The light turned green.
I didn’t move.
The car behind me registered its displeasure. I pulled forward on autopilot, turned right onto a street I hadn’t decided to turn onto, and spent approximately thirty seconds pretending I was driving somewhere with intention before I accepted the truth, which was that my body had already made the decision my mind was still arguing about.
She had walked away.
That was the thing I couldn’t stop replaying—not the kiss itself, though that was there too, sitting in my chest like something with weight and heat and a half-life I couldn’t calculate. Not the way she’d felt, or the sound she’d made when I’d pulled her closer, or the specific devastating detail of her hand in my jacket. All of that was filed somewhere I wasn’t looking at directly.
What I couldn’t stop replaying was the moment after.
The way she’d gone still when I pulled back. The way her face had done something—just briefly, just for a single unguarded second before the composure came down like a curtain—that I recognized because I’d spent forty years learning to recognize the face people make when they’ve offered something real and had it returned to them with less than they put in.
I’d done that.
I’d put that expression on her face with both hands and then sat there and watched it arrive.
We should stop before this goes further.
Seven words. Even. Controlled. The voice of a man who had made a decision.
What I hadn’t said, what I hadn’t let myself examine while she was still in the car, was that the decision had cost me something. That pulling back had required the specific, grinding effort of a man fighting against every instinct he had, and that I’d won that fight by the thinnest possible margin, and that the victory felt exactly like a loss.
I turned left.
Then right.
Then I was idling outside her building again, staring up at its lit façade with the engine running and the heat on and the accumulated weight of everything I was supposed to be pressing down on the thing I apparently couldn’t stop being in her presence.
Weak.
That was the word. I was weak, and I knew it, and I hated it with the specific, burning resentment of a man who had built his entire identity on the absence of this exact feeling. I didn’t want things I couldn’t have. I didn’t chase things that complicated missions. I didn’t sit outside buildings in the dark debating whether to go back inside because a twenty-two-year-old girl with dark eyes and a silver bracelet had kissed me back with everything she had, and I’d been stupid enough to stop it.
I gave myself two minutes.
That was the deal I made—two minutes to find a reason strong enough to justify driving away again. Matvey’s voice. The folder.Tomas Alvarez.The mission that had put me in her orbit in the first place, the mission that required my proximity to her to remain strategic rather than personal, the mission that became significantly more complicated the moment it stopped being a mission and started being the reason I had access to someone I was increasingly aware I had no business touching.
Two minutes.
I sat there, and I listed every reason.
The mission. Her age. Eighteen years between us—not a gap, a canyon. The fact that her father was under investigation for crimes that, if confirmed, would end in violence I would be responsible for delivering. The fact that she was innocent of all of it, which made using her proximity worse rather than better. The fact that Matvey had specifically, deliberately chosen me because I didn’t feel things, and every minute I spent in this car outside this building was evidence that Matvey had been catastrophically wrong.
Two minutes passed.
I’d not found a reason.
I took a sharp U-turn and pulled back to the curb.
***
The truth, and I’d the honesty to admit it only because there was no one in the car to admit it to, was that tonight had always been pointing here. Not consciously. I hadn’t stood in the club and thought,This is where it ends.But somewhere underneath the decisions, in the part of me that operated below language, the direction had been set from the moment I’d turned away from a random woman at Kazan’s because none of them had dark eyes and an unguarded face and the specific way of looking at me that made me feel simultaneously seen and challenged.
I’d come to the club to clear my head.
I’d driven Sofia home instead.
The universe, apparently, had opinions about what I needed, and they didn’t align with mine.