I turned to face him fully.
“How do you know my name?”
He opened his mouth.
“And,” I added, because I wasn’t finished, because the question of my name was only the beginning of what I needed answered, “how did you know I wanted to get away from him?” A beat. “And what’s your name? Who are you, by the way?”
The corner of his mouth moved.
That almost-smile again. The one that lived at the edge of itself and decided, each time, not to become the real thing. It was infuriating in a way I couldn’t entirely justify, because it wasn’t mocking—there was nothing unkind in it—but it carried the particular energy of a man who found something faintly interesting and wasn’t going to tell you what.
“Gregory Kamarov,” he said. “Yegor’s cousin.”
The name landed, and I sorted it instantly. Yegor—my brother-in-law, quiet and severe and the kind of man you could be in a room with for an hour without feeling like you knew him any better at the end of it. Camila’s husband. The Kamarov who had stood at the altar seven months ago, looking like he’d been carved from something elemental, and then terrifyingly, briefly, looked at my sister like she was the only soft thing in a world of hard edges.
Yegor’s cousin.
“I recognized you from the wedding,” Gregory said.
I stared at him.
“We’ve never met,” I said. “I would remember.”
The words came out with more certainty than I’d intended, and I heard them land in the space between us and wished, briefly, that I could take back the specific weight ofI would remember, which communicated something I hadn’t meant to communicate and couldn’t now uncommunicate because it was already there, already said, already sitting in his expression as something he had registered and filed.
His eyes didn’t change.
“No,” he agreed. “We haven’t.”
Which told me precisely nothing about how he’d been at the wedding without us crossing paths, which at a wedding the size of Camila’s—which had been approximately half of Chicago’s most powerful people crammed into a venue that had cost more than most people’s houses—was not impossible, exactly, but was also not fully satisfying as an explanation.
I let it sit for now.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” I said. “How did you know I wanted to leave?”
He looked at me then. Fully, directly, the way he had from the moment I’d collided into him—that complete, undivided attention that somehow made the rest of the room go slightly out of focus.
He took one step closer. Not crowding, not aggressive—just reducing the distance to something that existed below the threshold of what was socially unremarkable and just above what was impossible to ignore.
Close enough that I could see the exact shade of his eyes. Not uniformly blue—there were variations in it, deeper toward the edges, the kind of color that changed depending on what light it sat in.
He nearly whispered, “Tell me how you understood me so easily.”
The words arrived softly and hit like something considerably heavier.
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
Because the honest answer was that I didn’t know. The honest answer was that something had passed between us in a language I’d not known I spoke until thirty seconds ago, and I was standing here trying to explain it with the same part of my brain that cataloged symptoms and read lab results, and that part of my brain was coming up entirely empty.
I was not a person who came up empty. I found that deeply inconvenient.
“I asked you first,” I said instead.
Something moved in his eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or recognition. Some combination of the two that arrived and departed so quickly that I was left with only the impression of it, like when you look at something bright and then look away and the shape stays burned into your vision for a moment before it fades.
The silence between us stretched.
Not uncomfortable—that was the strange part. It should have been uncomfortable. I was standing in the middle of a fundraiser six inches closer to a man I’d met eight minutes ago than was strictly appropriate, and neither of us was speaking, and my father was somewhere in this room, and Nico was almost certainly watching from wherever he’d landed, and the correct thing was to fill the silence with something polite and retreat to a safe distance.