Chapter 5 – Sofia #2
I was, to put it clinically, very drunk.
Camila, who had always been able to outpace me in this department with zero apparent consequence, looked entirely unaffected and completely satisfied with herself.
Yegor arrived at twenty past eleven.
He moved through the club the way he moved through everything—without announcement, without urgency, with the specific economy of a man who had decided where he was going and simply went there, and the crowd thinned in front of him without him asking.
He reached our booth and looked at Camila with the particular quality of attention that I’d never seen him give to anything else—a fraction more present, a fraction less distant—and then he looked at me.
Something in his expression shifted.
Not concern, exactly. More like assessment.
“She’s coming with me,” Camila told him, standing with the fluid ease of someone who was not on her fourth drink.
Yegor said something quietly to her in Russian—I’d picked up enough in the last seven months to catch individual words but not full sentences—and then he turned to the room and made the smallest of gestures.
A single movement. Almost nothing.
“One of my cousins will take you home,” he said to me. Not unkindly. Just directly, the way Yegor said everything.
I opened my mouth to protest—I was fine, I could call an Uber, I was a grown woman with a functioning phone and an apartment that wasn’t far—
And then I stood up.
The floor did something unexpected. A gentle, firm reminder that my center of gravity had shifted approximately three inches to the left of where I expected it to be, and my body had not been consulted about this decision.
I put my hand on the table. Steadied. Composed my face into the expression of someone who was completely fine and in full possession of their motor functions.
Camila kissed my cheek. “Text me when you’re home.”
Then she and Yegor were moving away through the crowd, and I was standing at the edge of the booth with my bag over my shoulder and the room doing its gentle, tilting thing, and I turned toward the exit—
And stopped.
Gregory Kamarov was standing in front of me.
Not expectantly. Not with the performed casualness of someone who had positioned himself and was now pretending it was coincidental.
Just—there. The same quality of presence he had in every space he occupied, the kind that didn’t announce itself and didn’t need to.
Dark blond hair, a little disheveled. The leather jacket that suited him infinitely more than the fundraiser suit had.
Those cold blue eyes, which were currently doing the thing where they assessed everything in one pass and gave nothing back.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Three days of carefully not saying his name to Camila, and here was the universe delivering him to me at the worst possible version of myself—unsteady on my feet, four drinks deep, with my composure somewhere at the bottom of a glass I’d emptied twenty minutes ago.
“I’m fine,” I said, preemptively.
“You’re not,” he said.
“I’ll call an Uber.”
I moved to step around him.
His hand closed around my arm.
Not rough—nothing about Gregory Kamarov was unnecessarily rough, I was beginning to understand, which was somehow more unnerving than if he had been. Just firm. The grip of a man who had made a decision and communicated it through his hands because words, in this case, were secondary.
“You’re not getting in a car with a stranger at midnight when you can’t walk a straight line,” he said.
The Russian undertone was slightly more present than it had been at the fundraiser, which I filed next to the observation that his jaw was tighter than it had been there too, that something in him was less composed, that the specific quality of his stillness tonight was different. Not looser, exactly, but—
I stopped analyzing and focused on the argument.
“You’re a stranger,” I pointed out.
“I’m Yegor’s cousin.”
“I met you four days ago.”
“That’s four days more than zero.” His eyes held mine with an evenness that made arguing feel like it was moving through resistance. “Come on.”
I wanted to push back. I genuinely wanted to—not out of recklessness, not because the Uber idea was actually good, but because the alternative was getting into Gregory Kamarov’s car while I was incapable of maintaining the kind of careful, calibrated distance I needed to maintain around him, and that felt like exactly the kind of situation that was going to produce consequences I hadn’t consented to in advance.
But his hand was on my arm and the floor was still tilting and it was midnight and Camila was already gone, and the honest part of me—the part that had been thinking about him for three days without permission—was already moving.
He walked me out.
His car was black, immaculate, and smelled faintly of something that was becoming inconveniently recognizable to me.
He opened the passenger door—not with flourish, just with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone for whom opening a door was a neutral act and not a performance—and I got in, and he closed it, and I sat in the seat and stared straight ahead and told myself very firmly that I was in control of myself.
I was an adult. I was a medical student. I understood human biology and neurochemistry and the specific, documented effects of alcohol on decision-making. I was completely capable of sitting in a car for ten minutes without doing anything I would have to account for in daylight.
