The flat was twice the size of her old one. High ceilings, parquet floors, windows that flooded the rooms with the kind of goldenevening light that estate agents would kill to photograph. It was beautiful. It was clearly expensive. And it was full of her things.
Not arranged the way she’d have arranged them, but present. Every book from her shelf, standing in the same colour order she had organised them in, on a new shelf that was longer and deeper than the one in her old flat. Her mugs, the chipped blue one from the marché aux puces, the oversized one Raven had bought her as a joke, the plain white one she used every morning, hanging from hooks in a kitchen that had a window twice the size of her old one. Her kettle on the counter. Her shoes lined up by the door.
And on the bedside table in the bedroom, positioned with a care that made her throat close: the photograph of her mother.
It was a small frame. Silver, slightly tarnished. Her mother at twenty-six, two years older than Ciana was now, laughing at something off-camera in a garden Ciana had never been able to identify. It was the only photograph she had. Her father, in one of his rare moments of tenderness, had given it to her on her tenth birthday. She had kept it on her bedside table in every flat she’d lived in since she was sixteen, through every move, every new address. It was the first thing she unpacked and the last thing she packed and she had never told anyone, not even Raven, how much it meant to her.
Someone had touched it. Someone had lifted it from her old bedside table and carried it here and placed it on this new one, and they had set it at the same angle she always kept it, slightly turned, so her mother’s face was the first thing she saw when she woke up.
Ciana sat on the edge of the new bed. The mattress was better than her old one. The sheets were better. Everything was better,and that was the problem, because better wasn’t the same as chosen, and none of this, not the flat, not the jet, not the six hours sealed in a cabin with a man who caught her when she fell and let go exactly when she didn’t want him to, none of it had been her choice.
She picked up the photograph. Held it. Her mother’s face smiled at something Ciana would never see.
She set it back down. Same angle. Same position.
Some things, at least, she could still control.
The security panel was by the front door.
She hadn’t noticed it on the way in, too stunned by the sight of her own belongings in a stranger’s flat to notice the small touchscreen mounted at eye level beside the entrance. It was new. The installation was clean, professional, built into the wall as though it had always been there. A green light pulsed slowly in the corner of the display. Armed.
She hadn’t requested a security system. She hadn’t requested this flat. She hadn’t requested any of this.
She went to the kitchen. Made tea in her own kettle, in her own mug, because ritual was the scaffolding that held her upright when everything else was swaying. She sat at a table that wasn’t hers with a cup that was and opened her laptop.
The airline’s internal directory had been restructured since the acquisition, new logos, new portals, new corporate language that smelled like lawyers. She navigated to the ownership filings. Côte d’Azur Atlantic SAS had been acquired by a holding company registered in Monaco: Almazov Group International.
Almazov.
She typed it into Google.
The results came fast. A cascade of images and headlines and society-page photographs that assembled, piece by piece, into a picture she hadn’t been prepared to see. A casino on the Monaco waterfront, Ace Royale, that looked less like a business than a declaration of war against modesty. Black marble floors reflecting crystal chandeliers. Frosted glass etched with a crest: a diamond wreathed in flames. Rose petals in crystal bowls at every entrance. Leather chairs branded with a monogram she recognised, the same emblem she had seen on the bulkhead of the jet.
She scrolled. Found a gala photograph. Four men in black, standing in a line that looked less like a photo opportunity and more like a warning. The eldest, tall and sharp-featured, with eyes that even in a photograph seemed to lower the temperature. Beside him, two men of identical height, twins, she thought, though one was smiling and the other wasn’t. And at the edge of the frame, half-turned away as though he hadn’t wanted to be photographed at all, the one she recognised.
The scar was a silver line in the flashbulbs. His jaw was set. His hands were at his sides, and even in a still image she could see the tension in them: the careful, contained readiness of a man who was always bracing for something.
Andrei Almazov. Head of security. The Almazov family.
She read. She read for an hour, then two. The information was fragmentary. The Almazovs existed in the space between public record and rumour, their name surfacing in financial filings and charity galas and, in certain corners of the internet, in whisperedassociations with a word she had to look up to be sure she understood correctly.
Bratva.
The Russian word sat on her screen like a stain. She read the definitions, the explainers, the carefully hedged articles that never quite accused and never quite acquitted. She read about the father, dead, under circumstances no article fully explained. She read about the brothers, four of them, orphaned as teenagers, who had built an empire from wreckage. She read about Ace Royale, which the internet described variously as the most exclusive casino in Europe, a monument to dark money, and a throne room.
She looked at the photograph again. The four men. The black marble behind them. The diamond wreathed in flames.
These aren’t businessmen, she thought.
She closed the laptop. The screen went dark and her own face looked back at her from the black glass, the same face that had looked back at her from the security monitor in the terminal, soft and open and turned toward a man she should never have noticed.
The security panel by the door pulsed green. Armed. Watching. The flat was beautiful and her things were here and someone had placed her mother’s photograph at exactly the right angle, and all of it, every careful, expensive, meticulous detail, had been arranged by a man the internet called Bratva royalty.
Ciana sat in her new kitchen, in her new flat, surrounded by her own belongings in a life she no longer recognised.
Chapter 3
“YOU OWN MY AIRLINE.”
