Page 8 of Hold On to Me
She said it at thirty-eight thousand feet because there was nowhere for either of them to run.
He was in his seat, the forward suite, the owner’s seat, with the leather folio closed on the table and his hands resting on the armrests in that composed, contained way she was beginning to understand wasn’t calm but restraint. The cabin hummed with engine noise. Outside the windows, the Alps slid past in white silence, and Ciana stood in the aisle with a coffee pot she had no intention of pouring and said the words she had been building toward since two o’clock that morning, when she had closed her laptop and stared at the ceiling of her new flat and counted the ways her life had been rearranged by the man sitting six feet in front of her.
He didn’t deny it.
That was the thing she hadn’t been prepared for. She had rehearsed this confrontation during the drive to the airfield, silent in the back of the black Mercedes, watching Nice recede in the pre-dawn dark, and in every version she had imagined, he deflected. Lied. Offered the bland, lawyered non-answers that men with three-hundred-million-euro holding companies gave when cornered. She had prepared for evasion.
He gave her the truth instead.
“Yes.”
One word. No inflection. No apology. He looked at her the way he always looked at her, like she was something he had been studying for a long time and hadn’t yet finished understanding.
“The airline. My reassignment. The jet. The flat.” She set the coffee pot on the counter beside his seat because her hands needed to be empty for this. “The security system I didn’t ask for. The photograph of my mother positioned at exactly the angle I keep it. All of it. You.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The silence that followed was long enough for her to count. She didn’t. She was tired of counting. She wanted an answer.
He looked at the window. Then at his hands. Then, and this cost him something, she could see it in the way his jaw shifted, at her.
“Your father and mine were friends.”
Of all the things she had expected him to say, that wasn’t one of them. Her father, charming, reckless, impossible Nico Reyes, had been many things, but a man with friends in the Almazov world wasn’t something she had ever considered. Her father’s world had been small: borrowed flats, borrowed money, borrowed time. The idea of him standing in the same room as the men she had seen in that gala photograph, the four brothers in black, the marble, the diamond wreathed in flames, was disorienting.
“Friends,” she repeated.
“Before I was born. Before you were born. They met in Lyon, when your father was—” He paused. Chose a word. “Working.My father trusted very few people outside the family. Yours was one of them.”
“And?”
“My father died when I was nineteen. Before he died, he asked me to do something.” Another pause, longer. His scarred hand turned on the armrest, palm up, then down again, a gesture so small and involuntary that she almost missed it. “To look after you. To see that you ended up with someone good.”
The cabin hummed. The Alps gleamed. Ciana stood very still.
“Someone good,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And buying my airline, that’s looking after me?”
A long silence. Then, quietly, and this was the first time she had heard his voice sound anything other than controlled: “It was the only way I could think of to keep you close without pulling you into my world.”
She processed this the way she processed turbulence: by holding still and letting the motion move through her until the cabin levelled.
It didn’t level.
Because what he was telling her was insane. Not violent. Insane. A man she had never met until six weeks ago had been watching over her since she was a child, had purchased an entire airline to bring her closer, had moved her belongings into a flat he had chosen, had placed her mother’s photograph at the correct angle, and all of it, every extravagant, invasive, meticulously arranged detail, had been done in service of a promise made toa dying man about a daughter who had never been asked if she wanted to be looked after.
“You spent three hundred million euros,” she said slowly, “because your father told you to find me a husband.”
“That’s a simplification.”
“Is it wrong?”
He said nothing.
