Chapter 4: Mile High Instruction
The signing in Barcelona was a formality, a dry exchange of pens and papers that felt utterly divorced from the tectonic shift that had occurred in the penthouse hours before. Clara was, again, impeccable. Her handshake with Señor Mórelo was firm, her smile professional. Only Damien noticed the subtle differences: the way her eyes avoided his for a fraction too long when she handed him a document, the faint tremor in her voice when she said, “Initial here, sir,” that he alone could hear.
They spoke only of logistics. The flight to Madrid. The dinner with the architectural preservation board. Her formal resignation letter, already drafted on her tablet, waited in silent limbo.
The drive to the private airfield was silent, but the silence now had a new texture. It was no longer a wall; it was a charged space, humming with unspoken words and the memory of skin. He watched her from his seat as she stared out the window, the Catalan countryside blurring past. She had re-done her hair, but a few strands, defiant, curled at her temples.
His Gulfstream waited on the tarmac, a sleek silver bullet against a bruised evening sky. They act professional until the polite says you are now free to roam the cabin.
They acted professional until the pilot said they were now free to roam the cabin. The click of the seatbelt sign was a starting pistol. The door to the cockpit sealed shut with a definitive thud. For a moment, there was only the deep, vibrational hum of the engines.
Then Clara unbuckled her belt. The sound was deafening. She stood on slightly unsteady legs, the plane’s movement beneath her. She didn’t look at him. She walked to the bar, her heels sinking into the plush carpet. She poured two fingers of amber whiskey into a crystal tumbler, knocked it back in one smooth, burning gulp, and turned.
Her eyes were dark, stripped of all pretense. “Okay,” she said, the word a released breath. “Okay.”
It was all the invitation he needed. He was out of his seat, crossing the cabin in three strides. He didn’t kiss her. He grabbed the back of her head, fingers tangling in her perfect chignon, and crushed his mouth to hers. It was a collision. She met it with equal fury, her teeth scraping his lip, her hands clawing at his shirt, popping buttons that scattered like ivory ticks across the floor. They were a pent-up grenade, and the pin had been pulled hours ago in that penthouse. They exploded.
He lifted her, her legs wrapping around his waist, and carried her to the wide leather sofa. He fell onto it with her on top of him, a tangle of need and expensive fabric. “Get this off,” he growled against her mouth, tearing at her blouse. The silk ripped with a satisfying sound.
“You owe me so many shirts,” she panted, but she was helping him, shrugging out of the ruined material, fighting with his belt buckle.
He freed himself, his thick cock springing out, already fully hard and straining. She looked at it, her lips parting, then back to his face. There was no hesitation, no false demureness. She braced her hands on his shoulders, positioned herself above him, and sank down in one agonizingly slow, wet slide.
“Fuck, Clara,” he groaned, his head falling back against the leather. She was so tight, hot, and impossibly deep. She’d taken all of him.
“My turn,” she breathed, her voice shaky with the effort of accommodation. Then she began to move. This was not him taking her over a desk. This was her using him. She rode him with a focused, relentless rhythm, her hips rolling and grinding, taking his length inside her at the angle that served her pleasure. Her head tilted back, her breasts swaying with each motion, her eyes slitted in concentration.
“That’s it,” he urged, his hands gripping her thighs, feeling the muscles work. “Use me. Fuck yourself on my cock. Just like that.”
She moaned, the sound lost in the engine’s drone. Her pace increased, her movements becoming more urgent, more selfish. He could only watch, mesmerized, as she chased her climax, her body a mesmerizing symphony of need. She came with a sharp, bitten-off cry, her internal muscles fluttering and clenching around him in vicious, delicious ripples. She collapsed forward onto his chest, breathing raggedly.
For a long time, they stayed like that, connected, listening to each other’s heartbeats slow. He stroked her hair, now completely loose and cascading over his skin. Gently, he shifted them, laying her down on the sofa alongside him, face to face. He was still inside her. He began to move again, but this was different.
This was slow. Infinite. Each withdrawal was a whisper, each stroke a deliberate, gentle claiming. He watched her face. Every micro-expression was a revelation: the flutter of her eyelashes, the slight part of her lips on an inhale, the way her brow smoothed into pure, unguarded sensation. It wasn’t performative. It wasn’t ecstasy for an audience. It was her, unspooling for him alone.
