Chapter 8 #2
She brought the entrée. She poured the wine.
She cleared the plates with the smooth, unhurried rhythm of a woman who loved her work and took pride in doing it well and wasn’t, at any point, dying inside.
She smiled at Justina. She refilled Andrei’s water at the twenty-two-minute interval she had established on the first flight and hadn’t deviated from since, because if she changed even one detail of her service he’d know that something had broken, and she wouldn’t give him that.
Justina excused herself to the lavatory.
The cabin was quiet. Just the two of them. The first time they had been alone since the galley.
Ciana collected Justina’s champagne glass. Set a fresh one in its place. She didn’t look at him.
“Ciana.”
His voice. Low. The same voice that had said her name in the Geneva galley, like it cost him something, like it was a wound.
“Will there be anything else, sir?”
Silence.
She looked at him. Met his eyes. And the expression she gave him was the most devastating thing she had ever assembled on her own face: warmth, professionalism, pleasant neutrality.
She smiled at him the way she smiled at every passenger in every cabin on every flight for four years. A good smile. A real smile.
Dead behind the eyes.
She watched him see it. Watched the recognition move through him, not shock, not guilt, something worse.
Fear. For the first time since she had known him, since the first night in 1A, since the security monitor, since the jet and the flat and the photograph of her mother at the correct angle, Andrei Almazov looked afraid.
Not of her anger. Not of her tears. Of her composure. Of the professionally warm, personally vacant, absolutely finished woman standing in front of him with a champagne bottle in her hand and nothing left in her eyes for him to find.
Justina returned. Ciana served dessert. The flight continued.
She didn’t look at him again.
The jet landed in Nice at seven in the evening.
The sky was the colour of a bruise, purple-gold, the Mediterranean flat and dark below the airfield lights.
Justina disembarked first, kissing Andrei on the cheek at the door with the easy affection of a woman saying goodbye to a friend, and Ciana watched the kiss graze the cheek below his scar and felt nothing.
Not nothing as an absence. Nothing as a presence: a solid, immovable, occupying-every-room nothing that had replaced the part of her that used to feel things about Andrei Almazov.
He stopped at the galley curtain on his way out. She was stowing the crystal. She didn’t turn.
“Ciana.”
“Goodnight, sir. I hope you and Mademoiselle Karpov had a pleasant flight.”
She heard him stand there. She heard the breath he took, deep, uneven, the breath of a man gathering himself to say something he hadn’t rehearsed. She waited for it. She gave him the silence. She gave him every second he needed.
He said nothing.
He left.
She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. Heavy. Slow. Not the long strides of his usual departure but the measured, deliberate steps of a man walking away from something he didn’t want to leave. The stairs shifted under his weight. The tarmac received him. The car door opened and closed.
Silence.
She stood in the galley. Their galley. The counter where his fist had hit the wall and his head had gone back and the sound had come out of him like something being born.
She pressed her hands flat on that counter, his counter, their counter, the surface where everything had happened and nothing could be undone, and she made a decision.
The quiet, final kind.
She filed the transfer request from her phone. Standing in the galley, thumbs moving across the screen, navigating the airline’s internal portal to the reassignment form. Reason for request: personal. Preferred assignment: commercial routes. Effective date: immediate.
She sent it.
Then she called Raven.
“I need you to do something for me.”
Raven’s voice went sharp. Not with alarm, with the particular alertness of a woman who could hear the absence of something in her best friend’s voice and was trying to identify what was missing. “What happened?”
“The colleague. The one you mentioned last month, your friend from the Interpol liaison programme. The kind one. You said he asked about me.”
A pause. “Paolo. Paolo Sabbatini. Ci, what happened on that jet?”
“Set it up.”
“Ciana—”
“Set it up. Please.”
Raven was quiet for a long time. Ciana could hear her breathing, the slow, rationed breathing of a woman who wanted to ask twenty questions and was restraining herself because she understood, the way only a best friend could understand, that the steadiness in Ciana’s voice wasn’t strength. It was the last wall standing.
“Okay,” Raven said. Softly. “I’ll set it up.”
“Thank you.”
“Ci?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m here. Whatever it is. I’m here.”
Ciana closed her eyes. “I know.”
