It began the way these things always did at events like this—the auctioneer’s voice picking up energy, the room’s attention sharpening into the particular focus of wealthy people considering whether they wanted something badly enough to announce it publicly. Watches, artwork, experiences—the currency of people who had run out of things to need and were now acquiring things to want.
I was watching the stage when movement at the edge of my vision made me look back.
Gregory had lowered his phone.
He was looking at something the auctioneer was presenting—a watch, from the description filtering through my distracted attention. Antique, apparently. Significant. The auctioneer was describing its provenance in the reverent tones reserved for objects that were worth more as stories than as functional items.
The bidding climbed.
I watched Gregory.
He raised one hand. A single, unhurried movement, the same quality of economy he applied to everything—no performance, no theatre, just the gesture of a man indicating what he intended to do and then doing it.
Two million dollars.
The number landed in the room, and the bidding stopped.
Not because two million was necessarily the ceiling—at an event like this, in a room like this, it wasn’t—but because of how it had been offered. Not competitively, not as escalation, but as finality. The kind of number you put on something when you want the conversation to be over. The auctioneer’s pause beforesoldwas barely a pause at all.
Two million dollars.
For a watch.
Without blinking.
I thought about the way he’d scanned the room earlier with the practiced attention of someone doing a job, not attending an event. I thought about his hands, which didn’t look like the hands of a man who collected antique watches.
I thought aboutYegor’s cousin,and the way the Kamarov name sat at the center of a world my sister had married into, and I’d been carefully, deliberately shielded from.
Until tonight.
Gregory pocketed his phone. Accepted something from a staff member—paperwork, probably, or a claim ticket, something administrative and mundane—and then he looked up.
Across the room.
Directly at me.
The distance was significant. The crowd was between us, people shifting and murmuring in the aftermath of the auction’s climax, bodies moving in the unfocused way of an audience returned to itself after a collective moment of attention.
None of it mattered.
He found me the way you find something you’d already marked—without searching, without scanning, just the direct arrival of a gaze that knew where it was going.
I didn’t look away.
I should have.
I was already compiling a list of reasons why looking away was the correct and sensible response—my father three feet to my right, Nico somewhere in this room with that flat, recalculating look still fresh in my memory, the fundamental reality that Gregory Kamarov was a stranger who had said six sentences to me and I’d already spent more mental energy on him than on anything else that had happened tonight.
I should have looked away.
His expression didn’t change. Nothing moved in it that the distance would have allowed me to read clearly anyway. But something in the quality of his attention—even from across a crowded room, even through the noise and the movement and the gold-lit air between us—landed the same way it had up close.
I pulled my eyes back to the stage.
My father’s hand covered mine briefly on the table—a rare, small gesture, there and gone before I could decide what to do with it.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.