“You’re so fucking beautiful like this,” he murmured, his voice rough. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
A tear leaked from the corner of her eye. He kissed it away. They moved together in that gentle, deep rhythm for what felt like hours, the world outside the windows a blanket of star-dusted black.
Later, he fetched a silk tie from his discarded suit jacket. He didn’t speak. He just looked at her, a question in his eyes. She held out her wrists, one over the other. He bound them firmly but not cruelly, the dark blue silk a stark contrast against her pale skin. He tied the end to a secure handle low on the sofa’s frame, leaving her arms resting back above her head, exposed and utterly vulnerable.
He kissed his way down her body, a slow pilgrimage. He lingered at her breasts, sucking her nipples until they were hard, red peaks. He traced the line of her ribs, the soft swell of her stomach. When he reached the junction of her thighs, he didn’t hesitate. He pushed her legs apart, hooked them over his shoulders, and buried his face in her.
He ate her pussy with a single-minded intensity that bordered on worship. His tongue was broad and flat, then pointed and precise. He licked her from her entrance to her clit, again and again, until she was writhing, the tie straining. He sucked that swollen bud into his mouth, applying relentless, rhythmic pressure.
“Damien… I can’t… I’m going to…” she babbled, her hips bucking against his face.
“Come,” he ordered, his voice muffled against her flesh. “Come in my mouth.” She screamed, her body bowing off the leather, shaking violently as the orgasm tore through her. He didn’t stop. He licked her through it, gentler now, soothing the hypersensitivity, until she was a boneless, trembling mess, barely coherent.
Only then did he rise over her. He freed himself from the tie, rubbing her wrists. He positioned himself at her soaked entrance. He looked into her dazed, sated eyes. “One more,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
He pushed in, slow and hard, filling her completely. He held himself there, buried to the hilt, letting her feel every inch. He began a deep, dragging rhythm, each thrust a profound, full-body possession. “You feel that?” he grunted, his control fraying. “That’s all me. Deep inside you.”
“Yes,” she whimpered, her nails digging into his back.
His pace quickened, turning rough, piston-like. The sofa creaked in protest. The sound of skin slapping against skin, of their mingled grunts and moans, filled the cabin. He fucked her fast and hard, chasing his own release now, utterly lost in the exquisite, wet heat of her. He came with a shout, pouring into her, his entire body seizing as he collapsed atop her, spent.
He came with a shout, pouring into her, his entire body seizing as he collapsed atop her, spent. They lay entwined on the jet’s leather sofa, a slick, breathing knot of limbs, the only sound their ragged breath harmonizing with the engine’s hum. Eventually, he shifted, pulling a cashmere blanket from a nearby compartment to drape over her cooling skin, and they slept, her head on his chest, descending through the night toward Madrid.
An hour later, he woke to the warm, wet pressure of her mouth. The cabin lights were dimmed to a soft glow. Clara was between his legs, her hair a curtain falling around his hips, her full lips stretched around the thick head of his cock. She was already half-hard again. He let his head fall back, watching through heavy-lidded eyes as she worked him with a slow, dedicated rhythm, her tongue swirling along the prominent vein underneath.
She took more of him, her throat relaxing in increments, until the tip nudged the back of her mouth. A primal groan rumbled in his chest. The sight—her submission, her beauty focused on this single, filthy act—unraveled his last thread of civilized restraint. He placed a heavy hand on the back of her head, his fingers fisting in her warm brown hair.
“You like that?” he rasped, his voice thick with sleep and desire.
She hummed around him, a vibration that shot straight to his balls.
He moved her head, setting a pace. It was not gentle. He thrust upwards into the wet heat of her mouth, fucking her face with shallow, deliberate strokes. She gagged, her body tensing, but her hands came up to grasp his thighs, holding on. Tears sprang to her eyes from the force, glistening trails catching the low light. He didn’t stop. The obscene, wet sounds filled the cabin, a soundtrack to her choking struggle. He was lost in it, in the raw power and the breathtaking surrender.
When he finally pulled her off, a string of saliva connected her lip to his shining cock. She gasped for air, chest heaving. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looked up at him, and said, “I really like it when guys are rough with me like that.”
The statement, so casually uttered, so starkly honest, hit him like a physical blow. It wasn’t a line. It was a confession, and it made his already hard cock twitch violently. He saw it then—the genuine excitement in her eyes, the flushed pleasure beneath the tears. She meant it.
