Tall, dark, angular in a way that read as intensity but might have just been good bone structure. Dark eyes that watched more than they spoke. He wore his suit like armor, every line precise, nothing out of place. He was the kind of man who looked like he made decisions for a living.
“Sofia.” He said my name like he’d practiced it. Maybe he had.
“Nico.” I matched his energy. Steady. Measured. Giving away nothing.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“I’ve heard nothing about you,” I said. “So we’re starting uneven.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something more controlled than that. “I can fix that.”
Around us, I was peripherally aware of our fathers drifting: naturally, smoothly, the practiced retreat of men who wanted to appear uninvolved. By the time I noticed the space where they had been standing, they were already halfway across the room, deep in conversation with someone else, leaving Nico and me in a bubble of engineered intimacy.
I kept my expression easy.
Inside, I was already calculating the fastest exit.
Nico was polite. He was measured, articulate, and he asked the right questions. He didn’t talk over me. He didn’t dismiss anything I said.
He was, by every visible metric, the correct choice.
I felt absolutely nothing.
Not sparks, not nerves, not even the low-level simmer of potential that comes from standing close to someone you might want to know better. Just—nothing. The conversational equivalent of a waiting room. Pleasant enough. Entirely forgettable.
I smiled anyway. Said the right things. Asked the right questions back.
And then, between one polished sentence and the next, I ran out of the willingness to perform.
“Excuse me for a moment,” I said, with a smile that I hope read as gracious rather than desperate. “I need to find—”
I didn’t finish the sentence. I just turned.
Too fast. Way too fast—the heel, the marble floor, the momentum of a girl moving with more urgency than elegance—
And then I walked directly into a wall.
Except walls don’t breathe.
And walls don’t catch you.
His hands closed around my arms before I could fall—one hard grip, steadying, effortless—and I had exactly one second of registered sensation—solid, warm, enormous—before I looked up.
And the room went quiet.
Not literally. The music still played. The conversation still moved around us in its elegant currents. The chandeliers still dripped gold light across the marble floor.
But something in my chest went completely, suddenly, startlingly still.
He was….
There wasn’t a clean word for what he was. Nothandsome, exactly, though he was that too, in the hard, unpolished way of something that had never been designed for aesthetics and ended up striking anyway. He was tall in a way that reorganized the space around him, broad in a way that made the crowd behind him seem to thin. Dark blond hair, a little messy, like he hadn’t thought about it and didn’t intend to. A jaw shadowed with stubble. A scar running faint and pale from his cheek toward his temple—old, healed, the kind you stop seeing unless you’re already looking.
I was already looking.
His eyes were blue.
Not warmly blue, not the easy, pleasant blue of a clear sky. These were cold blue. Deep, still, and absolutely arctic—the kind of blue that belonged to water you couldn’t see the bottom of. The kind that didn’t invite you in.