Blood and Vows.

Chapter 14 — Into the Skies

The private terminal pretended to be sleepy. It wasn’t. Security cameras blinked like patient insects; a man behind the rental desk watched the parking lot the way hunters watched tree lines. On the apron, a sleek white jet dozed with its door shut and its belly open, the baggage hatch yawning while two ground crewmen ferried soft leather carry-ons from a cart to the hold.

Alex crossed the lot in a high-vis vest and a cap she’d bought that morning from a hardware store. The vest did most of the camouflage; people rarely studied a moving safety color. She pushed an empty luggage cart as if it belonged to her and kept the tired gait of someone at the end of shift.

The fence gate to the apron chimed when she badged it with a card she’d lifted from a distracted handler at the coffee machine. She timed the beep beneath the rumble of a taxiing turboprop, then slipped through and steered for the jet. The tail number matched the one Natalie had pulled from the charter manifest an hour earlier. Redhaven had booked the flight under a shell, which meant Samantha Barnes would be on it.

Flight to Mexico. Villa at 1600. The words from the mirrored text still pulsed in Alex’s head like a metronome.

She parked her cart behind the baggage tug and moved with the choreography of people who belonged there: bend, lift, pass. When the handler stooped into the hold to rearrange a net, Alex leaned in after him, slid one knee up, then the other. In one fluid motion she rolled past the handler’s shoulder and into the dark corner behind a stack of soft duffels. The handler swore at a strap that caught on a hinge—her cover noise—then backed out without looking.

She exhaled into her sleeve only when the last bag came. The handler latched the net, tugged twice, and ducked away. A moment later the hatch swung up and sealed with a satisfying hydraulic kiss. The belly of the jet became a steel cave.

Alex switched on the penlight clipped to her collar and cupped it so the beam stayed small. The hold was pressurized and lightly heated—charter jets treated luggage better than people treated themselves—but the metal bit at skin through the vest anyway. She wriggled deeper into the corner and anchored herself beneath the cargo net with a soft tie. A bump on rotation could throw bodies the way waves threw boats; she’d learned that the hard way on other continents.

Her “lawyer” kit—cream blouse, blazer, glasses—was folded inside a garment bag she’d stolen from a trolley two nights ago. Now she wore black cargo pants, a thermal, and fingerless gloves. From a side pocket she drew the tiny receiver tied to the bug in Samantha’s tote. Its screen blinked to life with a thin green line waiting for sound.

Above her, the cabin door latched shut. The engine spooled from polite whine to intention. Alex swallowed to pop her ears, then again as the jet rolled. When the thrust pressed her back into the duffels, she let it, counting: one, two, three—nose up—five, six, seven—earth falling away—ten… and the tense vibration smoothed into air.

She closed her eyes and listened to the receiver. Static. Then the shape of voices.

“…—I’m fine,” a woman said over the hush of cabin air. Samantha. Alex could hear the banker’s careful control, like a line drawn around panic to keep it small.

Another voice, male, muffled by distance; likely the flight attendant. “Seat belt, Ms. Barnes. We’ll be smooth after ten thousand.”

“Thank you.”

Soft clinks. The susurrus of leather. Then, a minute later, the tight click of a phone case. The receiver flashed as the paired device in Samantha’s tote came to life.

Sebastian: Answer when safe.

Alex tasted metal. She didn’t look at the name. She didn’t have to. She had felt his sentences before.

Samantha didn’t text back. The line stayed empty for long enough that Alex wondered if she had put the phone away. Then the faintest shift in air—Samantha rose, crossed what Alex pictured as the aisle, and closed herself into the lavatory. The audio tightened, the way spaces did when doors stole some of the world. The tap of a lock.

The call connected on the first ring. The receiver didn’t carry both sides perfectly, but the cabin’s smallness helped. Alex heard them clear enough.

“Sebastian,” Samantha said, and the use of his first name made Alex’s ribs tighten. People said a man’s name that way when they needed him to be larger than his shadow.

“Talk,” Sebastian murmured. His voice ran low, a current under rock. The sound of him was a memory Alex did not want and could not fold small enough to ignore.

“I’m on the plane,” Samantha said. “We’ve taken off.”

“I know.”

“I need you to promise me something.” She kept it controlled, but fear thinned the edges. “When we land—when we go to your mother’s house—”

“She calls it a villa,” he said, weary. “You don’t have to.”

“—promise you won’t leave me alone with her,” Samantha rushed on. “I can handle clients, I can handle audits. I can’t handle… her.” She breathed once, a small, involuntary sound. “I’ve heard stories.”

