I’d spent three days since the fundraiser being annoyed about that.
***
I had my own apartment now.
One month. That was how long I’d been living somewhere that didn’t belong to Tomas Alvarez—didn’t carry his name on the lease, didn’t have his preferences built into the furniture, didn’t come with the particular atmospheric pressure of a house where someone was always watching the shape of your choices and deciding whether they approved.
One month of waking up in a space that was mine. Small, practical, with a reading corner I’d built out of a secondhand armchair and a lamp from a street market and the accumulated weight of four years’ worth of medical textbooks. It smelled like the candle I burned when I studied—something clean, faintly botanical—and nothing else that didn’t belong to me.
I loved it with a ferocity that probably said something about how long I’d been waiting for it.
But my father still called daily. Still sent the car. Still expected my presence at events like the fundraiser with the particular confidence of a man who considered the question of my attendance already settled.
Some things didn’t change with an address.
The club was loud in the way I’d come to associate specifically with Bratva spaces—not the curated, ambient noise of places designed to be seen in, but something rawer than that. Bass that lived in the floor. Smoke and conversation layered into a texture you moved through rather than heard. The kind of place that didn’t care whether you were comfortable; it only cared whether you belonged.
I’d been here enough times with Camila that the men at the door recognized my face without checking anything.
That still unsettled me a little.
Camila was already at our usual table when I arrived, tucked into the corner booth with a drink in her hand and the particular look on her face that meant she had already decided this evening was going to produce something worth discussing. She was wearing a deep burgundy wrap dress that Yegor had probably not chosen and definitely hadn’t asked her not to wear, because Yegor was smart enough to know that Camila Alvarez—Camila Kamarov—was not a woman whose wardrobe accepted external input.
She looked at me and smiled.
Not her public smile. The real one.
I slid into the booth across from her and immediately reached for the drink she had already ordered for me, because this was how we worked: She knew what I needed before I arrived, and I let her, because there was exactly one person in the world whose assumptions about me I trusted completely.
“You look like you have something to say,” she said.
“I always have something to say.”
“You look like it’s been accumulating pressure for several days and is about to become structural.”
I took a long sip of the drink—something fruity with considerably more alcohol than the fruit advertised—and set it down and looked at my sister.
“Papá set me up,” I said.
Camila raised an eyebrow. The gesture was so perfectly calibrated—one eyebrow, no more, communicating complete comprehension, mild unsurprise, and active interest simultaneously—that I briefly marveled at it the way I sometimes marveled at very efficient biological mechanisms.
“At the fundraiser,” she said.
“At the fundraiser. Maverick Wiese’s son. Nico.” I paused. “Or stepson, apparently.”
“Nico Calderon.” Something moved through Camila’s expression—a flicker, quick and careful, that she tucked away before I could fully read it. “What did you think of him?”
“I thought he was very handsome and completely wrong for me and that Papá had clearly put considerable planning into a situation I had no interest in.”
“But?”
I looked at her. “Why is there a but?”
“Because you have the face you make when a story isn’t finished.”
I picked up my drink again. Turned it in my hands. The ice moved against the glass with a small, clean sound.
“Someone intervened,” I said. “Before the Nico conversation could become something I had to actively dismantle. One of Yegor’s cousins, apparently. He—” I stopped. Recalibrated. “He walked over and told Nico he was borrowing me. And then he did. And then he let me go and told me I was free to leave.”