She hung up. Set the phone on the counter. Stood in the empty galley on the empty jet and listened to the silence where his presence used to be.
Then she collected her crew bag, descended the stairs, and walked across the tarmac without looking back.
He came back to the jet at midnight.
The airfield was dark. The ground crew had gone home.
The A350 sat on the private apron like a sleeping animal, its cabin lit only by the low blue accent lighting that ran along the floor panels, the same light that had illuminated the galley the night before, when she had put her hands on his skin and he had let himself be broken.
He climbed the stairs. Entered the cabin.
Stood in the aisle where she had stood, in the space where she had passed him a hundred times, where her shoulder had grazed his and her hip had turned toward his seat and her presence had occupied every molecule of air until he couldn’t breathe without breathing her.
The cabin was empty.
She was gone. Not just from the jet, from his operation, from his world, from the sealed, pressurised universe he had built around them both.
He had received the transfer request at eight-fifteen.
He had stared at it on his phone for forty minutes.
He hadn’t approved it. He hadn’t denied it.
He had driven back to the airfield because the jet was the only place that still smelled like her.
He walked through the cabin. Past the owner’s seat.
Past the four seats where Justina had sat and laughed and touched his hand and he had endured it, endured it, because endurance was the word for what he had done, sitting beside a woman he felt nothing for while the woman he loved poured champagne three feet away with a smile that had nothing behind it.
Justina was no one. A favour. An acquaintance from the Monaco circuit whom he had called that morning and asked to fly with him for the day.
She had agreed because Justina was kind and uncomplicated and had no idea she was being used as a blunt instrument to destroy the last remaining connection between Andrei Almazov and the only woman who had ever made him understand why his father had believed in promises.
He had regretted it before the wheels left the ground.
He had regretted it when Ciana said you’re welcome, Mademoiselle and her voice was warm and professional and not for him.
He had regretted it when she smiled at Justina, genuinely, because Ciana wasn’t capable of cruelty even when cruelty was being done to her, and he had seen the warmth in that smile and known that it was the same warmth she had given him, once, in a galley in a snowstorm, before he had destroyed everything.
He had regretted it when Justina touched his hand and he hadn’t pulled away, and across the cabin Ciana’s face had done something he’d never be able to un-see: it had gone still. Not angry. Not hurt. Still. The stillness of a woman watching the last door close.
He walked to the galley. Her galley. He stood where she had stood, hands on the counter, head bowed, the posture a mirror of every moment she had spent in this space processing what he had done to her life.
The counter was clean. She had left it immaculate, because she was Ciana and even in the act of leaving she wouldn’t leave a mess for someone else to manage.
He picked up the champagne glass.
Not his, Justina’s. It was still on the table where Ciana had set it during the clearance. The crystal was clean except for a faint crescent of lipstick on the rim, coral, the shade Justina wore, a colour he couldn’t have identified if his life depended on it and would remember for the rest of it.
He stared at the glass.
The lipstick on the rim. The crystal in his scarred hand. The empty cabin. The counter where he had broken apart under her touch and the silence where her presence used to be and the blue light that had illuminated the worst and best moments of his life in the same twenty-four hours.
He hurled the glass at the bulkhead.
The impact was sharp and bright, crystal detonating against the leather wall, fragments spraying across the cabin in a constellation of glass that caught the blue light and scattered it into a hundred broken points.
The sound was enormous in the empty cabin.
Violent. Honest. The first honest sound he had made with his own hands since she had left.
He stood in the dark. Surrounded by broken crystal. The fragments glittered on the carpet like something precious that had been destroyed beyond repair.
He sat down. In her galley. On the floor. His back against the counter, his scarred hands on his knees, his head bowed.
He knew, with absolute clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives too late, that illuminates the wreckage after the act rather than the path before it, that he had destroyed the only real thing in his life.
The blue light pulsed. The cabin ticked.
Somewhere in Nice, a woman who had offered him everything was walking away, and she wasn’t coming back, and the man who loved her was sitting in the dark surrounded by broken glass because he had decided, with the ruthless, misguided, catastrophic logic of a man who believed he was a monster, that breaking her heart was the kindest thing he could do.
He had been wrong about everything.
The crystal glittered. The cabin was empty. The night was very long.