Chapter 9 #2
“I’ll tell you what Alexei said. But first I need you to answer something. Why did you leave?”
She almost laughed. “You know why I left.”
“I know what he did. I want to hear why it made you leave.”
She set the glass down. Looked at Anton, at his face, which was Andrei’s face rewritten in warmth, the same features made gentle and open and readable, and told him.
“Because I had never touched a man before him. Not like that. Not any of it. And twelve hours later there was a woman in my seat.”
Anton closed his eyes. Briefly. The expression that crossed his face was pain, not for himself, for his brother, for the magnitude of the mistake his twin had made.
“I need to ask,” she said. Her voice was steady. She was tired of it being steady. “Why did he bring that woman onto the plane?”
“Because he’s an idiot.” Anton said it the way a man says something he has said a hundred times, with deadpan affection, a man who had called his brother an idiot many times and meant it every time.
“Because he thought if he made you hate him, it’d be easier for you to leave.
Because he doesn’t know how to love someone without trying to protect them from himself. ”
The words sat in the room. She let them.
“He loves me.” Not a question.
“He loves you the way only a man who thinks he’s a monster can love someone, completely, destructively, and from behind every wall he can build.
Ciana, my brother bought an airline because the alternative was telling you he was in love with you.
That isn’t the behaviour of a man with a healthy relationship to his own emotions. ”
“Tell me what Alexei said.”
Anton poured himself more wine. Settled back in his chair. The weary expression hadn’t lifted. If anything, it had deepened, as though what he was about to recount was something he had carried for weeks and was only now setting down.
“Alexei called a meeting. Just the brothers. This was the day after you filed the transfer. Andrei was—” He paused.
Chose a word. “Devastated isn’t strong enough.
He was annihilated. He sat in Alexei’s office and he said what he said, I found her someone good, are you satisfied, and he meant it as an accusation.
As though fulfilling the promise was something Alexei had forced on him. As though any of us had wanted this.”
He drank. Set the glass down.
“Alexei looked at him. You have to understand, Alexei is cold. People think that means he doesn’t feel. Alexei feels everything. He just processes it at a temperature that would kill the rest of us. He looked at Andrei and he said—”
Anton’s voice changed. Not an imitation, a channelling. The warmth drained from his tone, replaced by something precise and still and cutting, and Ciana understood that she was hearing Alexei Almazov’s voice through his twin’s mouth.
“‘You misunderstood Father. “Someone good” was never about clean hands or a civilian life. Father didn’t mean someone with no record, no scars, no history. Someone good is someone who knows he’s not perfect but keeps trying because he cares.
You’re past that, brother. You don’t just care.
You love her. And you’ve been so busy deciding you’re not good enough that you’ve become exactly the kind of man Father warned against, the kind who hurts people by running from what he feels. ’”
The kitchen was very quiet.
Ciana sat with her hands around her wineglass and the words settling into her like sediment, rearranging everything.
The promise. The cage. The airline, the flat, the photograph at the correct angle.
The exclusion zone. The three-second hold.
The cheekbone. The name in the galley. The rain.
The Russian in the dark. The galley at two a.m. Justina Karpov’s hand on his.
The dead eyes. The transfer. All of it, every moment, every touch, every silence, reframed by a dead man’s words reinterpreted by his eldest son.
Daniil Almazov hadn’t asked for a civilian. He had asked for someone who cared.
And Andrei had cared so much he’d destroyed everything.
“What did Andrei say?” she asked.
“Nothing. He walked out. He went to the hangar. He sat in your galley for three hours. Anton—” He caught himself, smiled faintly at the third-person slip. “I found him there. He didn’t speak. He was holding a piece of broken crystal. From a champagne glass, I think. He wouldn’t let go of it.”
Ciana closed her eyes. The champagne glass.
The one she’d heard about from no one but could see perfectly: the crystal she had set on the table for Justina, the lipstick on the rim, the wall it had been hurled against. He had kept a piece of the wreckage.
He was holding it in the galley like a relic from a life he’d ruined.
She opened her eyes.
“If he wants me,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake, “he’ll have to come get me himself. And he’ll have to explain the woman. To my face. Without hiding behind a promise or a brother.”
Anton stood. Set his glass on the table. The weary expression had shifted, not into hope, not quite, but into something adjacent. The look of a man who had delivered a message and received an answer and believed, cautiously, that the answer was enough.
“I’ll tell him.”
“No.”
He stopped. Looked at her.
“No. If he can’t figure that out on his own, then Alexei is wrong. And so am I.”
Anton studied her for a long moment. Then he smiled, a real smile, the first full one she had seen on a face that looked like Andrei’s, and it was dazzling.
The kind of smile that explained why he managed high-roller relations.
The kind that made you understand why people trusted him with their secrets.
“You’re exactly what my brother needs,” he said. “And he’s an idiot. Both of these things are true.”
He left. The door closed. The wine was half-finished on the table and the kitchen was quiet and Ciana sat in her chair and pressed her hand to her collarbone and felt the ghost of a touch that had never been there and waited.
The text came at seven the next morning.
She was in a crew hotel in London, a layover on the Nice–Paris–London route, the kind of anonymous, efficient hotel that existed solely to give flight crews eight hours of horizontal rest before sending them back into the sky.
She had slept badly. She had dreamed about the galley, not the A350 galley but a version of it, larger, darker, and he was there, and she was there, and neither of them could find the door.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Raven.
He’s here.
She stared at the screen. The letters were sharp and bright against the dark of the room.
At the crew hotel. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a month. He asked for your room number. They said no. He’s sitting in the lobby.
A pause. Then:
He says he’ll wait.
Ciana set the phone down. Picked it up. Set it down again.
He was here. Not in Monaco, not in a hangar, not on the other end of a phone call with his brother.
Here. In London. In the lobby of a crew hotel that he had no business being in, at seven in the morning, looking like he hadn’t slept in a month and asking for her room number and being told no and deciding, with the implacable, infuriating, devastatingly Andrei logic of a man who had once bought an airline to be near her, that he’d wait.
She put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
She lay back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling.
He had come. Without Anton telling him. Without a brother or a promise or an excuse.
He had figured it out on his own, or he hadn’t, and it didn’t matter because he was here and he was waiting and the decision she had been holding since Istanbul, since the note, since don’t let him be, was no longer forming. It was formed.
She was going to go down to that lobby.
But not yet.
She was going to make him wait.