Hold On to Me (East Coast Mafia #9)

Chapter 1

They were betraying her now.

Not visibly. No passenger in cabin would have noticed the micro-tremor in her wrist as she tilted the bottle over the first flute.

She caught it before the pour wobbled, locked her elbow, and let the wine fall in a clean, golden arc.

But she knew. Her body had become aware of his presence before her eyes confirmed it, the way a compass needle swings north before the traveler has any idea which direction she’s facing.

He never reclined. He never slept. He never asked for anything beyond what was offered, and he declined half of that.

He wore dark suits that fit him the way armour fit, not for beauty, but for containment.

He was enormous in the way certain men were enormous: not just tall but dense with stillness, as though his body had been designed for a kind of violence he had chosen, very deliberately, to hold in reserve.

And the scar. A pale silver seam that ran from his left temple to the hinge of his jaw, pulling the skin taut over the cheekbone in a way that should have been disfiguring but wasn’t. It changed his face, made it more dangerous and impossible to look away from.

Ciana looked away.

She delivered the flute to 1A. "Your champagne, sir."

He took it without touching her fingers.

He was meticulous about that, his hand always arriving a breath before or after hers, maintaining a margin of air between his skin and hers that felt less like courtesy and more like a perimeter.

She had started to think of it as the exclusion zone.

Two centimetres of nothing that somehow weighed more than any hand that had ever actually touched her.

“Thank you.” Low. Accented. Russian, she thought, though it had been sanded down by years of something else. French, maybe. The vowels sat differently in his mouth than they would in a native speaker’s.

She nodded. Smiled. Cabin-professional, eyes-neutral, the expression she had perfected at twenty and now wore like a second uniform. She retreated to the galley.

Raven Burnett was already there, leaning against the beverage cart with her arms crossed and one eyebrow doing the thing it did when she had an observation she was going to deliver whether Ciana wanted it or not.

"Three weeks," Raven said.

"Don’t."

"Three weeks, Ci. Same seat. Same flight. Same look on his face like he’s running long division in his head and you’re the remainder that won’t resolve."

Ciana pulled a bottle of still water from the drawer and cracked the seal. "He’s a frequent flyer. We’ve several."

“We’ve several who fly this route. We don’t have several who watch you like you’re a problem they’re trying to solve.

” Raven uncrossed her arms and reached for a packet of shortbread, tearing it open with her teeth.

“I’m not saying it’s sinister. I’m saying it’s something.

And you—” She pointed the shortbread at Ciana.

“—are pretending it’s nothing because the alternative would require you to have a feeling, and we both know how you’re about those. ”

"I’ve feelings."

"Name one."

"Irritation. With you. Right now."

Raven grinned, wide, unrepentant, the kind of smile that had gotten her out of trouble and into it in roughly equal measure since they’d met in training four years ago.

She was Ciana’s closest friend, which wasn’t the same thing as saying they were alike.

Raven had opinions the way weather systems had wind: constantly, forcefully, and with no regard for whether you’d brought an umbrella.

She dated with cheerful recklessness, had a tattoo she’d gotten in Lisbon that she refused to explain, and kept a running spreadsheet of every airline she intended to fly for before she turned thirty.

She wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, a safe harbour.

She was a dare. Ciana loved her for it, mostly because Raven never once tried to be anything else.

"His hands," Raven said, quieter now.

Ciana stilled. "What about them?"

"You were looking at his hands when you poured. Not at the glass. At his hands."

That was true, and Ciana hated that it was true, and she hated even more that Raven had seen it.

His hands were... she didn’t have the right word.

Large, obviously. Scarred across the knuckles the way hands got scarred when they’d met hard surfaces repeatedly and without gloves.

But what had stopped her, what had made her pour go unsteady for a fraction of a second, was the way he held the champagne flute.

Delicately. With a precision that didn’t match the rest of him, as though the glass were something he could break without noticing and he had decided, with great private discipline, not to.

"I was looking at the glass," Ciana said.

