The kind that made you want to jump anyway.
He was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Not quite neutral—there was something behind it, some flicker of something that crossed his face so quickly I almost missed it—but controlled. Carefully, completely controlled.
His hands were still on my arms.
I became extraordinarily aware of this fact.
“Sorry,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I deserved credit for. “I wasn’t—I didn’t see you.”
“I noticed,” he said.
His voice was low. Unhurried. Carrying the faint edge of an accent he’d mostly worn away but not entirely—Russian, maybe, underneath the Chicago flat vowels. It landed in my chest like something with weight.
I should have stepped back.
I didn’t step back.
“Sofia.” Nico appeared at my left, the word landing with the particular energy of a man who had just watched something he didn’t like and was deciding how to address it. His hand touched my elbow lightly. “Are you all right?”
I opened my mouth.
The blue-eyed stranger looked at Nico.
Just looked at him. No hostility. No aggression. Nothing you could point to or name. Just the kind of look that comes from a man so certain of his own authority that he doesn’t need to perform it. The kind of look that simplylandsand lets the other person decide what to do with it.
Nico’s hand on my elbow went very still.
“I came to borrow Sofia from you,” the stranger said.
The words were so casual that they were almost polite. Almost. But underneath the politeness was something else—a certainty so absolute it didn’t leave room for the possibility of no. He wasn’t asking. He wasn’t even quite telling. He was simply stating a fact that hadn’t happened yet.
I stared at him.
Borrow me.
Like I was something that could be borrowed. Like Nico had any claim on me to begin with, which he didn’t, regardless of what our fathers were orchestrating across the room. Like this stranger had any right to walk up and—
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I tilted my head and looked up at him with my best impression of polite confusion. “Do we know each other?”
Something moved in those blue eyes. Something small and brief and gone almost instantly, like a light switching off in a room you’d only half-noticed was lit.
“Not yet,” he said.
Two words. Quiet and even and carrying the weight of something I didn’t have the language for.
Not yet.
The air between us did something I didn’t have clinical terminology for—and I was a medical student, I had clinical terminology for most things. Some kind of pressure differential. Some rearrangement of atmosphere.
I was aware of my own heartbeat in a way I usually wasn’t.
I didn’t like it.
I liked it entirely too much.
Nico cleared his throat. The sound was small and deliberate, and the most human thing he had done all evening. “Sofia and I were in the middle of a conversation,” he said, and his voice carried the careful, controlled edge of a man who was used to being the most formidable presence in any room and had just encountered evidence that tonight might be an exception.
The stranger didn’t look at him again. He was looking at me.