“I want the first night of our marriage to be at forty thousand feet because that’s where we started and that’s where I want us to begin.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up his phone and made a single call.
“Anton. I need a favour. Several, actually. A marriage officiant by noon. The jet fuelled and filed for a night routing. And tell Alexei.”
A pause. She could hear Anton’s voice on the other end, not the words, but the tone. Delight. Absolute, unrestrained, Anton-level delight.
“Yes,” Andrei said. “Today.”
He hung up. Looked at her. And the thing that was almost a smile became, for one brief, shattering moment, an actual smile. Small. Uncertain. The smile of a man who had never had reason to practise and was doing it for the first time because the woman across the table had asked him to marry her over coffee and meant it.
The ceremony was in the Ace Royale penthouse at half past two.
Small. Anton as witness, grinning, of course, grinning so hard it looked like his face might split, holding a glass of champagne he had poured before the officiant had even arrived because Anton Almazov didn’t wait for occasions to begin before celebrating them. Raven beside Ciana, she had flown in from Nice on a charter Andrei had arranged in ninety minutes, and she had walked into the penthouse and looked at Ciana and looked at Andrei and said, very quietly, “You impossible woman. You magnificent, impossible woman,” and then she had hugged Ciana so hard that Ciana’s composure had cracked for the first time in weeks and she had laughed into Raven’s shoulder with the uncomplicated joy of a woman who had found her way home.
Artem stood by the window. Quiet. Watchful. The youngest brother, the enforcer, the one whose ruthless facade hid something Ciana had glimpsed only once, in the lobby, when a waitress had stumbled and his hand had been gentle. He stood apart from the others, hands in his pockets, dark eyes on the ceremony with an expression that wasn’t cold but careful. Guarded. The face of a man watching other people’s happiness with the focused attention of someone who didn’t expect it for himself.
And Alexei.
He stood at the far end of the room, as he had stood at the far end of every room she had ever seen him occupy, separate, contained, the temperature around him several degrees lower than the rest of the penthouse. He wore black. His face gave nothing away. He hadn’t spoken since he arrived, and Ciana had the impression that Alexei Almazov didn’t speak unless thewords he had to offer were worth more than the silence they’d replace.
The officiant spoke. The words were French and brief and legal. Andrei held her hands, both of them, his scarred fingers wrapped around hers, and his grip was firm and his eyes were wet and he said “oui” in a voice that was raw and reverent and absolutely certain.
She said “oui” and meant it the way she had never meant anything.
And when it was done, when the officiant closed his book and Anton whooped and Raven wiped her eyes and the penthouse filled with the sound of champagne being opened, Ciana looked across the room at Alexei.
He was watching her. The eldest. The coldest. The one who had reinterpreted a dead man’s promise and sent his brother to a hotel lobby in London at seven in the morning. He looked at Ciana, this woman who had seen his kingdom and his brother’s scars and the worst cruelty the Almazov world could produce and had chosen to walk in anyway, and he did something no one had ever seen him do.
He smiled.
Small. Brief. Gone before anyone else caught it. But Ciana saw it, and she understood that it wasn’t warmth, Alexei didn’t do warmth, it was acknowledgment. The approval of a man who had spent his life building a kingdom and had just watched a woman prove she was strong enough to live in it.
She smiled back.
The jet was waiting on the Monaco tarmac at sunset.
The same jet, the matte-black A350 she had boarded with her spine straight and her fury quiet on the first morning of her new life. The cabin hadn’t changed: six seats, dark leather, the diamond wreathed in flames on the forward bulkhead. Nor had the galley, where she had pressed her hands to the counter and counted her way through every impossible thing this man had done to her life.
She boarded first. Not to the galley.
She sat in 1A. The owner’s seat. His seat.
He boarded after her. Saw where she was sitting. Stopped.
The look on his face, she’d keep that too. Alongside the smile. Alongside the sound he had made when she laced her fingers through his. A collection she was building, piece by piece, of the moments when Andrei Almazov’s walls came down and the man underneath was visible, and he wasn’t a monster, and he wasn’t stone. He was a man who had just married a woman who was sitting in his seat, in his jet, wearing a simple white dress she had bought that afternoon in Monaco, and looking at him as though he were just a man.
He sat beside her. The engines spooled.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. Up.”
The ground fell away.
Monaco receded beneath them, the coastline a ribbon of gold, the sea black and vast, the sky opening above them like a door into something limitless. The cabin was warm. The lights were low. They were alone at forty thousand feet, and the world belowwas a map of lights that meant nothing because everything that mattered was here.
She stood.
