Chapter 5 – Sofia
There were exactly two people in the world I told everything to.
One was my mother, and she had been gone for years.
The other was Camila.
My sister was three years older than me, which meant she had always been three years ahead of me in every way that mattered—three years more polished, three years more strategic, three years deeper into the understanding of what it meant to be an Alvarez woman in a world that our father had built to run on his terms. She had learned to navigate it the way you learn to navigate anything dangerous—carefully, intelligently, and with the specific kind of grace that looks effortless from the outside and costs everything on the inside.
I’d always followed her map, even when it led somewhere I didn’t expect.
Like the Bratva.
I’d known about it before the wedding, in the vague, peripheral way you know about things that exist at the edge of your family’s life without being invited into the center of it.
I’d known Camila was seeing someone dangerous.
She had never said his name, had never confirmed what world he moved in, but there were signs if you knew how to read them, and I’d always known how to read Camila.
The way she checked her phone with her body angled slightly away.
The way she talked about him—never directly, always in the shape of his absence, the negative space where a name should have been.
The way she smiled sometimes when she thought no one was watching, which was a smile I’d never seen her wear for anyone else.
Fierce. Unguarded. The smile of a woman who had found something she hadn’t been looking for and was still deciding whether to be terrified about it.
She had married Yegor seven months ago.
I’d stood at that altar beside her and watched my sister become a Kamarov and thought, in the private, honest part of myself that I rarely let speak at full volume: She looks like she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.
I’d not seen Gregory at that wedding.
I’d spent three days since the fundraiser being annoyed about that.
***
I had my own apartment now.
One month. That was how long I’d been living somewhere that didn’t belong to Tomas Alvarez—didn’t carry his name on the lease, didn’t have his preferences built into the furniture, didn’t come with the particular atmospheric pressure of a house where someone was always watching the shape of your choices and deciding whether they approved.
One month of waking up in a space that was mine.
Small, practical, with a reading corner I’d built out of a secondhand armchair and a lamp from a street market and the accumulated weight of four years’ worth of medical textbooks.
It smelled like the candle I burned when I studied—something clean, faintly botanical—and nothing else that didn’t belong to me.
I loved it with a ferocity that probably said something about how long I’d been waiting for it.
But my father still called daily. Still sent the car. Still expected my presence at events like the fundraiser with the particular confidence of a man who considered the question of my attendance already settled.
Some things didn’t change with an address.
The club was loud in the way I’d come to associate specifically with Bratva spaces—not the curated, ambient noise of places designed to be seen in, but something rawer than that.
Bass that lived in the floor. Smoke and conversation layered into a texture you moved through rather than heard.
The kind of place that didn’t care whether you were comfortable; it only cared whether you belonged.
I’d been here enough times with Camila that the men at the door recognized my face without checking anything.
That still unsettled me a little.
Camila was already at our usual table when I arrived, tucked into the corner booth with a drink in her hand and the particular look on her face that meant she had already decided this evening was going to produce something worth discussing.
She was wearing a deep burgundy wrap dress that Yegor had probably not chosen and definitely hadn’t asked her not to wear, because Yegor was smart enough to know that Camila Alvarez—Camila Kamarov—was not a woman whose wardrobe accepted external input.
She looked at me and smiled.
Not her public smile. The real one.
I slid into the booth across from her and immediately reached for the drink she had already ordered for me, because this was how we worked: She knew what I needed before I arrived, and I let her, because there was exactly one person in the world whose assumptions about me I trusted completely.
“You look like you have something to say,” she said.
“I always have something to say.”
“You look like it’s been accumulating pressure for several days and is about to become structural.”
I took a long sip of the drink—something fruity with considerably more alcohol than the fruit advertised—and set it down and looked at my sister.
“Papá set me up,” I said.
Camila raised an eyebrow. The gesture was so perfectly calibrated—one eyebrow, no more, communicating complete comprehension, mild unsurprise, and active interest simultaneously—that I briefly marveled at it the way I sometimes marveled at very efficient biological mechanisms.
