By my fourth, the instability was less pleasant and more architectural—the booth seeming to shift slightly, the club’s ambient noise arriving in waves rather than a continuous stream, my own thoughts moving with the laggy imprecision of something running on reduced processing power.
I was, to put it clinically, very drunk.
Camila, who had always been able to outpace me in this department with zero apparent consequence, looked entirely unaffected and completely satisfied with herself.
Yegor arrived at twenty past eleven.
He moved through the club the way he moved through everything—without announcement, without urgency, with the specific economy of a man who had decided where he was going and simply went there, and the crowd thinned in front of him without him asking.
He reached our booth and looked at Camila with the particular quality of attention that I’d never seen him give to anything else—a fraction more present, a fraction less distant—and then he looked at me.
Something in his expression shifted.
Not concern, exactly. More like assessment.
“She’s coming with me,” Camila told him, standing with the fluid ease of someone who was not on her fourth drink.
Yegor said something quietly to her in Russian—I’d picked up enough in the last seven months to catch individual words but not full sentences—and then he turned to the room and made the smallest of gestures.
A single movement. Almost nothing.
“One of my cousins will take you home,” he said to me. Not unkindly. Just directly, the way Yegor said everything.
I opened my mouth to protest—I was fine, I could call an Uber, I was a grown woman with a functioning phone and an apartment that wasn’t far—
And then I stood up.
The floor did something unexpected. A gentle, firm reminder that my center of gravity had shifted approximately three inches to the left of where I expected it to be, and my body had not been consulted about this decision.
I put my hand on the table. Steadied. Composed my face into the expression of someone who was completely fine and in full possession of their motor functions.
Camila kissed my cheek. “Text me when you’re home.”
Then she and Yegor were moving away through the crowd, and I was standing at the edge of the booth with my bag over my shoulder and the room doing its gentle, tilting thing, and I turned toward the exit—
And stopped.
Gregory Kamarov was standing in front of me.
Not expectantly. Not with the performed casualness of someone who had positioned himself and was now pretending it was coincidental. Just—there. The same quality of presence he had in every space he occupied, the kind that didn’t announce itself and didn’t need to. Dark blond hair, a little disheveled. The leather jacket that suited him infinitely more than the fundraiser suit had. Those cold blue eyes, which were currently doing the thing where they assessed everything in one pass and gave nothing back.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Three days of carefully not saying his name to Camila, and here was the universe delivering him to me at the worst possible version of myself—unsteady on my feet, four drinks deep, with my composure somewhere at the bottom of a glass I’d emptied twenty minutes ago.
“I’m fine,” I said, preemptively.
“You’re not,” he said.
“I’ll call an Uber.”
I moved to step around him.
His hand closed around my arm.
Not rough—nothing about Gregory Kamarov was unnecessarily rough, I was beginning to understand, which was somehow more unnerving than if he had been. Just firm. The grip of a man who had made a decision and communicated it through his hands because words, in this case, were secondary.