He hauled her up by her arms and turned her onto her stomach on the sofa. He didn’t bother with preliminaries. He drove into her pussy from behind in one brutal stroke. She cried out, a sound of pure satisfaction. He set a violent pace immediately, his hips slamming into her ass, the sharp cracks of skin on skin echoing.
“You like this, you filthy girl?” he grunted, delivering a sharp, open-handed smack to her rear. The flesh jiggled, a red handprint blooming. He pushed her face down into the leather, muffling her moans. “You like being used like a fucktoy?”
“Yes! God, yes, Damien! Harder!”
He pulled her up by her hair, his other hand snaking around her throat. He squeezed, not enough to cut off air completely, but enough for her to feel the dominance, the threat. Her breath came in ragged, choked hitches. He fucked her like that, pistoning into her, his hand tight on her throat. He watched her face in the dim reflection of the window. Her eyes were rolled back, her mouth slack with a look of pure, transcendent bliss. The sight made him wild.
He tightened his grip. Her pussy clamped around him, convulsing in a sudden, gushing flood that soaked his cock and thighs. She was squirting, her inner muscles milking him as the warm liquid spilled out around their joining. The sensation tore his own orgasm from him, a secondary, brutal eruption that left him shuddering and spent against her back.
He didn’t let her recover. He was hard again in minutes, a relentless engine fueled by her confession. He traced a slick, probing finger over her other hole, still buried in her pussy from behind. She flinched, then pushed back. “Do it,” she whispered, raw.
He spat, worked the head of his cock against the tight, resisting pucker. He pushed. It was an intense, burning stretch. She cried out, her nails scrabbling on the leather. He sheathed himself inside her ass slowly, completely, the sensations blindingly tight and rough. With his other hand, he rubbed her swollen clit, then pushed two fingers back into her dripping pussy alongside his cock in her ass.
“More,” she pleaded, her voice shattered. “I can take more.”
He added a third finger, stretching her cunt wide. She was panting, her body accommodating the impossible fullness. Then, she reached a hand back, guiding his whole hand, pressing his fingers together, pushing them inside her alongside the thick intrusion in her ass. It was a fight, a slow, wet conquest of muscle and will. He watched, mesmerized, as his hand disappeared into her, fisting her pussy while his cock sawed in and out of her asshole.
The sounds were obscene—squelching, wet, animal. Her body was a taut bow, every muscle straining. “Cum in my ass,” she begged, her voice a broken thing. “Fill it.”
The command undid him. He drove his fist deep, his cock slamming home, and erupted inside her. It was a volley, a deep, pulsing flood that seemed to have no end. Her own climax was a silent, cataclysmic seizure, her body clamping around both violations in a series of violent, rhythmic spasms. Her eyes flew wide, then shut. Her body went utterly limp, a marionette with its strings cut, and she slumped forward, unconscious.
He stayed there for a long moment, buried to the hilt in her ass, his hand still fisted inside her, both channels pulsing around their invasions. Her complete lack of movement, the profound stillness beyond even sleep, sent a cold spear of fear through his post-orgasm haze. He pulled his hand free with a wet sound, then carefully withdrew his softening cock.
“Clara.” He turned her onto her back. Her head lolled to the side. A faint sheen of sweat coated her skin, her lips were parted, her breath shallow but even. She was out cold. The red imprint of his hand stood out livid on her throat. He brushed the hair from her face, his own hands trembling now. “Hey. Wake up.”
He ran his palms over her body, up the delicate skin of her inner arms, over the curve of her hips, down her thighs. He used a touch so gentle it felt foreign to his own calloused hands. “Come on, baby. Open your eyes for me.”
She stirred, a faint moan escaping her. Her eyelids fluttered. She focused on him slowly, recognition dawning not with fear, but with a dazed, sated confusion. “Wha…?”
“You passed out,” he said, his thumb stroking her cheekbone. “You’re okay. Just lie still.”
He moved down her body. He positioned himself between her legs, which fell open bonelessly. He looked at the wreckage he’d made of her: swollen, glistening, used. He bent his head and began to lick her with a slow, flat tongue, cleaning the mixed fluids from her skin, soothing the inflamed, stretched flesh of her pussy and her asshole. She whimpered, her hips twitching.
