The impact was minor. My hand closed around her arm on reflex—steadying, automatic, no thought involved—and for one suspended moment she was right there, close enough that I could see the individual detail of her—the small gold cross at her collarbone, the silver bracelet at her wrist, the way her breath had caught at the collision.
Then she looked up.
And I looked down.
And something happened that I didn’t have a category for.
Her eyes were enormous up close. Dark brown and absolutely, completely unguarded in that single unscripted moment—she hadn’t had time to put anything in front of them, hadn’t had time to compose, and what I saw in them was so unfiltered and so entirely human that it hit me somewhere behind the sternum with the force of something I’d been telling myself for years I didn’t have.
I held it for exactly as long as I could afford to.
Which was not long.
But it was long enough for me to register it. File it. Know, with the cold, clear precision of a man who had been honest with himself about difficult things for four decades, that this was going to be a problem.
She pulled herself upright—spine straightening, chin lifting, composure sliding back into place with the practiced speed of a woman who had been putting herself back together in public for long enough that she’d gotten efficient at it. A breath. And then she looked at me with those dark eyes and said, steadily:
“Sorry. I wasn’t—I didn’t see you.”
“I noticed,” I said.
I kept my voice level. Unhurried. Gave her nothing to read in it, which was the only defense I’d left at this particular range.
Her eyes moved across my face with the quick, methodical attention of someone running an assessment—not flirtatious, not flustered, just observant. Intelligent. The same way you’d look at a variable that had just appeared in a problem you thought you understood.
She was trying to figure out what I was.
Good. That made two of us.
“Sofia.” The man from beside Maverick appeared at her left, and his hand landed on her elbow with the particular weight of someone establishing something. “Are you all right?”
I stopped myself from looking at him.
Barely.
The hand on her elbow landed in my chest like a splinter—small, disproportionately irritating, entirely without justification. She wasn’t mine. She didn’t know me. I had no claim on anything about this moment except the mission, which required her cooperation and her proximity and nothing beyond that.
I knew all of this.
The splinter didn’t care.
Sofia stepped back slightly, smoothing her dress with the one-handed gesture of someone buying themselves a second to recalibrate.
The gold cross caught the light.
The silver bracelet shifted at her wrist. She looked between the man and me with the careful neutrality of a woman deciding something.
Before she could answer him, I looked at him.
Not a threat. Nothing you could point to or name. Just the complete, undivided, entirely calm attention of a man who had been the most dangerous thing in every room he’d ever stood in and had never once needed to announce it.
He went still.
“I came to borrow Sofia from you,” I said.
The words landed exactly where I’d put them. Casual on the surface, absolute underneath, leaving no room for an alternative outcome. It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t quite a command. It was simply a statement of what was going to happen, delivered with the specific confidence of someone who had never once in his adult life made a statement he wasn’t prepared to back up completely.
The man said nothing.