"Liar." Raven ate the shortbread in two bites. "It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me anything. But I’m putting it on the record: that man isn’t flying this route for the inflight menu."

Ciana said nothing. She straightened her vest, checked her chignon in the polished steel of the coffee urn, and went back into the cabin.

The redeye from Nice to Monaco was a short-haul by any standard, fifty-five minutes gate to gate, though the first-class cabin of C?te d’Azur Atlantic turned it into something that felt longer.

The airline was boutique, the fleet small, the routes limited to a constellation of Mediterranean cities that catered to passengers who wanted discretion more than speed.

Ciana had chosen it for the same reason she had chosen Nice, and the small flat with the view of other people’s laundry lines, and the life that required no one’s participation but her own: it was manageable.

It was hers. It didn’t depend on anyone staying.

She moved through service the way she always did, anticipating, adjusting, invisible where invisibility was the kindest thing she could offer.

The cabin was half-empty tonight. A German couple in 2A and 2B who had fallen asleep before she’d finished the first round.

A woman in 3A reading something on her tablet with the focused stillness of a person who didn’t want to be spoken to. And 1A.

He wasn’t reading. He wasn’t sleeping. He sat with his hands on the armrests and looked at nothing. No. Not nothing. He looked at the space in front of him with the kind of attention other men gave spreadsheets or sunsets, as though the middle distance contained information he was still processing.

Ciana cleared his untouched flute. He had taken one sip, she noted, the way she noted everything, and replaced it with water. He acknowledged the exchange with a nod so slight it could have been breathing.

She should have moved on. She always moved on.

Service was a rhythm, and the rhythm protected her: task, task, task, and no space in between for the kind of noticing that made her chest feel tight.

But tonight the cabin was quiet and the lighting was low and the German couple were snoring in soft tandem, and for three entire seconds, Ciana stood at the edge of his row and let herself look.

His jaw. The scar. The way the overhead reading light carved the planes of his face into something that belonged on a cathedral wall. Not a saint, not a gargoyle, something in between. A figure placed high and out of reach, meant to be admired from below and never, under any circumstances, touched.

He turned his head. Looked at her.

She counted. It was what she did when she was afraid. Not of him, never quite of him, but of the sensation that bloomed behind her sternum when his eyes met hers. One. Two. Thr—

She turned away. Walked to the galley. Set the empty flute in the rack and pressed her fingertips to the counter until the tremor passed.

Three seconds. That was how long she had let herself look, and it was already too long.

Nice C?te d’Azur at one-seventeen in the morning was a particular kind of quiet.

The terminal lights had that sickly fluorescent quality that made everyone look like they were recovering from something, and Ciana moved through the corridor with the efficient, slightly dissociative stride of a woman who had done this walk several hundred times and could navigate it while thinking about something else entirely.

She was thinking about his hands.

Stop it.

She was thinking about the way the scar changed when he turned his head, the silver line catching the light like a—

Stop. It.

Raven fell into step beside her, dragging her crew bag with the resigned energy of a woman who had given up on the wheels three airports ago. "Did you see the notice?"

"What notice?"

“Company email. Just came through.” Raven held up her phone, but they were walking too fast for Ciana to read it. “C?te d’Azur Atlantic has been acquired. New ownership, effective immediately. Some holding company out of—” She squinted at her screen. “—Monaco.”

Ciana felt something shift. Not alarm, not yet. A vibration, like a wine glass struck at the wrong frequency. “Acquired by whom?”

"Doesn’t say. Very private, apparently. The email’s all corporate-speak. ‘Exciting new chapter,’ ‘commitment to excellence,’ the usual nothing-words." Raven shoved her phone into her jacket pocket. "Could be worse. Could be a budget carrier. Imagine us in polo shirts."

Ciana didn’t laugh. She was looking at the departures board, but she wasn’t reading it.

Acquired. The only stable thing in her constructed life—the airline, the routes, the rhythm that kept her days from collapsing into the shapelessness she remembered from before—had just been picked up and placed in someone else’s hands.

