She crossed the room. Looked down. A note had been slipped under her door, a single sheet of hotel stationery, folded once, written in a hand that was nothing like Andrei’s. His writing was precise, controlled, small. This was loose, confident, the kind of handwriting that belonged to someone who talked with his hands and laughed easily and had never in his life written anything without wanting it to be read.
She unfolded it.
I’ve known my brother for thirty-five years. I’ve never seen him say someone’s name the way he says yours. He’s wrong about what he thinks he’s doing. Don’t let him be.
It was unsigned. It didn’t need to be. She knew, from the handwriting, from the warmth in it, from the fact that it existed at all, that it was from the twin. The charming one. The one who saw everything.
Anton.
She read it again. Then a third time. Then she held it against her chest and stared at the ceiling and felt something crack, not in the wall she had built around herself, but in the story she had been telling herself about what was happening. The story in which she was a woman being moved around a board by a man who didn’t know how to want what he wanted. That story was still true. But Anton’s note added a line to it she hadn’t considered.
Don’t let him be.
She had spent her entire life letting people be. Letting her father drift into his absences without protest. Letting friends fall away when the effort of holding on became heavier than the loneliness of letting go. She had built a life around the principle of non-interference, if you don’t hold on, it doesn’t hurt when they leave, and it had worked, in the way that tourniquets work: by cutting off circulation to save the limb.
Now a stranger, Andrei’s twin, a man she had never met, was telling her that the man she wanted was making a mistake, and she could stop it. Not by being careful. Not by counting and waiting and holding still. By doing something. By refusing to let him be.
She set the note on the bedside table, beside the phone. The hotel room was quiet. Istanbul hummed outside the window, a city built on the fault line between two continents, a place that had survived by refusing to choose one world over the other.
Ciana lay back on the bed. She didn’t sleep. She stared at the ceiling and felt the shape of a decision forming, not yet made, not yet solid, but there. A presence in the room, like the presence of a man in a doorway, like the warmth of a breath that hadn’t quite become a kiss.
Don’t let him be.
She wasn’t going to.
Chapter 5
RAIN ON THE ISTANBULtarmac. Warm rain, not the Swiss cold of Geneva but something Mediterranean, almost subtropical, the kind of rain that fell in sheets and smelled like tarmac and jet fuel and the particular electricity of a city built between two seas.
Ciana stood between the jet and the waiting car and let it soak her.
The driver had the rear door open. The hotel was twenty minutes away. A dry room, a locked door, a bed she could lie on and stare at the ceiling and tell herself that the note under her door had been a stranger’s presumption, that she owed Anton Almazov nothing, that she owed his brother less, that the smart thing, the safe thing, the Ciana thing, was to get in the car and go.
She didn’t get in the car.
Don’t let him be.
She had carried the note in her jacket pocket all morning. Had reread it twice in the car to the airfield and once more on the tarmac before the rain started. The words were simple. The handwriting was warm. And the instruction cut through every defence she had built in twenty-four years of letting people be, because it was the one thing no one had ever asked her to do: stay. Fight. Refuse to walk away from someone who was walking away from himself.
She had spent her entire life letting people be. Letting her father drift into his disappearances without protest, because protest required hope, and hope required believing he’d come back, and believing he’d come back required a kind of faith she had burned through by the time she was twelve. Letting friends slip when the effort of holding on became heavier than the loneliness of letting go. Letting herself become the woman who counted exits and kept her hands steady and never, under any circumstances, needed anyone enough to be destroyed by their leaving.
Anton’s note was asking her to stop.
She turned away from the car. Turned back toward the jet.
He was at the top of the airstairs.
She saw him before he saw her, or rather, before he let her see that he’d seen her, because she was beginning to understand that Andrei Almazov saw everything and showed nothing, that his stillness wasn’t absence but surveillance, and that the exclusion zone he maintained around her wasn’t the behaviour of a man who didn’t want to touch her but of a man who wanted to so badly he had built an entire perimeter to prevent it.
He was holding his jacket. Not wearing it, holding it, extended in one hand, as though he had been about to descend the stairs and hold it over her head for the rain. She’d think about that later. The jacket. The instinct. The fact that a man who was planning to hand her off to a stranger had come to the top of the stairs with his jacket ready to shield her from the weather, because even in the act of pushing her away he couldn’t stop protecting her.
She walked toward him.
The rain was heavy now. It plastered her blouse to her shoulders and turned her hair from its careful chignon into something wild and loose and not at all cabin-professional. She didn’t care. She climbed the stairs, one, two, three, four, five, counting, always counting, but this time counting upward, toward him, instead of away.
She stopped one step below the top. At this height, their eyes were nearly level. She had never been this close to his face without the mediation of service, without a tray, a bottle, a professional reason to be in his space. There was no professional reason now. There was only the rain and the stairs and the two of them and the jacket he was still holding in one hand as though he had forgotten it existed.
Rain ran along his scar. The silver line caught the water and channelled it down his cheek in a thin, glistening stream that followed the fault line from temple to jaw and dripped from the hinge. She watched a single drop gather at the lowest point of the scar, hang, fall.
