Only at me.
Like Nico was furniture. Like the entire gleaming, gold-lit room was furniture. Like I was the only thing in it worth looking at, which should have been alarming—no, whichwasalarming.
I wasn’t naive enough to think this man’s interest was simple. I wasn’t naive enough to think anything about him was simple. Every instinct I had, every quiet, careful part of me that had learned to read rooms and people and the spaces between what was said and what was meant—all of it was screaming something in a language I was still translating.
Dangerous.
That was the word.
I thought about my father, somewhere on the other side of the room. I thought about the dress he’d chosen, the car he’d summoned, the future he’d decided on without asking me, the version of my life I was still trying to fight my way back toward.
Then I looked back at the stranger with the cold blue eyes and the scar in a room full of suits, and I understood that this man operated according to no rules I knew.
I should have saidexcuse meand walked away.
I should have gone back to Nico and his polished sentences and the match my father had engineered and the path of least resistance that led to a life I didn’t want but could at least map.
I should have been smarter.
I was twenty-two years old, and I’d spent the last year being smart, being careful, being exactly what everyone needed me to be—and standing in this gold-lit room in a dress my father had chosen, next to a man my father had selected, I was so exhausted by it that the wordshouldhad temporarily lost all meaning.
So instead of walking away, I looked up at the stranger, at those cold blue eyes that were still watching me like I was something he was deciding what to do with, and I said, very calmly:
“Borrow me for what, exactly?”
The corner of his mouth moved.
Not a smile. Something smaller than that.
“A conversation,” he said.
I held his gaze for one more second, just long enough to make it clear that I was choosing this, that I was not being borrowed, that no one borrowed Sofia Alvarez without her explicit cooperation.
And then I turned to Nico, and I gave him the most genuinely apologetic look I could manage, which under the circumstances was moderate at best.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Nico said nothing. His jaw was tight. His eyes moved once to the man beside me and then back to my face, and something in them shifted—not hurt, exactly, but the particular flatness of a man recalculating.
I didn’t wait to see what he recalculated.
I stepped away from him, and somehow—without meaning to, without deciding to—I fell into step beside the stranger with the cold blue eyes, and he moved through the crowd and the crowd parted for him the way crowds do for men who don’t seem to notice that other people are in the room, and I followed, and the music played on, and the chandeliers dripped their gold light across the marble floor.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, quiet and certain as a diagnosis, something told me that this was the moment.
Not the fundraiser. Not Nico. Not my father’s plans or the navy dress or any of the careful, constructed pieces of the evening.
This was where the night changed.
Chapter 2 – Gregory
The suit was Kirill’s idea.
Not the wearing of one—I knew how to dress for an event when the mission required it—but the specific one: charcoal grey, Italian cut, the kind that cost enough to make a statement without being loud about it.You need to look like you belong there, Kirill had said, sliding it across the table without looking up from his laptop.Not like you’re about to break someone’s fingers.
I’d taken the suit without commenting on the implication.
He wasn’t wrong.