Chapter 2 #2
Ciana considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
He hadn’t threatened her. He hadn’t been inappropriate.
He hadn’t, in fact, done anything except sit in his seat and work and maintain the same meticulous distance he had maintained on every commercial flight.
He was, if anything, more careful here, more contained, more deliberately harmless, as though the smallness of the cabin had made him shrink himself to compensate.
“Yes,” she said. And meant it. Which, in some ways, was worse.
Because if she had felt unsafe, she could have walked.
She could have called the authorities, filed a complaint, refused to fly.
But she didn’t feel unsafe. She felt seen.
And being seen by someone who had gone to these lengths to be near her without explaining why: that was a different kind of danger.
The kind that didn’t trigger alarms. The kind that made you want to stay in the room.
“Be careful,” Raven said. “And text me every hour, or I’m calling Interpol.”
“You don’t have Interpol’s number.”
“I’ll Google it. I’m resourceful.”
Ciana almost smiled.
The return leg was quieter. He closed the folio. Sat with his hands on the armrests, those hands, always those hands, and watched the Mediterranean slide beneath them through the window. She served coffee. He took it black, no sugar, and the cup looked like a toy in his grip.
She was in the aisle, returning to the galley with the empty cup, when the turbulence hit.
Not gentle. Not the polite shudder of a plane adjusting altitude.
This was a fist, a sudden, violent drop that threw the cabin sideways and sent Ciana stumbling.
Her hand shot out for the nearest headrest and missed.
Her balance went. The cup she was carrying shattered somewhere behind her and she was falling, falling toward the carpet with nothing to catch herself on—
His hand.
His hand caught her waist.
Not her arm, not her shoulder. Her waist. His palm landed on the curve above her hip, fingers splayed across her side, and even through the fabric of her jacket and her blouse and whatever else separated his skin from hers, the heat of him was immediate.
Not warmth, but heat. Something was happening to her body where his hand was and she couldn’t make it stop.
She counted.
One.
His grip tightened. Not pulling her closer, holding her steady. She could feel each finger individually, the way you can feel each note in a chord if you listen hard enough.
Two.
The plane levelled. The turbulence passed. The cabin was stable. There was no reason for him to still be holding her and he was still holding her.
Three.
He let go.
Exactly on three. Exactly at the moment when she had begun to think he wouldn’t, when her body had started to adjust to the pressure of his hand as though it might become permanent, he released her.
His fingers uncurled from her waist and returned to the armrest and he didn’t look at her and he didn’t apologise and he didn’t explain.
Ciana straightened. Smoothed her jacket where his hand had been. The fabric was warm.
“Thank you,” she said, because professionalism required it.
He nodded. The same minimal gesture from the commercial flights, the one that could have been breathing.
She walked to the galley. Pulled the curtain. Pressed her hand to her waist where his had been and felt the warmth fading like an afterimage, the ghost of a light you’d stared at too long.
Three seconds. She had counted every one. And the worst part, the part she wouldn’t tell Raven, the part she wouldn’t admit to anyone, the part she barely admitted to herself, was that she had wanted a fourth.
The car was waiting on the tarmac.
Not a taxi. Not a hire car. A black Mercedes with tinted windows and a driver who held the door for her as though she were the client and not the crew.
Andrei had disembarked first, long strides, no backward glance, and disappeared into a second car that pulled away before she had finished collecting her bag.
“Where are we going?” she asked the driver.
“Your new residence, Mademoiselle Reyes.”
“My what?”
He didn’t repeat himself. He drove. Nice slid past the windows in its evening colours, the palm-lined sweep of the Promenade, the faded pastels of the Old Town, the climbing streets of the residential quarters, and then turned into a neighbourhood Ciana knew by sight but had never lived in.
Cimiez. Quiet, wide streets, Belle époque architecture, the kind of area where the buildings had balconies with ironwork that had been there since before her grandmother was born.
The car stopped in front of a limestone building with tall windows and a small courtyard garden visible through a wrought-iron gate. The driver opened her door.
“There must be a mistake,” Ciana said.
“Third floor, Mademoiselle. The code is 4791.”
She went up because the alternative was standing on the street arguing with a man who clearly had his instructions and no authority to deviate from them.
The staircase was marble, worn smooth in the centre from a century of feet.
The landing smelled like beeswax and old stone.
She punched in the code. The door opened.
She understood immediately.
The flat was twice the size of her old one. High ceilings, parquet floors, windows that flooded the rooms with the kind of golden evening light that estate agents would kill to photograph. It was beautiful. It was clearly expensive. And it was full of her things.
Not arranged the way she’d have arranged them, but present.
Every book from her shelf, standing in the same colour order she had organised them in, on a new shelf that was longer and deeper than the one in her old flat.
Her mugs, the chipped blue one from the marché aux puces, the oversized one Raven had bought her as a joke, the plain white one she used every morning, hanging from hooks in a kitchen that had a window twice the size of her old one.
Her kettle on the counter. Her shoes lined up by the door.
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. C?te 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.
She looked at the photograph again. The four men. The black marble behind them. The diamond wreathed in flames.
These aren’t businessmen, she thought.
She closed the laptop. The screen went dark and her own face looked back at her from the black glass, the same face that had looked back at her from the security monitor in the terminal, soft and open and turned toward a man she should never have noticed.
The security panel by the door pulsed green.
Armed. Watching. The flat was beautiful and her things were here and someone had placed her mother’s photograph at exactly the right angle, and all of it, every careful, expensive, meticulous detail, had been arranged by a man the internet called Bratva royalty.
Ciana sat in her new kitchen, in her new flat, surrounded by her own belongings in a life she no longer recognised.