Page 15 of Shattered Altar (Makarova Bratva Duet)

ALEKS

“Here’s your seat.” The flight attendant gestures to the seat next to mine as Olivia lingers behind her, glancing around nervously.

“Can I get you anything?” the attendant asks. “A drink, perhaps? We have an assortment of wines, beers, spirits, champagne…?”

“Oh, um… no, thank you.” Olivia shuffles around and stares down at her own feet.

The flight attendant is persistent, though. “Something to eat, then? Mixed nuts? Fruit? Perhaps a cheese platter?”

“Uh, maybe later, I think.”

“Certainly, madam,” the attendant says. “If you need anything, just press the ‘Help’ sign next to your seat. It would be my pleasure to assist you.”

Olivia mumbles something incoherent in response. Once the attendant returns to the crew area, she eyes the seat next to me like it’s going to swallow her up the second she sits down.

“Is there a reason you requested my presence?” she asks. She doesn’t sound annoyed. More like… awed. She’s speaking to me like I might be royalty.

She’s not completely wrong.

“Sit down,” I say, gesturing to the empty seat beside me.

“Aleks, I… I don’t think I can stay up here the entire flight,” she whispers with a glance over her shoulder like the Peasant Removal SWAT team she joked about earlier has been tailing her, ready to pounce as soon as she steps one toe out of line.

“Sit,” I say again. “You’re blocking the path.”

Olivia mumbles another apology to nobody in particular and squeezes close to my armrest, letting a cranky old woman waddle through to the bathroom. Across the aisle, another first-class passenger wearing a mink coat and a nasty expression eyes Olivia venomously over the rim of her glass of champagne like a cheap Cruella de Ville impersonator.

If it were me she was glaring at, I’d tell her to redirect her gaze elsewhere or I’d rip her eyes right out of their sockets.

Olivia, on the other hand, is ever-so-slightly less confrontational. Instead of standing up for herself, she ducks into the seat next to mine.

“I don’t belong here,” she says, still in that cowed whisper.

“That’s the second time today you’ve said that,” I remind her icily. “I don’t want to hear it a third.”

She gulps and stares at me, wondering if I’m serious. I am. She’ll soon learn just how serious. “I just… I mean, I can’t accept this, Aleks. First class is expensive. I can’t afford it.”

“I can. In any case, it didn’t cost me a thing,” I say. “There was an empty seat. I called in a favor.”

“A favor?”

I nod. “The pilot’s an old friend of mine.”

She sits back in her seat and stares at me with unfiltered bewilderment. “Who are you?”

Smiling, I pick up my glass of whiskey and take a sip. “I’ll let you decide.”

Before she can figure out how to respond to that, the Fasten Seatbelts light dings on and the pilot launches into his spiel over the intercom. Beneath us, the engines roar to life.

We taxi towards the runway. The attendants move through the aisles and seal off the first class from the rest of the seating. Olivia takes note of all this with pursed lips, but she doesn’t say anything.

Until something occurs to her. She curses and grabs for her phone. “Shit! I forgot to let Mia know that we’re about to take off.”

She types out a quick message and hits send. It doesn’t escape my notice that her hands are trembling hard enough that she can barely type. Her breath comes in shuddering gasps.

“Nervous flyer?” I ask.

“Not usually.” She tosses me a glance that tells me I might be the cause of her sudden anxiety.

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