Page 26 of Hold On to Me
A pause. “Paolo. Paolo Sabbatini. Ci, what happened on that jet?”
“Set it up.”
“Ciana—”
“Set it up. Please.”
Raven was quiet for a long time. Ciana could hear her breathing, the slow, rationed breathing of a woman who wanted to ask twenty questions and was restraining herself because she understood, the way only a best friend could understand, that the steadiness in Ciana’s voice wasn’t strength. It was the last wall standing.
“Okay,” Raven said. Softly. “I’ll set it up.”
“Thank you.”
“Ci?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m here. Whatever it is. I’m here.”
Ciana closed her eyes. “I know.”
She hung up. Set the phone on the counter. Stood in the empty galley on the empty jet and listened to the silence where his presence used to be.
Then she collected her crew bag, descended the stairs, and walked across the tarmac without looking back.
He came back to the jet at midnight.
The airfield was dark. The ground crew had gone home. The A350 sat on the private apron like a sleeping animal, its cabin lit only by the low blue accent lighting that ran along the floor panels, the same light that had illuminated the galley the night before, when she had put her hands on his skin and he had let himself be broken.
He climbed the stairs. Entered the cabin. Stood in the aisle where she had stood, in the space where she had passed him a hundred times, where her shoulder had grazed his and her hip had turned toward his seat and her presence had occupied every molecule of air until he couldn’t breathe without breathing her.
The cabin was empty.
She was gone. Not just from the jet, from his operation, from his world, from the sealed, pressurised universe he had built around them both. He had received the transfer request at eight-fifteen. He had stared at it on his phone for forty minutes. He hadn’t approved it. He hadn’t denied it. He had driven back to theairfield because the jet was the only place that still smelled like her.
He walked through the cabin. Past the owner’s seat. Past the four seats where Justina had sat and laughed and touched his hand and he had endured it, endured it, because endurance was the word for what he had done, sitting beside a woman he felt nothing for while the woman he loved poured champagne three feet away with a smile that had nothing behind it.
Justina was no one. A favour. An acquaintance from the Monaco circuit whom he had called that morning and asked to fly with him for the day. She had agreed because Justina was kind and uncomplicated and had no idea she was being used as a blunt instrument to destroy the last remaining connection between Andrei Almazov and the only woman who had ever made him understand why his father had believed in promises.
He had regretted it before the wheels left the ground.
He had regretted it when Ciana said you’re welcome, Mademoiselle and her voice was warm and professional and not for him. He had regretted it when she smiled at Justina, genuinely, because Ciana wasn’t capable of cruelty even when cruelty was being done to her, and he had seen the warmth in that smile and known that it was the same warmth she had given him, once, in a galley in a snowstorm, before he had destroyed everything.
He had regretted it when Justina touched his hand and he hadn’t pulled away, and across the cabin Ciana’s face had done something he’d never be able to un-see: it had gone still. Not angry. Not hurt. Still. The stillness of a woman watching the last door close.
He walked to the galley. Her galley. He stood where she had stood, hands on the counter, head bowed, the posture a mirror of every moment she had spent in this space processing what he had done to her life. The counter was clean. She had left it immaculate, because she was Ciana and even in the act of leaving she wouldn’t leave a mess for someone else to manage.
He picked up the champagne glass.
Not his, Justina’s. It was still on the table where Ciana had set it during the clearance. The crystal was clean except for a faint crescent of lipstick on the rim, coral, the shade Justina wore, a colour he couldn’t have identified if his life depended on it and would remember for the rest of it.
He stared at the glass.
The lipstick on the rim. The crystal in his scarred hand. The empty cabin. The counter where he had broken apart under her touch and the silence where her presence used to be and the blue light that had illuminated the worst and best moments of his life in the same twenty-four hours.
He hurled the glass at the bulkhead.
The impact was sharp and bright, crystal detonating against the leather wall, fragments spraying across the cabin in a constellation of glass that caught the blue light and scattered it into a hundred broken points. The sound was enormous in the empty cabin. Violent. Honest. The first honest sound he had made with his own hands since she had left.
