Page 92 of The Heart of Winter

For a while, we talked about the project and the technical details of our presentation. I also gave him some insight into the person handling the negotiations on their side, warning him to be cautious when speaking with the guy. He had a habit of prying for details we didn’t necessarily want to disclose.

Sariel grumbled that he had to take strong suppressants for the flight, something the Japanese side had insisted on, and that they sometimes made him slightly dizzy.

I won’t lie, takeoff always made me a little uneasy. There’s a reason people say most accidents happen during takeoff and landing. But… nothing happened.

Business class wasn’t fully occupied, though in our row, just to Sariel’s right, an older, well-dressed omega sat, looking like a wealthy businessman. Meanwhile, the economy section was getting pretty loud.

Also, I made a conscious decision not to dwell on anything unpleasant for the duration of the flight. Being in a confined space like this was making me feel a little claustrophobic.

Eventually, I decided to take a nap, and Sariel seemed to make the same choice. He kept complaining about the side effects of the suppressants, saying they were making him sleepy.

No blockers in my system, but I fell asleep equally quickly, and I must have slept for quite a while. I hadn’t gotten much rest the night before, so my body was demanding it.

When I woke up, the sky outside the airplane window was gray, which confused me at first. We’d taken off at 6 am, so in theory, we should have been flying through daylight. But then I remembered. We were landing in Tokyo at 10 am, which meant that sooner or later, we had to cross into the nighttime zone. The plane was moving faster than the Earth's rotation, essentially ‘catching up’ with time.

I wasn’t sure if Sariel had fallen asleep before or after I did, but at that moment, he was still in a deep slumber. So, I grabbed a quick bite and then pulled up our presentation on my tablet, memorizing key points I needed to emphasize first. That occupied me for the next two hours.

Finally, after about two and a half hours, when the world outside was completely dark, Sariel slowly opened his eyes.

Our gazes met.

He gave me a soft, sweet smile.

I could see the hesitation in his expression, the way he was struggling with the urge to say something despite the ‘ban’ I had placed on the topic. He bit his lip slightly, and then his eyes flickered down, to my lips.

Was he imagining our first kiss?

A thrill ran through me, something almost adolescent in its excitement.

We had all of it ahead of us: the first kiss, the first time, the entire journey of our relationship unfolding. That rush of anticipation, the electrifying experience of something new. And in our case… it was bound to come with a lot of emotions.

Not all of them pleasant. Maybe ‘excitement’ wasn’t the right word? Perhaps it was more like… a kind of nervous tension.

How should I act? How far could I allow myself to go… and how much could I allow him to?

Sariel’s gaze never left my face. And then—

It happened.

The whole plane shook as a deafening boom echoed around us.

A terrifying explosion—

Somewhere in the back of the plane.

And in that very instant, the thought hit me like a flash of lightning: this had to be a bomb.

I just knew.

With a strange, sharpened focus, I realized that Blue not being on board could mean that whoever planted the bomb hadn’t had the chance to remove it. If it had been placed far in advance, it was likely beyond retrieval.

It was almost eerie how all of these thoughts raced through my mind in the split second before the entire plane jolted violently, and a rush of freezing air slammed into us.

It was almost… a form of escape.

Escape from the fact that I knew, without a doubt, that we were all about to die.

No one had ever survived a plane crash at cruising altitude. Not over the North Pacific, in January.

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