Chapter 8
SHE POURED CHAMPAGNE for the woman Andrei brought onto the jet and didn’t spill a single drop.
Dom Pérignon. The same case she had opened weeks ago, the first morning on this aircraft, when the only person in the cabin was a scarred, silent man in the owner’s seat and the only thing she had known about him was that his hands around a champagne flute made her notice things she had no business noticing.
She lifted the bottle now with the same professional grip, the same forty-five-degree angle, the same controlled pour that turned the wine into a thin gold ribbon unspooling into crystal without a sound.
She had done this a thousand times. She could do it in her sleep.
She could do it while something inside her chest was turning to stone.
“Thank you,” the woman said. Her voice was warm.
Low, musical, the kind of voice that had been shaped by good schools and easy confidence and a life in which champagne on a private jet wasn’t remarkable.
She smiled at Ciana, a real smile, full of the casual kindness of a woman who had no idea she was a weapon.
“You’re welcome, Mademoiselle—?”
“Karpov. Justina.” Another smile. “Please, just Justina.”
Ciana smiled back. “Of course. Please let me know if you need anything at all.”
She turned to him. He was in the seat beside Justina, not the forward suite, not the owner’s chair where he always sat.
He had moved. He had rearranged himself in his own cabin to sit beside this woman, and the displacement was so deliberate, so unmistakably staged, that Ciana felt a brief, incandescent flare of something that might have been fury if it hadn’t been immediately smothered by something colder.
“Champagne, sir?”
“Please.”
She poured. His fingers arrived first: the exclusion zone, the perimeter, the careful margin of air that he had maintained since the first night on the commercial flight.
Two centimetres. The same two centimetres.
As though nothing had changed. As though last night, the galley, the dark, her hands on his skin, his fist on the wall, the sound that would live inside her until she died, had been a dream she’d had alone.
She retreated to the galley. Drew the curtain. Pressed her hands flat on the counter.
Six hours. Monaco to somewhere, she hadn’t looked at the routing, didn’t care, would fly to the edge of the world and back if that was what the manifest said because the manifest was the only part of this situation she could still read without her vision blurring.
Six hours of service. Of champagne and coffee and meal courses and warm smiles for the beautiful woman in the cabin and professional composure for the man beside her and nothing, not one tremor, not one crack, not one visible sign, that would give him the satisfaction of seeing her break.
She straightened her vest. Checked her chignon. Went back to work. And if anyone had been watching her the way Andrei was watching her, from the corner of his eye, over the rim of a glass he wasn’t drinking, they would have thought the same thing he was thinking.
She was magnificent.
She didn’t know this. She wouldn’t have used the word.
But the service she delivered over the next six hours was the finest work of her career, not because she was performing but because she had retreated so far behind professionalism that it had become a kind of armour, and inside the armour she was untouchable and outside it she was perfect.
She anticipated Justina’s preferences with an intuition that bordered on clairvoyance.
The woman liked her champagne cold but not glacial; Ciana adjusted the chiller.
She ate slowly, savouring; Ciana timed the courses to give her room.
She spoke with her hands, animated and warm, and twice she gestured too broadly and nearly caught her glass; Ciana had already moved it.
She smiled each time Justina spoke to her.
Not the tight, formal smile of a crew member enduring a shift, but a genuine smile, full, warm, the smile of a woman who understood that Justina Karpov wasn’t the enemy.
Justina was a prop. A beautiful, innocent, completely unsuspecting prop in a performance directed by the man beside her, and Ciana wasn’t going to punish an actress for a script she hadn’t written.
“You’re wonderful at this,” Justina said, halfway through the second course. “How long have you been flying?”
“Four years.”
“You must love it. The travel.”
“I do.” She set the bread basket on the table with the ease of a woman who had been placing things at exact angles her entire professional life. “It suits me.”
“Andrei is lucky to have you.” Justina glanced at him with a smile that was, and this was the detail that almost undid Ciana’s composure, fond.