Gregory got in on the driver’s side. Pulled out his phone. Looked at the screen for a moment—Yegor had clearly given him my address, because he entered it without asking me—and started the car.
We drove.
The city moved past the windows in its nighttime configuration—gold and dark and the particular hazy beauty of Chicago after midnight, when the edges of everything softened and the lights reflected off wet pavement in long, liquid streaks. I watched it without seeing it.
I was aware, in the way you’re aware of things you are trying not to be aware of, of every detail of the person sitting eighteen inches to my left.
The way his hands sat on the wheel—easy, relaxed, the hands that looked made for a different world and somehow looked equally at home here.
The line of his jaw in the passing light.
The leather jacket. The faint smell of something that wasn’t cologne and wasn’t quite gunpowder either, just—him, some combination of things that had no business being this specific inside my memory.
Somewhere between the third and fourth traffic light, the warmth of the car and the lateness of the hour and the four drinks reached some kind of critical consensus, and I stopped fighting them.
I woke up with a jolt, suddenly conscious without being certain how I got there or how long I’d been gone.
The car had stopped.
I was still in the passenger seat. The engine was off. The city outside the window was the specific, familiar configuration of my block, my building, the amber glow of the entrance light I’d come to know as the marker of home.
And Gregory was leaning across the center console.
Close.
His face was close, and his hands were at my waist—not holding, just present, the warmth of them reaching me through the fabric of my dress—and the sound I’d half-registered was the click of my seatbelt unbuckling, which he had apparently just done.
I came fully awake.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
The words came out with less alarm than I’d intended, possibly because the alarm was arriving slightly behind the observation, which was: He was very close, and his eyes in the low light were a shade of blue I didn’t have a name for, and the warmth of his hands was doing something to the part of me that had been cataloguing details for three days and had very strong opinions about all of them.
He went still.
Our eyes met, and the question hung between us—what the hell are you doing—and the space where the answer should have been filled with something else entirely.
Something that was the absence of distance, the specific thickness of air between two people when the gap has become too small to maintain with certainty.
“What do you think I was doing?” he said.
Low. Quiet. The accent more present than it had been all night.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
And then—I don’t know who moved first, or whether it was simultaneous, or whether the space between us simply ceased to exist in any way that felt like either of us had decided it—
His mouth found mine.
And every careful, clinical, methodical part of me that had been building walls and filing observations and maintaining appropriate analytical distance—
Went completely, devastatingly quiet.
He kissed the way he probably did everything: without excess, without performance, with the total, focused presence of a man who didn’t do things halfway. Warm and certain and exactly as overwhelming as I’d—not expected, I hadn’t expected, I’d specifically not allowed myself to expect—
I felt his hands tighten slightly at my waist.
I felt myself lean in.
And then he pulled back.
Not slowly. Not with the reluctant softness of someone who wanted to stay but couldn’t. Sharp. Decisive. The same quality of decision he applied to everything, only this one landed like a door closing.
“We should stop,” he said. “Before this goes further.”
The words arrived in the silence and just sat there.
I stared at him.
Something in my chest cracked along a line I hadn’t known was there—clean and silent and complete, the specific kind of break that doesn’t announce itself until later, when you’re alone, and the adrenaline has cleared, and you understand the shape of what happened.
He was looking at me with those blue eyes that gave nothing away.
Nothing warm in them, nothing that acknowledged what had just happened between us or what it had cost to stop it—just that steady, sealed control that had been there at the fundraiser and in the club and in every version of him I’d encountered so far.
Like the kiss hadn’t moved anything.
I got out of the car, closed the door behind me, and heard the engine turn over as I walked toward the entrance of my building. I didn’t turn around, and I didn’t let anything move in my face until the elevator doors closed in front of me.
Then I pressed my back against the elevator wall.
And the tears came—not dramatic, not heaving, just the quiet, certain kind that arrive when something has hurt you and your body has been waiting for the privacy to say so.
The elevator reached my floor.
I went inside.
I locked the door behind me and sat on the floor in my hallway in my navy dress, and I thought about cold blue eyes that showed nothing, and hands that had let go, and four words delivered with such complete, sealed composure that they might as well have been nothing at all.
Before this goes further.
As if I’d been the one reaching for something I shouldn’t want.
As if he hadn’t been the one who started it. I sat there for a long time.
And somewhere in the distance, his car moved through the Chicago night, and whatever he felt about what had just happened—if he felt anything—he kept it exactly where he kept everything else.
Behind glass.
In the cold.