Chapter 21 Mina
MINA
The cabin hums like a held breath. I stare at the oval window until the sky blurs and comes back. My phone lies face down on the little table, screen still, a quiet threat. I tell myself not to touch it. I touch it anyway.
I need confirmation of what I know has happened, and I google the island. Headlines pop up. All some iteration of “Fourteen dead in paradise massacre.”
My throat tightens. The words swim and then sharpen. There are three paragraphs of nothing. There are a hundred comments from people who will never smell salt and plaster dust in the same breath. It does not matter. Fourteen dead.
My lungs forget how to work. Air goes in wrong and comes out worse. Roman looks up from whatever gauge he was pretending to read. He reads me instead.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Fourteen…” The word scrapes my mouth. I show him the screen and keep my thumb over the comments.
He scans once and nods once. He does not tell me the number will change. He does not tell me the post is wrong. His breath is steadier than mine.
I blurt, “We keep them there. At the retreat. My mother. The women. I do not care how long. We keep the boys there.”
“Yes,” he says. He does not ask how long is long. He does not tell me I’m being dramatic. “For now they stay. You call when you need to. Not when you think you should.” His eyes hold mine. “We have a chance to pull him again. We take it. That is how this ends.”
My chest goes hot. “No.”
“Mina, it’s the only way—”
“I don’t want another chance. I don’t want to be bait. I want our sons behind a fence. I want to close my eyes and wake up to a normal that never existed. I want—”
“You cannot pretend it away,” he says softly.
“I know,” I say, and my voice breaks. My phone slips from my hand and smacks the carpet. “I know, but I want to. I want one hour where I am not a target. I want to be boring. I want you to lie to me and say everything is fine.”
He reaches for my hands. I pull back and my hands shake. Heat crawls up my throat. Shame follows it. He laces his fingers with mine and squeezes once. “Look at me. Only me.”
I look.
His gaze does not flick. “Breathe with me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“You already are.”
I try. The first inhale hurts like a bruise. The second catches on the way out. The third slides. On the fourth my hands start to remember stillness. I want to be angry at myself for needing help to breathe. He squeezes again and kills the anger before it grows.
“Tell me what is happening right now.”
“I am on a plane. I am breathing. I hate that I’m breathing without my boys. I hate that your men are dead. I hate that my mother’s kettle is the thing my brain keeps circling like it’s a lighthouse.”
He nods. “All true.”
“And I hate that I’m falling in love with you, because I’m scared I’m going to lose you,” I say, because panic makes me honest.
His mouth moves. Not a smile. Not not a smile. “I know how you feel. I feel it too.”
He said he would never lie to me, so I should take that at face value. But maybe when he said he’d never lie to me, he was lying. It’s easier to believe that than to believe he’s falling in love with me. No one falls in love with me. Not ever. Love like that has never been in the cards for me.
And yet…
We sit in silence for a breath. The engine hum shifts.
The seat belt digs into my hip. The number sits between us like a guest who refuses to leave.
Fourteen. I hear it in the cough of the air system when it changes speed.
I hear it in the thin voices that float through the closed door from the cockpit.
“I can’t do this,” I say. I hate the way the words sound. “I cannot be bait. I cannot be brave. I cannot pretend this is somebody else’s life. I cannot.”
“You can.” He does not make it a speech. “But you do not have to like it.”
“I will claw my own skin off if I sit here,” I whisper. I close my eyes and see plaster dust in his hair, the hole in the wall, the sheet I smoothed over pillows, the way the air went still after the shots. “Make it stop.”
He studies my face. Then he unbuckles with a clean click and stands. He does not walk away. He closes the cabin door. The latch falls soft. He drops the second shade with a small pull. The cabin lowers into private quiet. He looks at the phone on the floor.
“I’ll make it stop.” He presses the button until the screen goes black.
He sets it with his own on the credenza.
He waits by my knees. His jaw flexes, a tight line.
He kneels in front of me and sets his palms on the armrests.
He looks up like a man asking permission to step through a door.
