I crossed to the panel and looked at the screen.
Gregory Kamarov.
He was standing at the building’s entrance, his jaw set and his eyes on the camera, an expression I could read clearly even through the grainy resolution: He already knew I was looking at him, and he had no intention of leaving.
My stomach did something complicated that I chose not to examine.
I pressed the entry button without speaking and listened to his footsteps on the stairs—not the elevator, the stairs, because apparently even his impatience had a specific texture to it—and unlocked the door before he could knock.
He moved through my doorway while I closed the door behind him and turned to face him. He looked at me for a long moment. His jaw was tight. His eyes moved over my face as he searched for information he hadn’t decided how to handle.
Then he said, “Did you sleep with him?”
The question landed in the room and stayed there.
I stared at him. I heard the words, processed them, ran them back through my mind to confirm I’d heard them correctly, and then spent a full two seconds in a state of pure disbelief.
“What do you mean?” I asked. The words came out evenly, but only because I was still assembling my response to the audacity of the question.
“Nico.” His voice was flat. “Did you sleep with Nico Calderon?”
An electric anger moved toward my chest. One that came from being reduced to something simple by someone who should have known better. I’d spent the last three hours building a case that could protect my family, confronting a man who moved weapons under my father’s name—and the man standing in my kitchen wanted to know if I’d slept with him.
“Why,” I said carefully, “does that matter to you?”
He stepped closer. I held my ground, which required more effort than I wanted to admit, because there was something about Gregory Kamarov in a small space that made all other things recede slightly. He was too much in the physical sense, and he was looking at me right now with an expression that I couldn’t fully name because it had too many things in it at once.
He kissed me.
He kissed me the way a man kissed a woman when he’d spent too long arguing himself out of it—and had finally run out of reasons to stop.
I kissed him back for exactly three seconds before I put my hands on his chest and pushed.
He stepped back. His eyes were dark, and his breathing wasn’t entirely even, and I felt a vicious, satisfying flicker of something at the knowledge that whatever this was, it was doing exactly as much damage to him as it was doing to me.
“You don’t get to do that,” I said. My voice was steadier than I expected. “You don’t get to show up here every time you feel like it and—” I stopped, because the sentence had several possible endings and none of them felt like the right one. I chose the truest one. “You told me to move on with my life.”
Something moved across his face. Something that I might have called guilt if I’d believed Gregory Kamarov capable of it.
“Did you sleep with him?” he asked again. This time, the flatness was gone, replaced by something beneath it I hadn’t heard from him before—something raw, poorly contained, and unmistakably desperate.
“What if I did?” I said.
The silence lasted less than two seconds.
He closed the distance between us in one movement and pressed me back against the wall, his forearms braced on either side of my head, his body a wall of heat and presence, and he was looking at me with an expression that made something in my chest go very, very still.
“Nobody,” he said, low and deliberate, each word arriving with its full weight, “has a right to touch you but me.”
I stared at him.
“And who gave you that right?” I asked. My voice came out quieter than intended.
He didn’t answer, but kissed me instead, and this time there was nothing gentle about it at all. It was all the things the previous kisses had been circling without landing, and I felt it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet like a current finding its ground.
My hands moved on their own, fueled by a desperation I couldn’t control. I shoved one hand under his jacket, my palm flat against the burning skin of his chest, while my other hand tangled in his hair, fistfuls of it, yanking his head back to keep his mouth locked on mine. The sound he made—a low, animalistic grunt of surrender—shattered whatever was left of my self-control. Knowing I’d finally broken through his cold exterior did something dangerous to my head.
Gregory didn’t just undress; he stripped with a violent efficiency. His jacket hit the floor, and his shirt followed in a blur of snapping buttons and tearing white linen. In the shadows, he looked lethal—all hard, corded muscle and jagged scars. He was a man built for war, and as he hovered over me, it was clear I was his only target.