Chapter 18
SOFIA
Three days.
That's how long I spend back at St. Gabriel pretending I don't know what his hands feel like.
I attend lectures. I eat in the dining hall with Mara, who asks no questions and shares her notes, which is the precise combination of qualities that makes her the only person I can currently tolerate.
I sit through a seminar on syndicate law and write down words that don't penetrate past the surface of my brain.
I sleep badly. I run in the morning because the track is the only place on campus without cameras in the gargoyles, and running is the closest thing to freedom this school offers.
He is here. In the same building. In the same suite that smells like cedar and cold air and something I have now permanently associated with the word problem.
He hasn't mentioned the yacht.
The first day, we operate in formal parallel.
He's in his study by seven AM. I'm in the kitchen.
He comes out for coffee at eight, we exchange two sentences about the week's schedule, and then he goes back in and closes the door.
I sit with my workbook and listen to his voice through the wall — Russian, precise, a phone call to Moscow, and the fact that I understand maybe forty percent of it is the only thing that morning that feels like I have any advantage in this building.
After lunch he leaves the Tower entirely. Meeting in the east wing, I assume, or one of the library conference rooms the Heirs use for the meetings that don't happen on paper. I don't know and he didn't say and I didn't ask.
The second day is worse because it's quieter.
He works. I study. We eat meals at offset times, which is almost certainly not an accident.
I have breakfast before he emerges. He has dinner after I've already retreated to my room.
The Tower has developed a specific temperature — not cold, not warm, the careful nothing of two people maintaining exactly the distance they need to pretend nothing is happening.
I've seen him use this technique on other people. I thought it was a form of control.
I didn't realize it would feel like this from the receiving end.
By the third morning I'm angry about it, which is better than the alternative.
Anger has a shape. It gives me somewhere to put the energy that's been building since the yacht, since the corridor in Miami, since the specific weight of his forehead on my shoulder in the garage and the three words he said to the brake caliper before stepping back and pretending they hadn't happened.
I go to my seminar and take meticulous notes about a jurisdiction case I have no interest in.
I eat with Mara and don't tell her about the yacht; she doesn't ask, and the not-asking is the most careful kindness I've received since October.
On the way back to the Tower I detour through the east wing garden and sit on the stone bench by the dead fountain — dark, cold, the night air smelling of wet stone and November — and think: this is not sustainable.
I already knew it wasn't sustainable.
I'd been telling myself I was fine with not-sustainable.
I'm not.
It's past midnight on the third night when I hear him in the kitchen.
Not loud — just the specific quiet sounds of someone who grew up in a house with staff and never quite unlearned the art of moving like he doesn't want to be noticed. The soft click of the cabinet. Ice. The pour of something that costs more than my gap year.
I should go back to my room.
I've said this to myself before. It never works.
He's standing at the counter with his jacket off, tie undone and hanging loose, sleeves rolled to the forearms. The overhead light is off — just the under-cabinet strip, warm and low, turning the kitchen amber.
He has his back to the door and a glass of scotch in his hand and he looks like a man who came downstairs for the specific purpose of not having to be Aleksei Romanov for twenty minutes.
He looks almost human.
I hate him for it.
"Can't sleep?" I ask.
He doesn't turn around. "I was sleeping."
"You were standing in the kitchen with a glass of Macallan at midnight."
"I sleep efficiently." He takes a swallow. "Fifteen minutes and I'm done."
I lean against the door frame. "Is that what you tell yourself."
"Sofia."
"Aleksei."
He turns then. His eyes are slightly less armored than usual — it's the hour, or the scotch, or the fact that we're not in a room that requires him to be something specific. He looks at me the way he occasionally allows himself to look at me when he thinks the moment is too small to matter.
It always matters.
"Go to bed," he says.
"No."
A pause. "No."
"No." I push off the door frame and come to stand on the other side of the counter. "I want to talk about the yacht."
Something shifts in his jaw. "There's nothing to discuss."
"You had your hand up my dress at a poker table in front of Dimitri Drakos."
