I didn’t ask any of them out loud. Instead, I stood there in my navy dress under the chandelier light, with my composure back in place and my mind running at a speed that probably showed in my eyes if you knew how to look. I looked at this man—Gregory, though I didn’t know that yet—and tried to solve him the way I solved things. Methodically. Starting with what was observable and working inward.
Observable: He was enormous and completely unbothered by it. He wore the suit like an afterthought, like something he’d put on because the occasion required it and not because he’d given it a second’s thought beyond that. His hands—I noticed his hands, which were a strange thing to notice first, but they were hard to miss—were the kind that looked like they’d been made for a different world than this one. A rougher one. The scar at his cheek caught the light when he shifted fractionally, old and pale and entirely at odds with the crystalline elegance of everything around him.
He didn’t belong here.
He was here anyway.
And he was looking at me like he’d already decided something, like the conversation we were apparently about to have was a foregone conclusion, like Nico standing twelve inches to my left with a jaw gone tight enough to crack wasn’t a variable he needed to factor in.
That should have annoyed me.
Itdidannoy me.
It also, and I resented this entirely, made something in my chest go very quiet in a way that felt less like calm and more like the held-breath moment before something significant.
Then his gaze moved.
Just slightly. Just enough. He shifted those cold blue eyes from my face to Nico’s—not a look you could call hostile, nothing so readable as that—and something passed through them. Something that communicated, with zero words and absolute clarity, that he was speaking to me and Nico’s continued presence in the conversation was a courtesy he was extending and could just as easily retract.
Then he looked back at me.
And I understood.
That was the part that unsettled me most, turning it over later. Not what he did, but the fact that I understood it immediately. Without explanation, without preamble, without anything that should have constituted communication between two people who had never met—I read him. Completely. The slight tilt of his chin, the deliberate ease in his posture, the half-second of eye contact that saidplay along.
I’d spent four years in medical school learning to read people—their pain levels, their anxiety, the gap between what they said and what their body was doing—and I was good at it. But this was different. This wasn’t clinical reading. This was something more instinctive and considerably more alarming, the way you sometimes finish a sentence before the person speaking reaches the end of it and can’t explain how you knew where it was going.
I knew where he was going.
And I took exactly one breath to decide.
He held out his hand.
Not urgently. Not with any of the performative gallantry that Nico had deployed all evening with his practiced manners and his calibrated smile. Just—steady. Open. The same certainty he put into everything, offered in the shape of a palm that was waiting without demanding.
An exit, wrapped in a question I hadn’t been asked.
I hesitated for exactly one moment.
One real moment, where I acknowledged that I didn’t know this man, that his name was unknown to me, that the only things I’d to go on were a pair of cold blue eyes and one sentence and the inexplicable fact that he had read my boredom from across a room full of Chicago’s most distracted people and walked toward it like it was something that concerned him.
Then I slipped my hand into his.
His fingers closed around mine—not tight, not possessive, just present—and the warmth of it moved up my arm in a way I noted and immediately tried not to note, and we turned together, and we walked.
It was strange how naturally we moved.
No negotiation. No one leading, no one following in any way that felt imbalanced. Just two people crossing a marble floor together with the unhurried synchrony of—I didn’t have a word for it. Something that should have taken time to arrive at, something that was usually the product of familiarity and repetition, occurring in the first thirty seconds of being in proximity to each other.
I kept my chin up and my expression easy, and I didn’t look back at Nico.
We moved maybe fifteen feet before he released my hand.
Just let go, quietly, as if he’d always intended it to be temporary. The warmth left with it, and I hated that I noticed the absence, and I told myself I noticed it the way you notice any sensory shift—clinically, without attachment—and I believed that approximately forty percent.
“Now you are free to go, Sofia.”
His voice, close and low and carrying that ghost of an accent underneath the Chicago cadence. He said it without looking at me—eyes already moving, assessing the room with the peripheral attention of someone who had trained himself to watch everything and seem to watch nothing.