“Four brothers,” she said.
“Alexei is the eldest. Thirty-seven. He runs everything. The family, the business, the pieces of us that don’t fit into polite conversation. He’s cold. People think that means he doesn’t care. They’re wrong. He cares so much he had to freeze it or it’d have burned him alive.”
“Anton.”
“My twin.” Something shifted in his face, not a smile, but the memory of one. The faintest warming. “Charming. Sees everything. The kind of man who can walk into a room full of strangers and leave with every one of them convinced he’s their closest friend. He manages the high-roller relations at Ace Royale. He’s very good at making people feel seen.”
“And Artem?”
“The youngest. Thirty-four. He’s—” A pause. Something complicated passed behind his eyes. “He’s what people think I am. Dangerous. But there’s something else underneath. I’ve seen it. He doesn’t let many people see it.”
“And you?”
“I’m the one who keeps them safe.” He said it simply. Without pride, without self-pity. A job description. “Head of security. It’sa polite way of saying I’m the brother people cross the street to avoid.”
“You’re also the one who bought an airline because his father asked him to look after a girl he’d never met.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not what a dangerous man does, Andrei. That’s what a man who can’t stop keeping promises does.”
He didn’t respond. But his hands, flat on the table, pressed harder against the wood.
“My father was charming,” she said. “The kind of charming that makes you forgive things you shouldn’t.”
She told him. Not everything, not the worst nights, not the landlords, not the particular humiliation of being fourteen and answering the door to a man who said your father owed him money and your father was three countries away and you didn’t know when he was coming back. But enough. She told him about the disappearances: weeks, sometimes months, gone without warning and returning with gifts and no explanation. She told him about the debts she had inherited at sixteen, when Nico Reyes had died in a hospital in Marseille with nothing in his pockets but a photograph of a woman Ciana had never been able to identify and a note written in handwriting that wasn’t his.
She stopped. That note was something she had never told anyone. She didn’t tell Andrei, either, not yet, but she felt the edge of it in the room, the awareness that there were pieces of her father’s story she didn’t have yet, and pieces of Andrei’s she hadn’t been given, and the space between them was the shape of two dead men who had apparently been friends.
“I put myself through training at twenty,” she said. “The airline was the first stable thing I ever had. Routines. A schedule. A flat I paid for myself. I built all of it from nothing, and I built it to be mine, and then you—”
She stopped again. Not because she was angry, though she was, but because the thing pressing against the back of her throat wasn’t anger. It was recognition. Two people shaped by the men who raised them, surviving in opposite ways. He had built walls. She had built routes. Both of them using structure to keep the chaos out, and both of them sitting in a grounded jet in a Swiss snowstorm because neither strategy had worked.
“I know what I took from you,” he said. His voice was low. The kind of low that meant the words were coming from somewhere deep and not without cost. “The airline. The routes. Your friend. The life you built. I told myself it was protection. That I was keeping a promise.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No.” The word was quiet. “It wasn’t.”
He didn’t say what it was instead. He didn’t need to. The silence said it. Or rather, the silence held the space where the truth would go when one of them was brave enough to put it there.
Neither of them was brave enough yet.
It happened the way weather happens, not all at once but in a slow accumulation that you only recognise as a system when it’s already overhead.
The morning had been the conversation. The early afternoon was silence, but not the armed silence of the night before. A different kind. Companionable, almost. She worked in thegalley. He read in his seat. Occasionally she brought him coffee and he took it without maintaining the exclusion zone quite as rigidly as before. Their fingers didn’t touch, but the margin had narrowed from two centimetres to something she could feel as heat rather than measure as distance. The space between them had been shrinking all morning and neither of them was doing anything to stop it.
At half past two, she was in the galley. The counter was narrow. The light was grey and soft from the snow outside, the kind of light that makes everything feel quieter and closer than it is. She was washing the cafetière because it was a task and tasks were all she had left.
She didn’t hear him come in. She felt him, the way you feel a change in air pressure when a door opens in another room. She turned, and he was there.
Not at the entrance. In the galley. One step away. Close enough that she could see the individual threads of silver in his scar, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the way his pupils had gone wide and dark in the dim light. His chest was nearly touching hers. The counter was behind her. There was nowhere to go and she didn’t want to go anywhere.
The space between his mouth and hers was the width of a breath.
She could feel it. Not his lips, not yet, but the warmth that preceded them, the way you feel the sun before you see it crest the horizon. His breath caressed her mouth, and it was warm and uneven and it smelled like the coffee she had made him and something underneath, something that was just him, and her entire world narrowed to the three inches of air between them.
Neither moved.
