Chapter 3 – Sofia
I stared at him.
Not the polite, glancing kind of stare you deploy at fundraisers when someone says something mildly surprising, and you need a second to compose a response.
The full, unfiltered, completely undisguised kind—the kind that would have made my father clear his throat from across the room if he’d been watching.
He probably was watching.
I didn’t look to check.
I came to borrow Sofia from you.
The words were still hanging in the air between the three of us, taking up space with the particular audacity of something said by a man who had never once in his life considered that the world might not rearrange itself to accommodate him.
He hadn’t looked at Nico when he said it.
He’d looked at me—those cold blue eyes doing the thing they kept doing, that steady, unhurried assessment that made me feel simultaneously seen and taken apart.
Who are you?
That was the first question. The loudest one, crowding out everything else.
Why are you interfering came second. Close behind it, almost simultaneous: What do you want?
I didn’t ask any of them out loud. Instead, I stood there in my navy dress under the chandelier light, with my composure back in place and my mind running at a speed that probably showed in my eyes if you knew how to look.
I looked at this man—Gregory, though I didn’t know that yet—and tried to solve him the way I solved things.
Methodically. Starting with what was observable and working inward.
Observable: He was enormous and completely unbothered by it.
He wore the suit like an afterthought, like something he’d put on because the occasion required it and not because he’d given it a second’s thought beyond that.
His hands—I noticed his hands, which were a strange thing to notice first, but they were hard to miss—were the kind that looked like they’d been made for a different world than this one.
A rougher one. The scar at his cheek caught the light when he shifted fractionally, old and pale and entirely at odds with the crystalline elegance of everything around him.
He didn’t belong here.
He was here anyway.
And he was looking at me like he’d already decided something, like the conversation we were apparently about to have was a foregone conclusion, like Nico standing twelve inches to my left with a jaw gone tight enough to crack wasn’t a variable he needed to factor in.
That should have annoyed me.
It did annoy me.
It also, and I resented this entirely, made something in my chest go very quiet in a way that felt less like calm and more like the held-breath moment before something significant.
Then his gaze moved.
Just slightly. Just enough. He shifted those cold blue eyes from my face to Nico’s—not a look you could call hostile, nothing so readable as that—and something passed through them.
Something that communicated, with zero words and absolute clarity, that he was speaking to me and Nico’s continued presence in the conversation was a courtesy he was extending and could just as easily retract.
Then he looked back at me.
And I understood.
That was the part that unsettled me most, turning it over later.
Not what he did, but the fact that I understood it immediately.
Without explanation, without preamble, without anything that should have constituted communication between two people who had never met—I read him.
Completely. The slight tilt of his chin, the deliberate ease in his posture, the half-second of eye contact that said play along.
I’d spent four years in medical school learning to read people—their pain levels, their anxiety, the gap between what they said and what their body was doing—and I was good at it.
But this was different. This wasn’t clinical reading.
This was something more instinctive and considerably more alarming, the way you sometimes finish a sentence before the person speaking reaches the end of it and can’t explain how you knew where it was going.
I knew where he was going.
And I took exactly one breath to decide.
He held out his hand.
Not urgently. Not with any of the performative gallantry that Nico had deployed all evening with his practiced manners and his calibrated smile. Just—steady. Open. The same certainty he put into everything, offered in the shape of a palm that was waiting without demanding.
An exit, wrapped in a question I hadn’t been asked.
I hesitated for exactly one moment.
One real moment, where I acknowledged that I didn’t know this man, that his name was unknown to me, that the only things I’d to go on were a pair of cold blue eyes and one sentence and the inexplicable fact that he had read my boredom from across a room full of Chicago’s most distracted people and walked toward it like it was something that concerned him.
Then I slipped my hand into his.
His fingers closed around mine—not tight, not possessive, just present—and the warmth of it moved up my arm in a way I noted and immediately tried not to note, and we turned together, and we walked.
It was strange how naturally we moved.
No negotiation. No one leading, no one following in any way that felt imbalanced.
Just two people crossing a marble floor together with the unhurried synchrony of—I didn’t have a word for it.
Something that should have taken time to arrive at, something that was usually the product of familiarity and repetition, occurring in the first thirty seconds of being in proximity to each other.
I kept my chin up and my expression easy, and I didn’t look back at Nico.
We moved maybe fifteen feet before he released my hand.
Just let go, quietly, as if he’d always intended it to be temporary. The warmth left with it, and I hated that I noticed the absence, and I told myself I noticed it the way you notice any sensory shift—clinically, without attachment—and I believed that approximately forty percent.
“Now you are free to go, Sofia.”
His voice, close and low and carrying that ghost of an accent underneath the Chicago cadence. He said it without looking at me—eyes already moving, assessing the room with the peripheral attention of someone who had trained himself to watch everything and seem to watch nothing.
I turned to face him fully.
“How do you know my name?”
He opened his mouth.
“And,” I added, because I wasn’t finished, because the question of my name was only the beginning of what I needed answered, “how did you know I wanted to get away from him?” A beat. “And what’s your name? Who are you, by the way?”
The corner of his mouth moved.
That almost-smile again. The one that lived at the edge of itself and decided, each time, not to become the real thing.
It was infuriating in a way I couldn’t entirely justify, because it wasn’t mocking—there was nothing unkind in it—but it carried the particular energy of a man who found something faintly interesting and wasn’t going to tell you what.
“Gregory Kamarov,” he said. “Yegor’s cousin.”
The name landed, and I sorted it instantly.
Yegor—my brother-in-law, quiet and severe and the kind of man you could be in a room with for an hour without feeling like you knew him any better at the end of it.
Camila’s husband. The Kamarov who had stood at the altar seven months ago, looking like he’d been carved from something elemental, and then terrifyingly, briefly, looked at my sister like she was the only soft thing in a world of hard edges.
Yegor’s cousin.
“I recognized you from the wedding,” Gregory said.
I stared at him.
“We’ve never met,” I said. “I would remember.”
The words came out with more certainty than I’d intended, and I heard them land in the space between us and wished, briefly, that I could take back the specific weight of I would remember, which communicated something I hadn’t meant to communicate and couldn’t now uncommunicate because it was already there, already said, already sitting in his expression as something he had registered and filed.
His eyes didn’t change.
“No,” he agreed. “We haven’t.”
Which told me precisely nothing about how he’d been at the wedding without us crossing paths, which at a wedding the size of Camila’s—which had been approximately half of Chicago’s most powerful people crammed into a venue that had cost more than most people’s houses—was not impossible, exactly, but was also not fully satisfying as an explanation.
I let it sit for now.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” I said. “How did you know I wanted to leave?”
He looked at me then. Fully, directly, the way he had from the moment I’d collided into him—that complete, undivided attention that somehow made the rest of the room go slightly out of focus.
He took one step closer. Not crowding, not aggressive—just reducing the distance to something that existed below the threshold of what was socially unremarkable and just above what was impossible to ignore.
Close enough that I could see the exact shade of his eyes. Not uniformly blue—there were variations in it, deeper toward the edges, the kind of color that changed depending on what light it sat in.
He nearly whispered, “Tell me how you understood me so easily.”
The words arrived softly and hit like something considerably heavier.
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
Because the honest answer was that I didn’t know.
The honest answer was that something had passed between us in a language I’d not known I spoke until thirty seconds ago, and I was standing here trying to explain it with the same part of my brain that cataloged symptoms and read lab results, and that part of my brain was coming up entirely empty.
I was not a person who came up empty. I found that deeply inconvenient.
“I asked you first,” I said instead.