Jax surveys me with quirked lips. “Kenna didn’t tell us much about you, you know.”

My eyes slide to Mackenna, and my tummy dips for some reason when I see he’s not smiling but watching me intently.

“Except that I was a witch?” I quip.

Lex laughs. “Not in those words.”

“Well, tall, dark, and mean is just part of his charm. Isn’t it?”

They grin at me, and I slide a look at Mackenna, my tummy dipping again when I see him looking at me as if there’s an intense pondering session going on in his brain. Lionel comes back with my ticket, and suddenly it’s real.

This flight is real.

There’s no way I will allow myself to be weak and vulnerable in front of Mackenna, but my nerves skyrocket as we head toward our gate.

I’m acutely aware of him silently walking next to me. One thousand percent bad boy rocker, with lazy swagger. With a sidelong glance I check out the tattoo on his forearm, the one thousand leather bracelets on his wrist, and the silver ring on his thumb. The memory of that ring on my skin when we went a little bit too far in the closet skims through me.

And what does that tattoo say?

Several men in suits walk with the group and attempt to keep people away from the main men. The guys have always been an entity—like two balls and a dick.

“You okay there?” Mackenna asks me.

“Dandy.”

Relax, Pandora. Just take a pill, take a whiskey, and knock yourself out.

I repeat it as a mantra as we board the plane. The scent of airplane is suddenly choking me.

Mackenna is talking with the guys. Lionel greets me with a huge smile as he lightly guides me into first class. A group of dancers start chatting up the guys. As I put my bag in the overhead compartment, I watch Mackenna. All the guys seem bored with the conversations, but not Mackenna. Ohhhh, no, not player Mackenna. He smiles and teases the girls, stealing little touches on their arms.

God, he’s unbelievable.

Scowling, I slide into my seat and pray for a smooth landing, breathing in and out as I check—for the tenth time today—the pillbox in my pocket. If a piece of metal can fly, then I can fly in it, safely, like everyone says.

But as I strap on my seat belt, I remember how my father died. He died this way. I picture that plane lurching and crashing. I picture him going numb. Thinking of Mother, of me. I wonder if the others screamed. It’s a fear that’s grown with me through the years as I’ve lost my innocence and become more cynical and, at the same time, more vulnerable and therefore more guarded. Fear bubbles and fizzes in my stomach as I try to stop thinking about that flight. How my father’s last goodbye was truly a goodbye. How no one survived.

My mother and I saw the crash on the evening news before we even realized my father was on board. “Ohmigod,” my mother breathed as we both watched the images of shredded airplane among sirens and stretchers and debris.

She checked her phone. “Your father’s flight should be landing soon,” she said. “And we are due for a nice family dinner.”

I checked my phone because I’d promised Mackenna I’d meet him by the docks.

My mother was pacing. She’d never paced before. A feeling of dread settled on me. Like when you see those dark clouds hover across the sun, blocking it from your view. When the phone rang, and my mother answered, I knew.

She started crying. I started crying too.

“He was on board. He was on board with his assistant. He wasn’t flying from Chicago, he was coming back from Hawaii.”

“What? Why?”

“Because . . .” My mother wiped her tears, and all the emotion fled from her face. “Because he’s been lying to us.”

The phone began ringing nonstop when people started to find out that my father had died. I knew that wasn’t the only thing they must’ve been talking about—they were talking about the fact that he was with his assistant too.

I stole out of the house, an hour late, and I ran into the darkness, and then I saw the figure out in the street, watching my house as though making sure I was all right, knowing he couldn’t go in there.

“Kenna!” I flung myself at him, trying to hold back my tears. “That flight. He was on it. He was on that flight.”

“Shh.” He rocked me. My safe haven. I closed my eyes and held on to him. “He lied to us. He’s been lying to us all along.”

“I’m sorry,” he rasped, kissing my eyelids. “I’ll always be here for you. I will never lie to you. . . .”

I jerk upright when the flight attendant announces she’s going to shut the plane door. The orchestra flies in the back, the singers up front. There are plenty of seats available—hell, they chartered the whole plane. Jax takes one seat and sets his stuff on the empty one beside him, and Lex takes another. And Mackenna is talking with the two flight attendants now. He’s twisted his cap around and looks young and delicious while wearing it backward. He looks like he used to look . . . when he was seventeen.

I’m trying to steady my nerves when he startles me by dropping down on the seat beside me, prying off his cap, and jamming it into the seat pocket in front of him, as if there weren’t a thousand and one bacteria in there. He leans on the armrest, his weight turned toward me. Is it his inborn fate to torture me?

“You lost? There are a dozen empty seats here,” I say.

He looks at me intently. “I want this one.”

Shaking my head, I grab a little manual from the seat pocket in front of me and start flipping through it. I will not lose my senses in front of him. No. Way. And yet I’m acutely aware of the alien noises surrounding me. Shuffle of feet. The engines. The shut of the plane door, his breathing.