Page 16 of Shattered Altar (Makarova Bratva Duet)

I smile and take another sip of my whiskey. “You ought to get yourself a drink. Calm your nerves.”

“I don’t…” she starts to mumble, then corrects herself. “Okay. One drink. But it’s medicine. For my nerves, like you said.”

She’s about to reach for the help button when I stop her. “No need,” I say. “The stewardess has her eyes on us.”

I signal to her to bring us a bottle, and she disappears immediately to do as instructed. Olivia watches the exchange with mild fascination.

When the bright blond woman returns, she puts a sparkling clean wine glass down in front of Olivia, uncorks the bottle, and leaves it for us. The moment she walks away, Olivia looks at me with raised eyebrows.

“The whole bottle?”

I shrug. “Why not?”

She examines the label and her eyes widen. “This wine has to be a thousand dollars, at least.”

“You’re off by a couple zeroes,” I say with a pleasant chuckle. “But don’t think about that. Just relax and enjoy it.”

“What makes you think I’m not relaxed?”

I gesture to her stiff posture and her clenched fist. “You mean, aside from everything about you?”

She makes a forceful effort to unclench and melt back into her seat. “I’m just… I’m not used to this kind of thing. First class, expensive wine…” She glances at me out of the corner of her eye. “Handsome strangers who clearly don’t want to tell me too much about themselves.”

“Oh, so you think I’m handsome?”

She tries to cover her blush behind an eye roll. “Please. You know you are.”

I shrug. “I don’t think about it.”

“Riiight,” she scoffs. “You probably assume women are at your beck and call because of your great fashion sense.”

“I always assumed it was my charming personality,” I sigh, feigning disappointment.

“That doesn’t hurt,” she mutters.

I glance over and take the time to really look at her. Her eyes are a deep, rich brown. Warm chocolate, melted amber, shot through with those bolts of green. When she smiles, dimples appear in both cheeks.

I understand the appeal of the girl-next-door quality, in an intellectual sense if nothing else. I just never thought it was a quality I would find appealing.

“How long will you be staying with your family?” I ask. She looks like she needs a few softball questions to relax while the wine does its magic on her.

“Just over the holidays,” she says. “Christmas and New Years’, then I’m flying back on the 2nd.”

“Why the hustle back to the city? I thought you made your own hours.”

“Well, typically, I do,” she admits. “But there is this job I want to start prepping for.”

“Do tell.”

“It’s not really a job yet,” she corrects hastily. “More like I’m trying to prepare a portfolio to submit in the hopes it’ll get me an interview.”

“Sounds like a lot of work for a maybe.”

She shrugs. “It’s not easy being a cartoonist these days.”

“How did you find yourself on that path in the first place?”

“By accident,” she admits. “I was a quiet kid. Mom called me shy; Dad was nice and went with ‘introspective.’ My siblings preferred ‘hermit.’” She chuckles. “The truth is probably all of the above. But either way, I wasn’t great at expressing myself. I thought I was gonna go crazy for a little while. All these thoughts and feelings and no way to channel them. Then I found art. I started drawing, sketching, painting. I did it all. But caricatures came naturally to me. Just observing people. Memorializing them. Showing themselves to them as the world sees them. It felt like an accomplishment. Like… the kind of thing that could be important, maybe. If I put my mind to it.”

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