"Yes."
"And then you walked away."
"Also yes."
"And since then you have been—" I gesture vaguely at him, at the kitchen, at the specific performance of normalcy we've both been conducting for three days. "This."
He sets down the glass. Carefully. The way he does things when he's deciding something.
"I did what I did," he says. "You responded. The evening continued. I don't see the problem."
"The problem," I say, and my voice is dangerously even, "is that you did that in front of people who hate you, while raising a bet to ten million dollars, without asking me, without telling me, without—"
"You didn't say stop."
"I couldn't say anything."
"I know," he says. And the way he says it — quiet, deliberate, slightly too knowing — ignites something behind my sternum.
"It's not a game," I say.
"Everything is a game."
"Not this." I put my hands flat on the counter. "Not what you did. Not what I— not the way it felt. That is not a game, Aleksei."
He looks at my hands on the counter. Then at my face.
We're both very still. The under-cabinet light does amber things to the shadows, and the kitchen smells like scotch and cedar and the late hour, and outside the narrow window November is doing its November thing — bare trees, no moon, the kind of dark that has weight.
"What do you want me to say?" he asks. His voice has changed — not soft, but lower, the control dialled back just enough to feel like honesty. "That it meant something? That I couldn't stop thinking about you? That I'm standing in my own kitchen at midnight because I can't—"
He stops.
The kitchen is very quiet.
"Can't what?" I ask.
He looks at me for a long moment with an expression that I have never seen on him before and cannot categorize — it's too much of something, too open, whatever it is — and then he crosses the distance between us.
I don't move back.
He stops with his hip against the counter, close enough that the warmth of him is a physical presence. He reaches out and takes my chin in his hand — not roughly, just precise — tilting my face up.
"You're furious," he says.
"Yes."
"Good." His thumb drags across my lower lip, which is either threatening or something else entirely. "Stay furious."
"Don't tell me what to feel—"
He kisses me.
Not gently. Not a decision — more like a detonation.
His hands find my waist and drag me toward him in the same motion, and I make a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed about if I had any remaining capacity for embarrassment, and then his hands are in my hair and I'm kissing him back with the full fury I've been suppressing for three days, which turns out to be considerable.
We knock the glass of scotch and I hear it hit the counter — don't break, doesn't break — and his hands are everywhere with that same focused precision he brings to everything, like he's cataloging, like he's learning, like he has a plan and the plan involves dismantling me by degrees.
I hate you, I think.
His teeth graze my neck and I change my mind.
He lifts me onto the counter in one smooth motion and steps between my knees and I let him, I pull him closer, because the anger and the wanting are the same thing tonight and I'm done pretending otherwise.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
His eyes are dark and very close and the controlled blankness is entirely gone — he looks like a man who has stopped pretending to be a machine, which is either the most dangerous thing I've ever seen or the most honest, and the distinction no longer seems important.
"Tell me to stop," he says. "And I stop."
"Don't stop," I say.
He doesn't.
His hands move to the hem of my shirt — slow, deliberate, the question in it even though he's already asked and I've already answered.
He pulls it over my head and sets it aside and then he just looks, which is somehow worse than anything that came before, the full weight of his attention on my skin in the amber under-cabinet light like he's making a file entry he intends to keep.
"Aleksei—"
"I'm looking." His voice has dropped to something I've never heard in it before. Not the command register, not the controlled-performance register. Just low and private and entirely honest. "Let me."
I let him.
He takes his time with my breasts. His mouth finds one nipple and his fingers find the other, and the dual attention is precise in a way that makes me wonder if he approaches everything like this — gather data, test response, refine method.
The answer seems to be yes, because when I arch into his mouth he makes a note of it and does it again, and when his teeth graze and I gasp he makes a note of that too and stays with it longer than is strictly survivable.
His free hand maps the geography of my ribs, my waist, the plane of my stomach — not groping, not rushing, just reading. He traces the waistband of my shorts with one finger and I feel the question reform in the pause.
I lift my hips.