The return leg was quieter. He closed the folio. Sat with his hands on the armrests, those hands, always those hands, andwatched the Mediterranean slide beneath them through the window. She served coffee. He took it black, no sugar, and the cup looked like a toy in his grip.
She was in the aisle, returning to the galley with the empty cup, when the turbulence hit.
Not gentle. Not the polite shudder of a plane adjusting altitude. This was a fist, a sudden, violent drop that threw the cabin sideways and sent Ciana stumbling. Her hand shot out for the nearest headrest and missed. Her balance went. The cup she was carrying shattered somewhere behind her and she was falling, falling toward the carpet with nothing to catch herself on—
His hand.
His hand caught her waist.
Not her arm, not her shoulder. Her waist. His palm landed on the curve above her hip, fingers splayed across her side, and even through the fabric of her jacket and her blouse and whatever else separated his skin from hers, the heat of him was immediate. Not warmth, but heat. Something was happening to her body where his hand was and she couldn’t make it stop.
She counted.
One.
His grip tightened. Not pulling her closer, holding her steady. She could feel each finger individually, the way you can feel each note in a chord if you listen hard enough.
Two.
The plane levelled. The turbulence passed. The cabin was stable. There was no reason for him to still be holding her and he was still holding her.
Three.
He let go.
Exactly on three. Exactly at the moment when she had begun to think he wouldn’t, when her body had started to adjust to the pressure of his hand as though it might become permanent, he released her. His fingers uncurled from her waist and returned to the armrest and he didn’t look at her and he didn’t apologise and he didn’t explain.
Ciana straightened. Smoothed her jacket where his hand had been. The fabric was warm.
“Thank you,” she said, because professionalism required it.
He nodded. The same minimal gesture from the commercial flights, the one that could have been breathing.
She walked to the galley. Pulled the curtain. Pressed her hand to her waist where his had been and felt the warmth fading like an afterimage, the ghost of a light you’d stared at too long.
Three seconds. She had counted every one. And the worst part, the part she wouldn’t tell Raven, the part she wouldn’t admit to anyone, the part she barely admitted to herself, was that she had wanted a fourth.
The car was waiting on the tarmac.
Not a taxi. Not a hire car. A black Mercedes with tinted windows and a driver who held the door for her as though she were the client and not the crew. Andrei had disembarked first, longstrides, no backward glance, and disappeared into a second car that pulled away before she had finished collecting her bag.
“Where are we going?” she asked the driver.
“Your new residence, Mademoiselle Reyes.”
“My what?”
He didn’t repeat himself. He drove. Nice slid past the windows in its evening colours, the palm-lined sweep of the Promenade, the faded pastels of the Old Town, the climbing streets of the residential quarters, and then turned into a neighbourhood Ciana knew by sight but had never lived in. Cimiez. Quiet, wide streets, Belle Époque architecture, the kind of area where the buildings had balconies with ironwork that had been there since before her grandmother was born.
The car stopped in front of a limestone building with tall windows and a small courtyard garden visible through a wrought-iron gate. The driver opened her door.
“There must be a mistake,” Ciana said.
“Third floor, Mademoiselle. The code is 4791.”
She went up because the alternative was standing on the street arguing with a man who clearly had his instructions and no authority to deviate from them. The staircase was marble, worn smooth in the centre from a century of feet. The landing smelled like beeswax and old stone. She punched in the code. The door opened.
She understood immediately.
