Sofia, however….
She turned those dark eyes on me, and in them I saw something I hadn’t expected. Not confusion, exactly, though that was there too. Not offense, though she was clearly deciding whether to be. Something sharper than both—the precise, focused look of someone who had just been spoken about as though they weren’t present and had noted it, cataloged it, and was now deciding exactly what to do with that information.
She wasn’t flustered.
She was thinking.
Who are you?her eyes said, without her mouth saying a word.And what exactly makes you think you can walk up to me and—
“Borrow me for what, exactly?” she said.
Quiet. Even. With an undertone that was half challenge and half something else I didn’t have a clean name for yet.
I looked at her—just her, only her, the man beside her already peripheral, the room beyond her already irrelevant—and felt the mission and the impulse and the splinter in my chest all arrive at the same point simultaneously.
“A conversation,” I said.
She held my gaze for a beat that lasted longer than it should have.
Then she turned to the man beside her and gave him a look that was genuinely apologetic in a way that nothing else she’d done tonight had been, which told me more about her in three seconds than the file had in three pages. She was kind, even in exit. Even when she was choosing to leave.
“Excuse me,” she said.
And then she turned. And she stepped away from him, and she was beside me, and I started moving through the crowd, taking her hand in mine, and she fell into step with the particular bearing of a woman who was absolutely choosing this, who needed me to know she was choosing it, who wouldn’t be led anywhere she hadn’t decided to go.
I noted that too.
Filed it somewhere that was starting to get complicated.
We moved through the room together. I kept my pace easy. I didn’t look at her, and I was excruciatingly aware of exactly where she was at every moment—the slight sound of her heels on the marble, the warmth of her in my peripheral vision, the fact that she smelled faintly of something clean and soft that had absolutely no business being this distracting.
I needed to remember what this was.
She was the access point. The means to the truth. The reason I was in this room, in this suit, at this event that cost three times what anyone at this table earned in legitimate business.
I needed to remember that.
I was already failing.
Chapter 3 – Sofia
I stared at him.
Not the polite, glancing kind of stare you deploy at fundraisers when someone says something mildly surprising, and you need a second to compose a response. The full, unfiltered, completely undisguised kind—the kind that would have made my father clear his throat from across the room if he’d been watching.
He probably was watching.
I didn’t look to check.
I came to borrow Sofia from you.
The words were still hanging in the air between the three of us, taking up space with the particular audacity of something said by a man who had never once in his life considered that the world might not rearrange itself to accommodate him. He hadn’t looked at Nico when he said it. He’d looked at me—those cold blue eyes doing the thing they kept doing, that steady, unhurried assessment that made me feel simultaneously seen and taken apart.
Who are you?
That was the first question. The loudest one, crowding out everything else.
Why are you interfering came second. Close behind it, almost simultaneous:What do you want?