Familiar. The smile of a woman who knew him, or thought she did, and liked what she knew.
“He never talks about the people who work for him, but I can tell. This operation is—” She gestured at the cabin, the crystal, the immaculate service. “Seamless.”
“Thank you,” Ciana said. “That’s very kind.”
She didn’t look at Andrei. She didn’t need to.
She could feel him the way she always felt him, like a change in pressure, like weather on the other side of a wall.
He hadn’t spoken since the champagne. He sat in his displaced seat beside a beautiful woman and he was watching Ciana, and she knew this because his gaze had weight, had always had weight, and she could feel it on the side of her face like sunlight through glass.
She didn’t give him the satisfaction of turning.
It happened in the fourth hour.
Justina was talking. She talked easily, about a charity gala in Monte Carlo, about a mutual friend of theirs (hers and Andrei’s, because apparently they had mutual friends, apparently he had a life outside the jet that included women who smiled at him with fondness and touched his arm when they made a point).
She was mid-sentence, describing something about a venue, when she reached over and placed her hand on Andrei’s.
Casual. Light. The thoughtless, affectionate gesture of a woman who was comfortable with the man beside her and saw nothing extraordinary in touching him.
Her fingers rested on his scarred hand.
The hand that had gripped the counter last night while Ciana took him apart.
The same one that had framed her face in the rain on the Istanbul tarmac, grazed her cheekbone in Geneva, caught her waist in turbulence and held for three seconds, one, two, three, and released at the exact moment she began to think it wouldn’t.
She had spent weeks learning the topography of that hand from a distance, cataloguing its scars and its terrifying gentleness, until she knew it better than her own.
Another woman’s fingers were on it.
Ciana was in the aisle. She had been clearing the bread service. She saw the gesture from three feet away, saw Justina’s smooth, manicured fingers settle on the ridged, scarred knuckles, and something inside her went quiet.
Not peace. Not acceptance. Not even pain, which would have been manageable, which would have been a feeling she could count through and survive.
This was different. This was the sound of a door closing in a room she hadn’t known she was standing in: a soft, final click, like a lock engaging, like the last tumbler falling into place. He didn’t pull away.
He didn’t pull away.
That was the part she’d remember. Not Justina’s hand, Justina was innocent, Justina was warm, Justina was a woman who touched people because she liked them and had no idea that the hand she was touching had been on Ciana’s skin twelve hours ago.
What Ciana would remember was that Andrei didn’t pull away.
He let another woman’s hand rest on his and he didn’t flinch and he didn’t withdraw and the exclusion zone, the sacred, electric, agonising perimeter he had maintained around Ciana for weeks, didn’t exist for Justina Karpov.
Ciana picked up the bread basket. Returned to the galley. Set it on the counter with the white-knuckle exactness of a woman who would come apart if she let one motion go loose.
She stood there for a long time.
She thought about the first night. The champagne flute. His scarred hands around it, the knuckles catching the reading light. She had noticed. She had been furious with herself for noticing.
Then the turbulence. Three seconds. His palm against her waist, hot through fabric. She had counted every one.
Geneva came back next: the strand of hair, the knuckle on her cheekbone, the burn.
The rain. His mouth opening against hers. The sound.
And the galley at two in the morning: the scars under her hands. His heart slamming against her palms. His fist on the wall. The wrecked, honest, devastating sound he made when his walls came down.
And twelve hours later, another woman’s hand on his, and he didn’t pull away.
She had offered him her first everything. Her first kiss. Her first touch. The first time she had reached for another person instead of letting them go. And his response was to bring Justina Karpov onto the jet and sit beside her and let her touch the hand that Ciana had held against his own heart.
She believed, with the absolute conviction of someone who had never been intimate before, that a man who could do this didn’t love her.
She was wrong.
But he wasn’t going to tell her.
She served the remaining courses with a perfection that was, to anyone watching, indistinguishable from contentment.