Page 25 of Hold On to Me
Justina excused herself to the lavatory.
The cabin was quiet. Just the two of them. The first time they had been alone since the galley.
Ciana collected Justina’s champagne glass. Set a fresh one in its place. She didn’t look at him.
“Ciana.”
His voice. Low. The same voice that had said her name in the Geneva galley, like it cost him something, like it was a wound.
“Will there be anything else, sir?”
Silence.
She looked at him. Met his eyes. And the expression she gave him was the most devastating thing she had ever assembled on her own face: warmth, professionalism, pleasant neutrality. She smiled at him the way she smiled at every passenger in every cabin on every flight for four years. A good smile. A real smile.
Dead behind the eyes.
She watched him see it. Watched the recognition move through him, not shock, not guilt, something worse. Fear. For the first time since she had known him, since the first night in 1A, since the security monitor, since the jet and the flat and the photograph of her mother at the correct angle, Andrei Almazov looked afraid.
Not of her anger. Not of her tears. Of her composure. Of the professionally warm, personally vacant, absolutely finished woman standing in front of him with a champagne bottle in her hand and nothing left in her eyes for him to find.
Justina returned. Ciana served dessert. The flight continued.
She didn’t look at him again.
The jet landed in Nice at seven in the evening. The sky was the colour of a bruise, purple-gold, the Mediterranean flat and dark below the airfield lights. Justina disembarked first, kissing Andrei on the cheek at the door with the easy affection of a woman saying goodbye to a friend, and Ciana watched the kiss graze the cheek below his scar and felt nothing. Not nothing as an absence. Nothing as a presence: a solid, immovable, occupying-every-room nothing that had replaced the part of her that used to feel things about Andrei Almazov.
He stopped at the galley curtain on his way out. She was stowing the crystal. She didn’t turn.
“Ciana.”
“Goodnight, sir. I hope you and Mademoiselle Karpov had a pleasant flight.”
She heard him stand there. She heard the breath he took, deep, uneven, the breath of a man gathering himself to say something he hadn’t rehearsed. She waited for it. She gave him the silence. She gave him every second he needed.
He said nothing.
He left.
She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. Heavy. Slow. Not the long strides of his usual departure but the measured, deliberate steps of a man walking away from something he didn’t want to leave. The stairs shifted under his weight. The tarmac received him. The car door opened and closed.
Silence.
She stood in the galley. Their galley. The counter where his fist had hit the wall and his head had gone back and the sound had come out of him like something being born. She pressed her hands flat on that counter, his counter, their counter, the surface where everything had happened and nothing could be undone, and she made a decision.
The quiet, final kind.
She filed the transfer request from her phone. Standing in the galley, thumbs moving across the screen, navigating the airline’s internal portal to the reassignment form. Reason for request:personal. Preferred assignment: commercial routes. Effective date: immediate.
She sent it.
Then she called Raven.
“I need you to do something for me.”
Raven’s voice went sharp. Not with alarm, with the particular alertness of a woman who could hear the absence of something in her best friend’s voice and was trying to identify what was missing. “What happened?”
“The colleague. The one you mentioned last month, your friend from the Interpol liaison programme. The kind one. You said he asked about me.”