“You’ve heard facts dressed to look like stories,” Sebastian said, and for a heartbeat Alex couldn’t tell if he meant to comfort or warn. “Listen to me: today is a test. Not for you. For me.”

“This is about you?” The shock in Samantha’s voice crackled over the receiver.

“My mother uses people as mirrors,” he said. “She stares at their faces to study mine. She will push you. She will measure how far I let her. If you stay inside the lines I draw, you go home alive.”

Silence. Alex pressed a knuckle between her teeth. The word alive did not belong in business conversations.

“What lines?” Samantha whispered.

“You will not answer questions about clients,” he said. “Not to her. Not to anyone but me. If she asks for proof, you show her what I put in your hands. Nothing else.” A glass clinked; his voice dipped lower. “You will not look afraid. She delights in fear.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“No,” he said. “Not easy.”

“Will you be there?” Samantha asked.

“I’ll be there,” he said. “I will walk you in. I will walk you out. That is the promise I can make.”

It was not I will protect you. It was the more brutal I will try.

Samantha exhaled, quicker now. “And… the ledger?”

“Carry it,” he said. “Don’t let it out of your hands unless I take it from you.”

“Sebastian—”

“I know what I’m asking,” he said. “I know why she asked. It is not about what is inside. It is about whether you understand we answer to me, not to her.”

A pause. In the hold, the engine hum stretched like a held breath. Alex pictured Samantha against the mirror, her hand white-knuckled on the sink.

“Promise me again,” Samantha said, smaller.

“I’ll walk you out,” Sebastian repeated. After a beat that did not belong to business, he added, softer, “Don’t make me regret asking you to stand beside me.”

The call clicked dead.

Alex lay very still. Hatred for him was the easiest thing she had learned in a year when everything else required thinking, and yet the sound of him refusing to lie made something inside her shift in a way she didn’t have words for. He would not promise safety. He would promise proximity. It was the most honest cruelty she knew.

She checked the receiver. A second notification scrolled: Selma: Bring her to me. East gate. Don’t be late.

A third, seconds later: Leila: Routes set. Greenhouse ready. Citrus crew briefed.

Alex’s jaw set. Citrus crew. East gate. The map in her head updated, drawing a dotted line through a place she’d never seen but could already smell: heat, watered leaves, the sweet-bitter of peel and oil.

She shut the receiver off to save battery and folded her hands on her chest. The plane sighed forward.

Above her, the cabin settled into the lull that lived between takeoff and landing. She tried to sleep and failed. Memories were never kind when forced into silence. Jacob’s laugh flared like a match and vanished. The morgue tech’s voice describing an unrecognizable body returned, then the ground inverted under her the way it had the first time she’d reached for a future and found someone else’s hand on it.

She thought of Caleb’s basement. Of Natalie’s chess-knight emoji. Of Emil counting exits like prayers. She thought of Sebastian’s mouth when he said Mother the way some men said war.

The plane juddered in mild turbulence and righted itself. Alex counted to thirty for luck and to quiet the small animal inside her chest. On twenty-seven, she heard a movement in the hold—metal against metal, the tick of expansion. She told herself stories of physics until fear sat down.

Time became a long hallway.

An hour later the receiver vibrated once, then again. Two preview lines slid across the tiny screen.

Sebastian: Wheels at 1430. I’m sending my car to the private apron. Do not leave with anyone else.

Samantha: (unsent draft) Understood. Thank you. The draft line lingered, then vanished. No reply sent. Smart. Or too scared to trust the ether.

Alex tucked the device away.

She drank two mouthfuls of water and swished the last behind her molars to trick her body into feeling fed. She flexed her toes inside her boots until pins and needles woke warm. Then she let herself recite the plan:

—Hatch opens. She stays low until the first cart rolls to the tug.

—Slide out behind the inner wheel.

—Into the shadow under the cart.

—When the handler turns to wave, roll under the second cart’s bar and ride it to the fence.

—If caught: smile, in Spanish, and hold up the stray tag she’d printed that morning. Perdón, etiqueta perdida, oficina de equipaje. People loved problems with simple causes.

—If not caught: peel off at the corner. Watch who meets Samantha. Count bodies. Count guns.

She rehearsed until the steps felt like joints she had always had.

The engine tone dropped by a fraction—the kind of change only pilots and men who slept on planes heard. The descent had begun. Pressure slid in her ears. The metal around her ticked softly as temperatures recalibrated to a world that was hotter, brighter, and much more dangerous than the one she had left.

She freed the tie at her waist and coiled it in her pocket. The hatch lever above her head vibrated, as if the jet were clearing its throat.

A text preview rolled across her screen one last time before she killed the receiver:

Sebastian: At the gate. Eyes up.