“I am going to touch you. Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I will.”
He frees my seat belt and slides his hands over my thighs.
His palms are warm through the fabric. He waits.
I nod and the nod breaks into a shiver. He kisses my knee.
Then higher. Slow. Careful. Patient. I pull him up by the back of his neck and meet his mouth.
Heat rolls through my chest like a switch flipped the right way.
“Here,” he murmurs, voice low and sure, and shifts us to the small couch by the window. I climb into his lap and anchor myself with my knees at his hips. The plane hums under us. He is strong under my hands and steady in every way that matters. “Take what you need.”
I hike up my dress as he lowers his trousers for me. This is what I need. No thinking. Just doing. We move together until my head empties of everything but breath and his name.
I ride him hard, mindlessly, carelessly.
My first orgasm shatters me, but it’s not enough.
I need obliteration, so I keep going. The next tightens every muscle in my back, and he catches me before I fall off of him.
His arms lock tight around me, keeping me close.
He gives me nowhere to fall but into him.
When I crest and break, I breathe like a person again.
I taste the sweat on his lip, and crave more.
He turns us over, laying me on my back on the sofa cushions so he’s on top of me.
His strokes turn slow. Almost lazy. He peppers my lips, my jaw, my throat with stubbled kisses.
One hand on my low back pulls me to him, getting him deeper and deeper.
His stare is intense, and in this moment, I can’t tell where he begins and I end.
I have never felt more loved than I do right now.
When that thought hits, my climax does too, cresting higher and higher until there’s nothing left of me. He buries himself deep and comes, and I wrap myself around him, clinging to him for every pulse.
After, the cabin smells like lemon and sweat and altitude. I press my forehead to his shoulder. His hand finds the back of my neck and holds. It is the pressure I need. He never holds too tight. He never lets go too soon.
“Better?” he asks against my hair.
“Yes.” The word is breath and gratitude and something like grief.
We clean up and dress, and settle into our seats again. I drink water, not because I want to, but because I need to. He’s right—the only way we get through this is by taking care of our bodies.
“I hate that I feel better,” I admit. “It feels like I cheated. Like I should sit here and punish myself until breathing is something I earn.”
“Enjoying what you can is not cheating. It is how you honor the fallen.”
“Tell me something about the retreat. I need to think about anything else right now.”
“They planted tomatoes,” he says. “The soil is bad and they are trying anyway. There are security cameras in all directions. The people on the ground are well trained and smart. My team takes care of the people I send there. Our boys and your mother are safe.”
I breathe that in without choking on it. The captain says something about time and weather. I tuck my feet up and breathe the way Roman taught me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
My mind tries to crawl back to the spa. I let it. I feel the cold tile and the hallway and the sheet. Then I force it toward tomatoes. Ugly and red and perfect in bad soil.
I close my eyes. The hallway is gone. The garden remains. The boys sleep in a room that smells like soap and wood. My mother argues with a kettle and wins. A door closes. A bolt slides. Tomorrow exists.
When I open my eyes, Roman is watching the wing. His hand rests on the armrest, so I curl my fingers over his.
“Better.”
It makes me smile to hear him say that.
I pick up the black phone and put it face down again. I could read about the fourteen dead bodies found at the resort. I could wallow in despair and guilt for their deaths. I could do a lot of things, but almost none of them are useful to the dead. Or to me.
As much as I blame myself for what happened, I know it’s not true. Vitaly did this. Not me. Not Roman. Vitaly is an angry, jealous man who thinks he is entitled to everything he wants.
He wants to be pakhan. He wants revenge against me.
He will have neither.
The plane rides a smooth pocket of air. The sky on the other side of the glass is the kind of blue that paint tries to copy. Roman’s hand is warm under mine. Fourteen is still a number in the world. It is not the only one. Two babies, sleeping. One woman, breathing. One man, watching the wing.
Right now, that’s the only math that matters.
When we land, the math changes. But I’ll be damned before I let that monster hurt my babies, and if that means I have to be bait, so be it.