“At the fundraiser,” she said.
“At the fundraiser. Maverick Wiese’s son. Nico.” I paused. “Or stepson, apparently.”
“Nico Calderon.” Something moved through Camila’s expression—a flicker, quick and careful, that she tucked away before I could fully read it. “What did you think of him?”
“I thought he was very handsome and completely wrong for me and that Papá had clearly put considerable planning into a situation I had no interest in.”
“But?”
I looked at her. “Why is there a but?”
“Because you have the face you make when a story isn’t finished.”
I picked up my drink again. Turned it in my hands. The ice moved against the glass with a small, clean sound.
“Someone intervened,” I said. “Before the Nico conversation could become something I had to actively dismantle. One of Yegor’s cousins, apparently.
He—” I stopped. Recalibrated. “He walked over and told Nico he was borrowing me. And then he did. And then he let me go and told me I was free to leave.”
Camila was very still in the way she got when something had caught her full attention, and she was deciding how to handle the information.
“Which cousin?” she asked.
And there it was. The question I’d been circling for three days without landing on—not because I didn’t know the answer, but because saying the name out loud felt like doing something I hadn’t yet decided to do.
Like the name had weight, and I wasn’t ready to put it down somewhere and see what it meant.
“I didn’t say,” I said.
Camila looked at me. “Sofia.”
“I know his name. I’m choosing not to say it yet.”
A beat. “Why?”
I looked at the table. Looked back at her. Tried to find the words for something that was equal parts embarrassing and inexplicable, and landed on the least dignified version of the truth because it was Camila and she would find the less dignified version anyway.
“Because I don’t want to know if he has a girlfriend,” I said. “Or a wife. Or any prior claim on his general existence that would make the last three days of thinking about him feel even more pointless than they already do.” I paused. “Which I’m aware is completely irrational. I’m aware of this.”
Camila’s expression did something complicated and then settled into something that was unmistakably the precursor to teasing.
“Sofia Alvarez,” she said.
“Don’t.”
“Three days.”
“Camila—”
“This is it,” she said, with the delighted certainty of someone delivering a verdict they had been building toward. “This is your chance. Lose the virginity. Do it. It has been twenty-two years—”
“It’s been twenty-two years because I haven’t found a person worth losing it to, and that remains true regardless of—”
“Yegor’s cousin.”
“I didn’t say it was him.”
“You didn’t say it wasn’t.”
I pressed my lips together. Looked away. The club moved around us in its loud, indifferent current—men at the bar, a card game at the far table, someone laughing at something that didn’t require explanation in this world.
“I don’t even know him,” I said.
“You didn’t know him four days ago either, and apparently, he left enough of an impression to still be with you now.”
That landed somewhere it shouldn’t have, and Camila saw it land, because Camila saw everything, and her expression shifted from teasing into something softer and considerably more dangerous—the look she wore when she was being honest with me rather than entertaining herself at my expense.
“He sounds interesting,” she said quietly.
“He sounds like a problem,” I corrected.
She smiled. “Those are usually the same thing.”
We drank.
Not carefully, not moderately—the specific way you drink when you are in the only space where the rules that govern the rest of your life temporarily suspend themselves, when the person across from you is the one person who has known every version of you and chosen to stay for all of them.
We talked about Camila’s son, about my coursework that my father kept finding reasons to interrupt, about the fundraiser and Maverick Wiese and the particular way my father had engineered the evening as though my feelings were a variable he could simply remove from the equation.
We talked about our mother, which we did sometimes—not with grief, exactly, not anymore, but with the specific tenderness of people carrying something precious that they occasionally needed to take out and hold together before putting back.
By my third drink, the room had acquired a gentle, pleasant instability.
By my fourth, the instability was less pleasant and more architectural—the booth seeming to shift slightly, the club’s ambient noise arriving in waves rather than a continuous stream, my own thoughts moving with the laggy imprecision of something running on reduced processing power.