“Damien… I’m too sensitive…”
“Shhh.” He didn’t stop. He laved her with deliberate, tender strokes, then pressed a soft, open-mouthed kiss to her clit. She jerked, a weak cry catching in her throat. He slid one finger, then two, back into her slick, warm cunt. They moved easily in the soaked, relaxed channel. He crooked them, finding that spongy spot inside her, and applied a gentle, relentless pressure as he continued to mouth at her clit with kitten-lick softness.
He was half-hard again just watching her, feeling her body stir back to life around his fingers. Her breath hitched in a new rhythm. He added a third finger, stretching her just enough, his thumb circling her asshole where he’d just been. He felt the telltale flutters begin deep inside her, the precursor to another climax she was too overwhelmed to consciously pursue.
“That’s it,” he murmured against her thigh. “Let it happen. Just let it go.”
Her back arched off the leather. A soft, broken sigh poured from her lips as she came, a gentle wave compared to the previous tsunami, her internal muscles fluttering weakly around his fingers. He smiled against her skin. He withdrew his fingers, bringing them to his mouth to taste her, his eyes locked on hers. He was fully hard again, achingly so.
He moved up her body, aligning himself. He pushed into her pussy with infinite slowness, a millimeter at a time, letting her feel every inch of his renewed girth stretching her sensitive, well-used flesh. He watched her face, utterly captivated by the play of sensation: the wince of overstimulation melting into a slack-jawed groan of profound fullness.
“You take me so fucking good,” he breathed, fully seated inside her. He didn’t move. He just let her adjust, let the heat build. Then he began to thrust. Hard, but slow. Each deep, dragging withdrawal was a tease, each powerful return to the hilt a promise. He built a rhythm that was less about speed and more about depth, about the brutal, perfect friction of his cock grinding against every nerve inside her.
Her eyes rolled back. “Oh god… again…”
“Yeah, again.” He increased the pace a fraction, the force undiminished. He could feel the telltale tremors starting in her thighs, the tightening of her grip around him. “Come on. Give it to me.”
She shattered, a raw, gasping cry tearing from her throat as her cunt convulsed around him in a series of intense, rhythmic clenches. He didn’t stop. He fucked her through it, maintaining the same deep, pounding cadence, forcing her oversensitized body to ride the wave into another peak almost immediately. Her screams became continuous, a stream of desperate, half-formed words.
“Please… Damien… I can’t… it’s too much… stop…”
“You don’t mean that.” He was mesmerized. Her beauty was in this ruin, in the tears streaming from her clenched eyes, in the desperate clawing of her hands on his back. Making her come was the only thing that mattered. It was a drug. He pistoned into her, his control snapping. The slow, hard pace dissolved into a frenzied, animal hammering.
His hips were a blur. The jet cabin filled with the sound of his balls slapping against her, of her choked sobs, of the leather squeaking in violent protest. She was screaming now, begging incoherently for a break that would not come. He watched her face contort in a ceaseless cycle of pleasure-pain, her cunt gripping him in near-constant, fluttering spasms. He wanted to live inside this moment, inside the wet, clutching heat of her, to die here, buried in the beauty of her unraveling.
He felt his own climax coiling, a precipice he was about to throw them both over. The city lights of Madrid glittered far below, indifferent to the tiny, gasping universe of two bodies breaking apart and fusing together again and again in the dark sky.
The city lights of Madrid glittered far below, indifferent to the tiny, gasping universe of two bodies breaking apart and fusing together again and again in the dark sky. Damien’s release was a volcanic rupture, a deep, groaning pour that flooded her clutching depths as his thrusts lost their rhythm and became shallow, grinding pulses. He collapsed onto her, the full, crushing weight of him pinning her to the sweat-slick leather, his face buried in the tangled mess of her hair.
They didn’t move. Couldn’t. The only sounds were the engine’s white noise and the ragged syncing of their breath. Her hands, which had been clawing at his back, now lay limp at her sides. He felt a wetness on her temple that wasn’t sweat. He lifted his head. Tears were streaming silently from her closed eyes, cutting tracks through the flush on her cheeks.
A cold spear of alarm lanced through him. “Clara.” His voice was wrecked. “Did I hurt you?” He started to pull away.