Raven glanced at her. Something in Ciana’s face must have shown, because her voice shifted: still Raven, still dry, but with the structural reinforcement underneath that she deployed when she could tell Ciana’s foundations were swaying.

“Hey. It’s probably nothing. Airlines change hands all the time. Our contracts are solid.”

"I know."

"And if anything changes, we deal with it. You’re the best crew on this fleet, and I’m saying that only partly because I’m biased."

Ciana nodded. Managed a small smile that felt like it fit correctly on her face.

They turned the corner toward the crew exit, and Ciana’s gaze swept the row of security monitors mounted above the corridor junction. Most of the screens showed empty gates, motionless jetways, the hollow architecture of an airport between shifts.

One screen showed the first-class cabin. Her cabin. The image was frozen, a still frame, not a live feed. It showed the aisle, the seats, the low amber lighting. And in the centre of the frame, caught mid-motion, pouring champagne with her face turned slightly toward 1A: Ciana.

Her own face looked back at her from the monitor. Eyes soft in a way she didn’t recognise. Mouth slightly parted. She looked like a woman noticing something she wasn’t supposed to notice.

Then the screen flickered. Cycled to another feed, an empty gate, grey carpet, nobody there.

Ciana stood very still.

"Ci?" Raven was ahead of her, halfway to the exit. "You coming?"

“Yeah.” She didn’t look at the monitor again. She walked. Her heels clicked against the terminal floor and she counted them the way she always did when the ground stopped feeling solid. One, two, three, four.

Her flat was a third-floor walk-up in the Libération quarter, four hundred square metres of careful independence: white walls she had painted herself, a shelf of paperbacks organised by colour because it soothed something in her that she had never bothered to name, a kitchen window that framed a rectangle of Nice sky that changed colour seventeen times between dawn and noon. She had counted.

She made tea. Sat at the table. Opened her laptop and deleted the airline acquisition email without reading it because Raven had already summarised the only parts that mattered and because the rest would be noise designed to make upheaval sound like opportunity, and Ciana had no patience for that particular fiction.

She thought about the security monitor. The frozen image. Her own face, softened toward 1A, caught on camera and displayed on a screen that should have been showing live feeds from the terminal.

It was a glitch. Screens cycled. Feeds lagged. It meant nothing.

She washed her cup. Set it on the rack. Stood at the kitchen window and watched the streetlight throw its orange circle on the pavement below, and inside that circle a cat moved, slow and deliberate, as though the light were warm.

Her phone buzzed.

A company memo, different from the acquisition email. This one was addressed to her directly. She read it standing up, because some things were easier to absorb when your body was already braced.

INTERNAL MEMO — CONFIDENTIAL

TO: C. Reyes, Senior Cabin Attendant

RE: Reassignment — Private Charter Division

Effective immediately, you’ve been reassigned to the newly formed Private Charter Division of C?te d’Azur Atlantic. You’ll serve as sole cabin attendant on an exclusive client account. Details of the client and flight schedule will be provided upon your first briefing.

Please confirm receipt and availability within 24 hours. Refusal to accept this reassignment may result in termination of your current contract.

She read it twice. Three times. The words didn’t change.

Her entire professional life—the routes she knew by heart, the cabin she had made hers, the rhythm that kept her steady—rearranged. By someone she had never met, for reasons no one had explained, with the quiet administrative violence of a memo that didn’t even bother to name the client.

She called Janice. Her supervisor’s phone rang four times and went to voicemail.

Ciana didn’t leave a message. What would she say?

She didn’t have a question yet. She had something worse: the feeling of walls moving around her while she stood still, the floor plan of her life redrawn by an architect she couldn’t see.

She set the phone down on the counter. The screen glowed for a moment, then went dark.

Outside, the cat had left the circle of light.

Ciana stood in her kitchen and counted the things she could control. The tea she had made. The cup she had washed. The steadiness of her own breathing.

It was a short list.

It was getting shorter.