She couldn’t hear the other end. But she could see his face. They were close enough, still, for the faint glow of the phone screen to illuminate his expression. And she watched it change. The openness that the kiss had produced, the brief, miraculous dissolution of every wall he’d built, closed over.
And then he was stepping back, and the heat disappeared.
He spoke into the phone. Russian, rapid, clipped. Not the low, rough Russian he had murmured against her mouth. This was operational. This was a man receiving information and processing it and making decisions and the woman he had been kissing thirty seconds ago was watching the transition happenin real time, like watching weather change, like watching a door close.
The call lasted ninety seconds.
He lowered the phone. Looked at her. And the expression on his face, the expression she’d see in the dark behind her eyelids for weeks, the expression that would make her want to scream and weep and shake him until the walls fell again, was a mask. Not blank. Worse than blank. Composed. Deliberate. The face of a man who had chosen, in the ninety seconds of a phone call, to undo everything the kiss had built.
“Alexei has found a candidate,” he said. His voice was level. Almost steady. If she hadn’t been standing close enough to see the vein in his throat pulsing at twice the rate his tone suggested, she might have believed he meant it. “A good man. Clean. Law enforcement background. No connections to our world.”
She stared at him.
He had kissed her. He had held her face in his shaking hands and murmured Russian into her mouth and pressed his forehead against hers and breathed her air and kissed her like she was oxygen, like she was the only breathable thing at forty thousand feet, and now he was standing in the dark cabin with his phone in his hand telling her that his brother had found her a husband.
“You’re serious.”
“The introduction will be on your next layover. Alexei will arrange it.”
“You’re serious.”
He looked at her. And in the half-second before the mask finished forming, in the hairline crack between what he was saying and what his eyes were screaming, she saw it. The devastation. The cost. The look of a man committing an act of violence against himself and calling it honour.
Then the mask closed. The crack sealed. He sat down. Picked up his folio. Opened it to a page he wasn’t going to read.
“You should get some rest,” he said. “We land in three hours.”
She stood in the aisle. The air where his forehead had been against hers was cold. The Russian he had murmured against her mouth was fading, not the memory of it, which would never fade, but the vibration, the physical resonance, the way her lips had felt the words even though she hadn’t understood them.
She didn’t speak. She went to the galley. Drew the curtain.
She stood in the dark with her hands on the counter and her eyes closed and the taste of him still on her mouth and she thought: He kissed me like I was the only thing in the world and he’s still going to give me away.
She thought: I’m not going to let him.
She thought: Whatever Alexei has found, whoever this man is, whatever clean, law-enforcement, connection-free candidate they put in front of me, I’ll sit across from him and I’ll smile and I’ll be polite and I’ll think about the sound Andrei Almazov makes when his walls come down, and I’ll know that no amount of clean hands will ever make me forget it.
She pressed her forehead against the cold steel of the galley cabinet.
Three hours to landing.
The taste of him didn’t fade.
Chapter 7
SHE WAS DONE PLAYINGby his rules.
The candidate introduction was scheduled for the Lisbon layover, four days away, three flights between now and then, three sealed cabins in which Andrei Almazov would sit in his seat and work and drink coffee and maintain the exclusion zone and pretend that he hadn’t kissed her in the dark and murmured Russian into her mouth and shaken against her like a man coming apart at the seams. Three flights in which he’d be composed and professional and armoured and she’d pour his champagne and clear his cup and be a good crew member and accept, gracefully, the slow-motion humiliation of being handed to a stranger by a man who had held her face in his trembling hands and called her oxygen.
She wasn’t going to be graceful about it.
She wasn’t going to be professional.
She was going to make every minute of the next three flights so unbearable for Andrei Almazov that by the time Alexei’s clean, law-enforcement-background, no-connections-to-our-world candidate sat across from her in some Lisbon restaurant, the man who had put her there would know exactly what he was losing.
The first flight was Monaco to Zurich. Three hours. Routine.
She didn’t change her service. She didn’t add words or touches or any of the obvious escalations that would have given him theability to name what she was doing and ask her to stop. She changed the geometry.
