The installation was clean, professional, built into the wall as though it had always been there. A green light pulsed slowly in the corner of the display. Armed.
She hadn’t requested a security system. She hadn’t requested this flat. She hadn’t requested any of this.
She went to the kitchen. Made tea in her own kettle, in her own mug, because ritual was the scaffolding that held her upright when everything else was swaying. She sat at a table that wasn’t hers with a cup that was and opened her laptop.
The airline’s internal directory had been restructured since the acquisition, new logos, new portals, new corporate language that smelled like lawyers. She navigated to the ownership filings. Côte d’Azur Atlantic SAS had been acquired by a holding company registered in Monaco: Almazov Group International.
Almazov.
She typed it into Google.
The results came fast. A cascade of images and headlines and society-page photographs that assembled, piece by piece, into a picture she hadn’t been prepared to see. A casino on the Monaco waterfront, Ace Royale, that looked less like a business than a declaration of war against modesty. Black marble floors reflecting crystal chandeliers. Frosted glass etched with a crest: a diamond wreathed in flames. Rose petals in crystal bowls at every entrance. Leather chairs branded with a monogram she recognised, the same emblem she had seen on the bulkhead of the jet.
She scrolled. Found a gala photograph. Four men in black, standing in a line that looked less like a photo opportunity and more like a warning. The eldest, tall and sharp-featured, with eyes that even in a photograph seemed to lower the temperature. Beside him, two men of identical height, twins, she thought, though one was smiling and the other wasn’t. And at the edge of the frame, half-turned away as though he hadn’t wanted to be photographed at all, the one she recognised.
The scar was a silver line in the flashbulbs. His jaw was set. His hands were at his sides, and even in a still image she could see the tension in them: the careful, contained readiness of a man who was always bracing for something.
Andrei Almazov. Head of security. The Almazov family.
She read. She read for an hour, then two. The information was fragmentary. The Almazovs existed in the space between public record and rumour, their name surfacing in financial filings and charity galas and, in certain corners of the internet, in whispered associations with a word she had to look up to be sure she understood correctly.
Bratva.
The Russian word sat on her screen like a stain. She read the definitions, the explainers, the carefully hedged articles that never quite accused and never quite acquitted. She read about the father, dead, under circumstances no article fully explained. She read about the brothers, four of them, orphaned as teenagers, who had built an empire from wreckage. She read about Ace Royale, which the internet described variously as the most exclusive casino in Europe, a monument to dark money, and a throne room.