Then he pulled back.
Something crossed his face, fast, there and gone, but she caught it the way you catch a bird at the edge of your vision: a flash of movement you know you saw but can’t prove. Horror. Not at her. At himself. At his own hand, which had just done the thing he had spent weeks maintaining the exclusion zone to prevent. He looked at his scarred knuckles as though they had betrayed him, and the expression on his face was the expression of a man who had walked into a room he had promised himself he’d never enter.
He turned. Disappeared into the cockpit. The door closed with a sound that was too quiet for a slam but carried the same finality.
Ciana stood in the galley.
She raised her hand to her cheekbone. The skin was warm where his knuckle had been, warm in a way that went deeper than temperature, that felt less like a physical sensation and more like a mark. As though he had left something there. An imprint. A signature written in a language she was only beginning to learn.
The skin burned.
She stood there, touching her own face, wearing his jacket, surrounded by the smell of cedar and smoke, and for the firsttime since this had started, since the security monitor and the memo and the jet and the flat and the photograph of her mother placed at exactly the right angle, she felt something crack in the wall she had built between herself and the truth of what was happening.
He wasn’t doing this because of a promise.
He was doing this because of her.
She pressed her fingertips harder against her cheekbone. The burn didn’t fade.
She heard him at half past midnight.
The snow had stopped. Geneva approach hadn’t reopened, but the quiet outside the windows had shifted from active storm to aftermath: the muffled, crystalline silence of a world buried under fresh white. The cabin was dark. She was half-asleep in one of the rear seats, still wearing his jacket, when his voice carried from the cockpit.
He wasn’t speaking loudly. He was speaking in Russian, low and tight, the way people spoke when they were trying not to be heard and failing because the cabin was small and silent and sound carried through aircraft walls the way truth carried through excuses: inevitably.
She didn’t speak Russian. But she caught one word she recognised, because she had spent two hours on the internet learning everything she could about the man who had bought her life: Alexei. His eldest brother. The one who ran the operation. The cold one.
She held very still. Strained to hear.
His voice shifted, from Russian to French, the transition fluid, mid-sentence. And in French, she understood everything.
“—the girl isn’t your concern, Alexei. She’s mine.”
A pause. The tinny sound of a voice on the other end, clipped, authoritative. She could hear the tone if not the words: a man accustomed to being obeyed.
“She stays on the jet.” Andrei’s voice was quiet. Final. A door closing. “She stays with me.”
Another pause. Longer. Whatever Alexei said made Andrei’s breathing change. She could hear it through the wall, the subtle shift from controlled to bracing.
Then, so quietly she almost missed it: “I’ll find her someone.”
Two promises in the same breath, pulling in opposite directions: keep her close, give her away. He was holding her life in both hands and trying to hand half of it to a stranger, and he couldn’t hear the contradiction because he was too busy honouring a dead man’s wish to notice that it had stopped being about his father a long time ago.
She pressed her back against the bulkhead. Closed her eyes.
His jacket was warm around her shoulders. His knuckles were still on her cheekbone, hours later, a ghost she couldn’t wash off. And he was in the cockpit, on the phone with his brother, planning to hand her to someone good, someone clean, someone safe, someone who wasn’t him, and she understood now, with a clarity that felt like the snowstorm clearing, exactly what was happening.
He had built a cage. But he was the one trapped in it.
The snow lay silent on the tarmac. The cabin ticked. Somewhere in the cockpit, a man who had spent three hundred million euros to keep her close was making plans to let her go.
Ciana pulled his jacket tighter around her shoulders.
She wasn’t going to make this easy for him.
Chapter 4
“WHAT DOES ‘SOMEONEgood’ look like to you?”
