Chapter 2 – Gregory #2
I was still six feet away when it happened.
She turned.
Fast—the sharp, decisive movement of someone who had made a decision and was acting on it before second thoughts could arrive. The heel caught the marble wrong, or the angle was off, or she had simply turned too quickly, and the physics of it didn’t cooperate—
She walked directly into my chest.
The impact was minor. My hand closed around her arm on reflex—steadying, automatic, no thought involved—and for one suspended moment she was right there, close enough that I could see the individual detail of her—the small gold cross at her collarbone, the silver bracelet at her wrist, the way her breath had caught at the collision.
Then she looked up.
And I looked down.
And something happened that I didn’t have a category for.
Her eyes were enormous up close. Dark brown and absolutely, completely unguarded in that single unscripted moment—she hadn’t had time to put anything in front of them, hadn’t had time to compose, and what I saw in them was so unfiltered and so entirely human that it hit me somewhere behind the sternum with the force of something I’d been telling myself for years I didn’t have.
I held it for exactly as long as I could afford to.
Which was not long.
But it was long enough for me to register it. File it. Know, with the cold, clear precision of a man who had been honest with himself about difficult things for four decades, that this was going to be a problem.
She pulled herself upright—spine straightening, chin lifting, composure sliding back into place with the practiced speed of a woman who had been putting herself back together in public for long enough that she’d gotten efficient at it.
A breath. And then she looked at me with those dark eyes and said, steadily:
“Sorry. I wasn’t—I didn’t see you.”
“I noticed,” I said.
I kept my voice level. Unhurried. Gave her nothing to read in it, which was the only defense I’d left at this particular range.
Her eyes moved across my face with the quick, methodical attention of someone running an assessment—not flirtatious, not flustered, just observant. Intelligent. The same way you’d look at a variable that had just appeared in a problem you thought you understood.
She was trying to figure out what I was.
Good. That made two of us.
“Sofia.” The man from beside Maverick appeared at her left, and his hand landed on her elbow with the particular weight of someone establishing something. “Are you all right?”
I stopped myself from looking at him.
Barely.
The hand on her elbow landed in my chest like a splinter—small, disproportionately irritating, entirely without justification.
She wasn’t mine. She didn’t know me. I had no claim on anything about this moment except the mission, which required her cooperation and her proximity and nothing beyond that.
I knew all of this.
The splinter didn’t care.
Sofia stepped back slightly, smoothing her dress with the one-handed gesture of someone buying themselves a second to recalibrate.
The gold cross caught the light.
The silver bracelet shifted at her wrist. She looked between the man and me with the careful neutrality of a woman deciding something.
Before she could answer him, I looked at him.
Not a threat. Nothing you could point to or name. Just the complete, undivided, entirely calm attention of a man who had been the most dangerous thing in every room he’d ever stood in and had never once needed to announce it.
He went still.
“I came to borrow Sofia from you,” I said.
The words landed exactly where I’d put them.
Casual on the surface, absolute underneath, leaving no room for an alternative outcome.
It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t quite a command.
It was simply a statement of what was going to happen, delivered with the specific confidence of someone who had never once in his adult life made a statement he wasn’t prepared to back up completely.
The man said nothing.
Sofia, however….
She turned those dark eyes on me, and in them I saw something I hadn’t expected.
Not confusion, exactly, though that was there too.
Not offense, though she was clearly deciding whether to be.
Something sharper than both—the precise, focused look of someone who had just been spoken about as though they weren’t present and had noted it, cataloged it, and was now deciding exactly what to do with that information.
She wasn’t flustered.
She was thinking.
Who are you? her eyes said, without her mouth saying a word. And what exactly makes you think you can walk up to me and—
“Borrow me for what, exactly?” she said.
Quiet. Even. With an undertone that was half challenge and half something else I didn’t have a clean name for yet.
I looked at her—just her, only her, the man beside her already peripheral, the room beyond her already irrelevant—and felt the mission and the impulse and the splinter in my chest all arrive at the same point simultaneously.
“A conversation,” I said.
She held my gaze for a beat that lasted longer than it should have.
Then she turned to the man beside her and gave him a look that was genuinely apologetic in a way that nothing else she’d done tonight had been, which told me more about her in three seconds than the file had in three pages. She was kind, even in exit. Even when she was choosing to leave.
“Excuse me,” she said.
And then she turned. And she stepped away from him, and she was beside me, and I started moving through the crowd, taking her hand in mine, and she fell into step with the particular bearing of a woman who was absolutely choosing this, who needed me to know she was choosing it, who wouldn’t be led anywhere she hadn’t decided to go.
I noted that too.
Filed it somewhere that was starting to get complicated.
We moved through the room together. I kept my pace easy.
I didn’t look at her, and I was excruciatingly aware of exactly where she was at every moment—the slight sound of her heels on the marble, the warmth of her in my peripheral vision, the fact that she smelled faintly of something clean and soft that had absolutely no business being this distracting.
I needed to remember what this was.
She was the access point. The means to the truth. The reason I was in this room, in this suit, at this event that cost three times what anyone at this table earned in legitimate business.
I needed to remember that.
I was already failing.