Page 23 of Hold On to Me
There was a woman in the cabin.
She was sitting in one of the four seats that faced each other across the walnut table, the seats that Ciana had never seen anyone occupy, because the jet was configured for one and the one was always Andrei and the rest of the cabin was always empty. The woman wasn’t empty. She was luminous. Tall, dark-haired, the kind of beautiful that had been assembled with care and money and the genetic confidence of someone who had never in her life walked into a room and wondered if she belonged there. She wore a cream silk blouse and gold at her throat and she was reading something on a tablet with the poised disinterest of a woman who had been placed here and was waiting, patiently, for the scene to begin.
Ciana stood in the doorway. Her crew bag was on her shoulder. Her hands were at her sides.
She heard the stairs shift. Heavy footsteps. The particular creak that only one person’s weight produced.
Andrei boarded behind her. She stepped aside to let him pass, professional, automatic, the body remembering its choreography even when the mind was somewhere else entirely.He moved through the cabin without looking at her. He sat in the seat beside the woman. Not his usual seat, not the forward suite, not the owner’s chair. The seat beside her.
His hand, the scarred one, the one that had gripped the counter last night while she took him apart, the one that had framed her face in the rain, the one that had grazed her cheekbone in Geneva, settled on the woman’s armrest.
Not touching her. But close. Close enough.
Ciana looked at that hand. She looked at the armrest. She looked at the beautiful woman who glanced up from her tablet and gave Ciana a smile that was warm and polite and completely, devastatingly innocent.
Something inside Ciana’s chest didn’t break. Breaking was a violent word, a loud word, a word for things that shattered. This was quieter. This was a door closing. A lock turning. A woman who had never been intimate with anyone, who had reached for this man last night with the first vulnerable act of her life, watching his hand rest on another woman’s armrest twelve hours later and feeling the last warm, stubborn, irrational part of herself go still.
She picked up the champagne bottle.
Chapter 8
SHE POURED CHAMPAGNEfor the woman Andrei brought onto the jet and didn’t spill a single drop.
Dom Pérignon. The same case she had opened weeks ago, the first morning on this aircraft, when the only person in the cabin was a scarred, silent man in the owner’s seat and the only thing she had known about him was that his hands around a champagne flute made her notice things she had no business noticing. She lifted the bottle now with the same professional grip, the same forty-five-degree angle, the same controlled pour that turned the wine into a thin gold ribbon unspooling into crystal without a sound. She had done this a thousand times. She could do it in her sleep. She could do it while something inside her chest was turning to stone.
“Thank you,” the woman said. Her voice was warm. Low, musical, the kind of voice that had been shaped by good schools and easy confidence and a life in which champagne on a private jet wasn’t remarkable. She smiled at Ciana, a real smile, full of the casual kindness of a woman who had no idea she was a weapon.
“You’re welcome, Mademoiselle—?”
“Karpov. Justina.” Another smile. “Please, just Justina.”
Ciana smiled back. “Of course. Please let me know if you need anything at all.”
She turned to him. He was in the seat beside Justina, not the forward suite, not the owner’s chair where he always sat. He had moved. He had rearranged himself in his own cabin to sit beside this woman, and the displacement was so deliberate, so unmistakably staged, that Ciana felt a brief, incandescent flare of something that might have been fury if it hadn’t been immediately smothered by something colder.
“Champagne, sir?”
“Please.”
She poured. His fingers arrived first: the exclusion zone, the perimeter, the careful margin of air that he had maintained since the first night on the commercial flight. Two centimetres. The same two centimetres. As though nothing had changed. As though last night, the galley, the dark, her hands on his skin, his fist on the wall, the sound that would live inside her until she died, had been a dream she’d had alone.
She retreated to the galley. Drew the curtain. Pressed her hands flat on the counter.
Six hours. Monaco to somewhere, she hadn’t looked at the routing, didn’t care, would fly to the edge of the world and back if that was what the manifest said because the manifest was the only part of this situation she could still read without her vision blurring. Six hours of service. Of champagne and coffee and meal courses and warm smiles for the beautiful woman in the cabin and professional composure for the man beside her and nothing, not one tremor, not one crack, not one visible sign, that would give him the satisfaction of seeing her break.
She straightened her vest. Checked her chignon. Went back to work. And if anyone had been watching her the way Andrei waswatching her, from the corner of his eye, over the rim of a glass he wasn’t drinking, they would have thought the same thing he was thinking.
She was magnificent.
She didn’t know this. She wouldn’t have used the word. But the service she delivered over the next six hours was the finest work of her career, not because she was performing but because she had retreated so far behind professionalism that it had become a kind of armour, and inside the armour she was untouchable and outside it she was perfect.
She anticipated Justina’s preferences with an intuition that bordered on clairvoyance. The woman liked her champagne cold but not glacial; Ciana adjusted the chiller. She ate slowly, savouring; Ciana timed the courses to give her room. She spoke with her hands, animated and warm, and twice she gestured too broadly and nearly caught her glass; Ciana had already moved it.
She smiled each time Justina spoke to her. Not the tight, formal smile of a crew member enduring a shift, but a genuine smile, full, warm, the smile of a woman who understood that Justina Karpov wasn’t the enemy. Justina was a prop. A beautiful, innocent, completely unsuspecting prop in a performance directed by the man beside her, and Ciana wasn’t going to punish an actress for a script she hadn’t written.
“You’re wonderful at this,” Justina said, halfway through the second course. “How long have you been flying?”
“Four years.”
