Chapter 1

The landing form had his name on it before the argument ever started.

Selene watched her husband's pen move across the descent checklist, the silver nib catching the cabin light, and she thought: *that's the only signature that matters on this aircraft.* Not the marriage certificate they'd signed nine weeks ago in a registrar's office that smelled like lemon polish and old carpet. Not the passenger manifest that listed her as "Selene al-Fahrain—Wife," typed in a font so small she'd had to squint to find her own name. Just this, the daily liturgy of a man who owned the sky beneath his feet and never once looked up from it.

"I said I'm fine, Rais."

She heard her own voice from very far away, a recording of a recording. The cabin hummed around them, the engines a low, constant vowel. Somewhere ahead of them, past the cream-leather seats and the dark wood panels and the polished brass fittings, two attendants were moving. She'd seen them earlier—Farhad, narrow-faced and clean-shaven, and Anwar, broader, with a day's worth of stubble that shadowed his jaw—when they'd brought the coffee service that her stomach had turned away from.

"Did you hear me?" She tried to lift her hand from the armrest and found that the muscles in her forearm had apparently filed their own resignation. The button beneath her thumb clicked uselessly. "I said I'm—"

His eyes came up from the checklist.

That was the thing about Rais that she still hadn't learned to read. He moved like a man who paid for time in advance, who had never once in his life needed to rush because everything—every plane, every meeting, every person—had simply agreed to wait for him. So the motion was slow, almost lazy, the way a cat acknowledges a door that opens. His chin came up a quarter of an inch. His eyes found her face.

And then—this was the part that made her stomach do its small, quiet flip—he looked at her. Not through her, not past her. At her.

"You haven't slept," he said.

It wasn't a question. It was an accounting, like the fuel gauge he'd checked at the start of the flight.

"I slept on the drive to the airport."

"You didn't."

"I—" Selene blinked, and the cabin tilted very slightly, as if the jet had banked in a way the instruments hadn't registered. "I rested my eyes. That's basically the same thing."

"You ate a flight attendant's mint at breakfast and called it lunch."

"I—" She had done that, actually. She'd been too nervous to eat in front of his mother's sisters, who had gathered at the family compound to examine her like a painting that had been acquired at auction. The mint had been a gesture of mercy, a small green disc of surrender. "It was a good mint."

Rais's mouth did something that might have been a smile if his face were built for them. It wasn't. His mouth was built for pronouncements and, very occasionally, for the low, flat sentences he used to move the world around him. But something passed across his features—a flicker, a shadow of acknowledgment—and then his eyes dropped back to the checklist and she was released.

She sagged.