Her legs locked around his hips, holding him inside her. “No.” The word was a hoarse scrape. “Don’t go. It’s not that.” She opened her eyes. They were pools of bewildered, saturated emotion. “I just… nobody has ever… wanted me like that. To that… degree. It’s a lot.”
He understood. The obliterating focus. He kissed her salty eyelids, her temples, the corner of her mouth. “It’s everything,” he corrected softly, still embedded within her. He shifted just enough to take his weight on his forearms, cradling her face. “You’re everything.”
She gave a wet, shuddering laugh. “We’re a mess.”
“A beautiful mess.” He finally withdrew, the separation feeling profoundly wrong. Fluids, their mixed essences, slicked her inner thighs and pooled on the leather. The cabin air, recycled and cool, hit their heated skin. The physical evidence of what they’d done was everywhere: the ripped blouse, the scattered buttons, the livid mark on her throat, the dark silk tie discarded like a snake’s shed skin.
He fetched a damp, warm towel from the jet’s galley. He returned and began to clean her with a methodical, gentle thoroughness that was its own kind of intimacy. He wiped the sweat from her brow, the stickiness from her stomach, the mess between her legs. She watched him, her expression unreadable. When he was done, he wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and pulled her against him on the sofa.
They sat in silence for a long time, watching the dawn bleed scarlet and gold over the Spanish plains. The descent began, a subtle change in the engine’s pitch.
“Beatrice meets us at the hangar,” Clara said quietly, her head on his shoulder. “My resignation is effective the moment we touch down. She’s already lined up three interviews for me.”
He tensed. “You don’t have to…”
“I do.” She looked up at him. “If this is going to be real, it starts on level ground. Not with you signing my paychecks.” Her tone was firm, but her eyes were soft. “Besides, she threatened to revoke my best friend privileges if I screwed this up by being professionally stupid.”
He smiled faintly. Beatrice Davenport, his oldest friend and sometimes-conscience, had likely heard the entire, edited version by now. “She’s terrifying.”
“She likes you. God knows why.”
The jet bumped gently onto the tarmac in Madrid, rolling to a smooth stop at a private hangar. They dressed in the clothes they’d ravaged, looking like survivors of a particularly decadent disaster. Clara re-knotted his tie for him, her fingers sure. He buttoned the last surviving buttons on her replacement blouse, his hands lingering on the curve of her breasts. Normalcy was a costume they were pulling on, and it didn’t quite fit.
The cabin door hissed open, revealing the bright, hangar lights and the silhouette of Beatrice. She was all sharp angles and knowing eyes, a champagne-colored pantsuit looking more like armor. She took in their dishevelment, the charged air wafting from the cabin, the way Damien’s hand rested possessively on the small of Clara’s back.
A slow, cat-like smile spread across Beatrice’s face. “Well,” she said, her voice crisp in the morning air. “It appears the merger negotiations were… thoroughly concluded.” She stepped aside. “Car’s waiting. I’ve booked Clara into the Gran Meliá. Separate suite. You’ll thank me later when you’re not trying to impress the preservation board smelling like a brothel.”
Clara flushed but met Beatrice’s gaze squarely. “Thank you, Beatrice.”
“Don’t thank me yet. The interviews start at two. You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards by a lust-crazed bear. We have work to do.” She turned and strode towards the waiting town car.
Damien stopped Clara with a hand on her wrist. He leaned down, his voice for her alone. “Dinner. Tonight. Just us. Somewhere with no desks, no deals, no past.”
She stretched up, brushing her lips against his. “I’d like that.”
The week in Madrid was a study in exquisite tension. Clara, guided by Beatrice’s ruthless efficiency, aced her interviews. Damien charmed the preservation board, securing the historical facade grant with an ease that felt hollow without her beside him to witness it. They met for dinner in a hidden courtyard restaurant, talking for hours about everything and nothing. He learned she hated cilantro, loved brutalist architecture, and had a childhood fear of garden gnomes. He told her about the time he’d gotten lost in the Tokyo subway system for eight hours when he was sixteen. They held hands across the table. He kissed her goodnight at the door of her hotel suite, sweet and slow, and walked away with his blood singing.
It was a new rhythm. Agonizing and perfect.
Their return flight to New York was scheduled for Friday night. Beatrice, citing a pressing matter with a Berlin holding, had flown ahead. They had the jet to themselves. The understood promise of it hummed between them from the moment they boarded.
