Sightline: Mile High Obsession

She counts everything. Seconds. Passengers. Pages he turns per hour. The eleven seconds his mouth was on hers before she pulled away.

Nadia Carr has been invisible for seven years. A federal air marshal on long-haul flights — armed, anonymous, watching three hundred strangers sleep while she keeps them safe from threats they'll never believe existed in seat 27C.

She doesn't get made. She doesn't get distracted. She doesn't break.

Then a man in business class holds his novel one-handed, and she can't stop watching him not read it.

Konstantin Lazar. Four watch lists. An arms broker who's carried more names than passports. A face that's been surgically rebuilt to be forgotten — except she can't. He knows her real name before she gives it. He knows her flight rotation before she files it. And he keeps showing up in the exact seat where she'll have to walk past him, six times a flight, pretending she doesn't.

He mapped her schedule. She omitted him from her report.

That's the problem.

What she leaves out of her official file is the three hours they spend awake while the cabin sleeps. The way he reads her pulse through her skin during turbulence. The fact that he's the first person in years to say her name like it belongs to someone real.

Her supervisor is asking questions. Her data is being reviewed. And the man she's protecting from her own agency just handed her a boarding pass to his next flight — no name, no confirmation number. Just a seat. And a date.

She has twelve hours to decide what she's willing to lose.