Where else would I kiss him, Raven.
I can think of several places but we’ll revisit that later. WHAT HAPPENED.
He kissed me back. For about one second. Then he told me it can’t happen again.
A longer pause. Then:
The man is an idiot. A beautiful, airline-buying, tragically noble idiot. What are you going to do?
Ciana looked through the curtain gap. He was in his seat, hands on the armrests, staring at the middle distance with the focused intensity of a man trying to solve an equation that had no solution. His jaw was still set. His shoulders were still braced. He looked like a man fighting a war with himself and losing.
I don’t know yet.
She put the phone down. The jet hummed. The clouds thickened and parted and thickened again, and somewhere below them the Mediterranean was the same colour as the suit he had been wearing the first time she saw him: dark, fathomless, impossible to read.
She heard him forty minutes before landing.
The curtain was drawn. She was in the galley, stowing the tea service, her back to the cabin. His voice came from the forward suite, low, urgent, unmistakable. He was on the phone.
She shouldn’t have listened. She knew this. Eavesdropping on a client’s phone call was a violation of every professional standard she had spent four years upholding, and the fact that this client had kissed her back on the tarmac forty minutes ago didn’t change the rule.
She listened anyway.
Russian first, fast, clipped, the cadence of a man delivering instructions rather than making requests. Then the shift, the seamless pivot into French that she had heard through the cockpit wall in Geneva. But this time his voice was different. Not controlled. Not measured. Raw. The voice of a man who had been undone and was trying to reassemble himself by force.
“Accelerate the search.”
She went still.
“I need candidates. Now. Not next month, Alexei. Now.”
The air left her lungs. Not a gasp, an evacuation. Quiet, total, the body’s response to something the mind hasn’t yet processed but the nervous system already knows is a wound.
Candidates. The search. He wasn’t talking about business. He wasn’t talking about security or operations or anything that lived in the leather folio on his table. He was talking about her. About the promise. About finding her someone good.
She had kissed him on the tarmac. She had fisted her hands in his shirt and pulled him down to her and tasted rain and coffee on his mouth and heard the sound he made when his wall came down. She had done the bravest thing she had ever done, she had reached for someone instead of letting them go, and his response, forty minutes later, was to call his brother and accelerate the search for the man he was going to hand her to.
His voice continued, lower now, harder to hear, the words slipping between Russian and French in a way that sounded less like code-switching and more like a man who was losing track of which language he was thinking in. She caught fragments. Clean. Civilian. No history.
The criteria for someone good. The checklist for the man who wasn’t him.
She pressed her hands flat on the counter. The surface was cool and smooth and indifferent, the way surfaces are, the way the world is when your heart is doing something it’s never done before and nobody around you can tell.
He was doubling down. She had kissed him and he had kissed her back and it had meant everything and he was still going to give her away, because the wall she had cracked on the stairs was already being rebuilt, faster and thicker, because Andrei Almazov loved her, she knew this now, knew it the way she knew the exits, the way she knew her own name, and his response to loving her was to find her someone else.
The phone call ended. The cabin went quiet.
She stood in the galley with her hands on the counter and her hair still damp from the rain they had shared and the taste of him still on her mouth, and she made a decision.
If he wanted to find her a husband, fine. Let him search. Let him compile his list of clean, civilian, history-free candidates. Let him hand Alexei the criteria and Alexei hand back a name.
She wasn’t going to make it easy.
And she wasn’t going to let him be.
Chapter 6
“YOU’RE LOOKING FORa husband for me.”