This time, it was different. There was no frantic tearing of clothes. Damien poured them both a drink. They sat across from each other, legs intertwined, talking softly as the plane climbed into the night. The desire was a slow, deep burn, not a wildfire.
“I got the offer from Kensington & Rowe,” she said, swirling the ice in her glass. “Senior associate. It’s a good fit.”
“They’re lucky to have you.” He meant it. The pang was for the loss of her daily presence, not her ambition.
She set her glass down, stood, and walked over to him. She settled herself sideways in his lap, her arm around his shoulders. She kissed him, a deep, exploring kiss that tasted of whiskey and promise. He cupped her face, losing himself in the softness of her mouth.
When she pulled back, her eyes were dark. “I want to try something,” she murmured.
“Anything.”
She got up and went to her carry-on, pulling out a small, black velvet pouch. She returned, kneeling on the carpet between his spread knees. From the pouch, she withdrew a slender, silver cock ring. She looked up at him, a challenge in her gaze. “Trust me?”
He nodded, his throat tight. He helped her slide his trousers and boxers down his hips. She rolled the cool metal ring down his length, settling it at the base of his already stirring erection. The constriction was immediate, making him fuller, harder, the veins standing out in stark relief.
“Now,” she said, her voice a low purr as she pushed him back into the seat. “You don’t get to come until I say. You just get to feel.”
She straddled him again, but this was a languid, controlled descent. She took him inside her inch by excruciating inch, her eyes locked on his, watching his reaction. When he was fully sheathed, she began to move. Not with frantic passion, but with a slow, undulating grind that made him see stars. The ring kept him on a brutal, perfect edge, amplifying every sensation, every clench of her inner muscles.
“Christ, Clara,” he gritted out, his hands gripping the leather arms of the seat.
“I know,” she cooed, leaning forward to bite his lower lip. She rode him with a hypnotic, devastating slowness for what felt like an eternity, her body a sleek, sweaty machine of torment. She’d bring him to the very brink, then still her hips, smiling down at him as he shuddered with the effort of holding back.
She finally let him flip her onto her hands and knees on the floor of the cabin. He drove into her from behind, the ring making each thrust a focused agony of pleasure. She reached back, guiding his hand to her clit. “Make me come,” she demanded, pushing back against him. “I want to feel you lose control while I’m falling apart.”
He obeyed, his fingers working her in tight, rough circles as he fucked her with deep, measured strokes. Her orgasm hit, a silent, convulsive shatter that milked him relentlessly. The sensation broke him. He was coming, a helpless, groaning surrender, the orgasm wrenched from him by the ring’s vicious grip, a seemingly endless torrent that left him blind and shaking.
He slipped out of her, collapsing onto the carpet beside her, the metal ring now a dull, throbbing ache. She curled into his side, her hand idly stroking his damp chest. “Okay?” she whispered.
“I have no words.” He turned his head, kissing her hair. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Promise?”
They lay there in a contented, exhausted heap on the jet’s carpet, the hum of the engines a soothing blanket. They were somewhere over the Atlantic, a world unto themselves, naked and spent and tangled together. Damien was tracing the curve of her hip, a thought forming about getting them both to the bed in the rear cabin, when the main cabin door suddenly hissed and swung inward.
The copilot, a man in his 30s with a neatly trimmed mustache and a crisp uniform, stepped through. He took two steps, his eyes professionally averted from the front of the cabin, focused on a clipboard in his hand.
“Mr. Trust, sorry to disturb, but we’ve just received an updated vector from New York ATC that will shave twenty minutes off our…” His voice died as his gaze lifted and landed on them.
He froze. His eyes, wide with professional horror, took in the scene: Damien and Clara, naked, glistening, sprawled on the floor amidst discarded clothing, the distinct smell of sex heavy in the recycled air. The sleek silver cock ring still encircled the base of Damien’s softening cock. A single, pearl-button from Clara’s first, torn blouse gleamed near the copilot’s polished shoe.
A beat of absolute, deafening silence crashed through the cabin.
The copilot’s face flushed a deep, mottled crimson. He snapped his eyes to the ceiling, then sharply back to his clipboard. “My apologies,” he stammered, the words clipped and strained. “The updated flight path is confirmed. We’ll… we’ll ensure no further interruptions.”