Page 71 of Give In to Me
He had tried to stop. He had given the tracking access to his security team and told them to handle it. That had lasted four days. On the fifth day, he had reinstalled the feed on his personal terminal and sat in the dark and watched the blue dot cross the Mediterranean and hated himself with a precision that bordered on craftsmanship.
“She’s... difficult,” Andrei said.
Luciano closed his eyes. Tilted his head back. The Nebraska sky was enormous above him, just starting to lighten at the eastern edge, and a sound came out of him—quiet, rueful. The sound a man makes when he recognizes his own disease in another man’s symptoms.
“They usually are,” Luciano said. “The ones worth it.”
Andrei said nothing. The silence told Luciano everything the words wouldn’t.
Andrei was thinking about a galley in a snowstorm. About the three inches of air between his mouth and hers and the way her name had come out of him like a wound—Ciana—low, involuntary, the first honest thing he had said in months. He was thinking about the tarmac in Istanbul, the rain on her face, her fists in his shirt pulling him down to her, and the sound she had made against his mouth that had dismantled every wall he had spent thirty-five years building. He was thinking about the morning after, when he had called Alexei and said accelerate the search in a voice that didn’t sound like his own, because if he couldn’t find Ciana someone good—someone clean, someone safe, someone who wasn’t the head of security for a Bratva family with blood in the foundations—then the alternative was keeping her, and keeping her meant pulling her into the dark, and he would burn every remaining good thing about himself before he let the dark touch Ciana Reyes.
He had tried the clean option. Paolo Sabbatini—decent, steady, Sicilian, hands without scars. He had watched Ciana sit across from Paolo at a restaurant near the port and smile and talk and try. He had watched from a surveillance feed he shouldn’t have been watching, in a room he shouldn’t have been sitting in, and when Paolo had reached for her hand across the table, Andrei’s own hand had closed into a fist so tight that the knuckle scars went white.
She had ended it with Paolo. Andrei had heard—through channels, because everything about Ciana reached him through channels now, a man reduced to gathering intelligence on the woman he loved because he had forfeited the right to hear it from her directly.
And then Justina. His worst mistake. A kind, oblivious woman he had invited onto the jet for one day—one day—because heneeded Ciana to see him with someone else, to believe he had moved on, to let go of whatever she was holding onto so she could walk toward the clean life he had built for her. Justina had touched his hand in the cabin. He had let her. And across the aisle, Ciana’s face had gone still—not hurt, not angry, still—and the stillness was the worst thing he had ever seen on a human face, and he had seen men die.
She had filed the transfer that night. And he had approved it. And the jet had been empty for eleven weeks and the champagne flutes gathered dust and the exclusion zone—the two centimetres of air between their skin that he had maintained since the first night in 1A—had expanded to six hundred miles, and it still wasn’t enough distance to stop him feeling her.
“You’ll figure it out,” Luciano said. “Or she’ll figure it out for you. That’s how it works. You build your walls, and she walks through them, and you stand there wondering how it happened and the answer is that it was always going to happen. You were just the last one to know.”
“That sounds like experience.”
“It sounds like a man who spent two years watching a girl draw circles in the third row of his lecture hall and told himself he was maintaining professional distance.” Luciano opened his eyes. The farmhouse light was still on. “I was an idiot. Don’t be an idiot.”
A sound on the other end. Not a laugh—Andrei Almazov didn’t laugh the way other men laughed. A vibration. An acknowledgment. The closest thing to warmth that a voice like his allowed.
In his office, Andrei turned from the window. The flight tracker pulsed on his desk—the blue dot motionless for now, Ciana still on the ground in Nice, still in the flat she had moved back to after leaving the apartment in Cimiez. The smaller flat. The one without the security panel. The one that didn’t have parquet floors or a bedroom window that let in golden evening light or a photograph of her mother positioned at the exact angle she kept it, because she had left the photograph behind when she left him, and he had picked it up and held it and put it back exactly where it was and hadn’t moved it since. He couldn’t. Moving it would mean admitting she wasn’t coming back.
“I have something for you,” Andrei said.
Luciano’s hand tightened on the porch rail. There were very few things Andrei Almazov would phrase that way. Very few debts between them that remained open. Andrei had built the invisible perimeter around one woman’s life for Luciano—three shell companies, one airline, the kind of financial engineering that made a three-hundred-million-euro acquisition look like routine corporate restructuring. In return, Luciano had asked him for one thing.
“The girl,” Andrei said.
Luciano went still. Not his heart—his heart continued, because it had no choice—but the rest of him. The part that had been keeping watch on a man for twenty-four years from a distance that was never far enough and never close enough. Watching him grow. Watching him build something from nothing. Watching him become someone Luciano could never be—someone clean, someone with a name that didn’t carry the weight of a stone room.
Watching him fall for a girl. Watching him ruin it. Watching him throw her out and then spend weeks tearing his own life apart looking for her, the way a man throws away the one thing he needs and then can’t understand why the house is empty.
Luciano knew the pattern. He had invented the pattern.
“Where?”
Andrei told him. Luciano filed the information in the place where he kept things that mattered—alongside lecture notes and Elsa’s coffee order and the sound she made when she said his name and the exact angle of Martha Lively’s photograph on her nightstand.
“I’ll make sure it reaches him,” Luciano said. “Without a source.”
“Of course.”
“And the rest of it—the acquisition, the restructuring—that stays buried.”
“It was never unburied.”
“Good.”
A pause. The last one. The kind that came at the end of a conversation between two men who had said everything they needed to say and didn’t waste words on the parts that lived in the silence.
“Congratulations,” Andrei said. “On the wedding.”
