Chapter 10
The rain had stopped somewhere between the shipyard and the airfield, and the air was clean and cold, and the tarmac shone under the field lights like something wet and new.
She could hear the engines. She could hear her own breathing.
She thought about the restaurant, and the glass, and her hand closing around a wrist that felt like marble. She thought about how, in that instant, she had not been afraid of the man at all — only of what losing her job would cost her brother. She thought about how he had said it to her later, in a dark car that smelled of sandalwood: *You are not terrified of me. You proved that.*
She thought about the first time she had walked into the estate and understood that it was a prison. She thought about the months after, when the prison had slowly stopped feeling like a prison — when she had learned the sound of his footsteps and the shape of his silences, when she had found him in the library at midnight and talked to him about books, when he had stood in a storm and said, *You are the only person in this house who tells me the truth.*
She thought about Marco, asleep in the cabin of a plane with a new name on a new passport, alive, sober, breathing — and about the fact that the man who had arranged all of it was standing thirty feet away with a bullet wound in his shoulder and his hands open at his sides.
She had hated him. She still did, in the part of her that kept accounts.
But hate was not the only thing she had.
The flight attendant appeared at the top of the stairs, leaning out, looking down at her with an expression of polite confusion. The plane was ready. The plane had been ready for ten minutes.
Bella looked up at her, and then at the dark windows of the cabin where her brother was waiting.
She looked back at Aleandro.
He had not moved. He would not move. She knew that about him now — that he would stand there until the plane left, and he would not ask, because asking would make it a debt, and he had spent months teaching her that he never collected a debt he had not created.
She had spent her whole life being collected. By Marco’s lies. By hospital bills. By a man in a suit who had decided what she was worth and bought her with it.
And now, for the first time, someone was standing in front of her with nothing to trade.
The choice was hers.
The wind came across the field again, and it was cold, and it carried the smell of jet fuel and wet asphalt and — faintly, impossibly — something like sandalwood.
Bella looked at the stairs.
She looked at the man.
May you like
And she stood there on the tarmac between them, with a passport in each hand and her whole life hanging in the balance, and did not move.
THE END
