Chapter 6 – Gregory
I drove exactly one block, then sat at a red light with both hands on the wheel, engine running, while the city moved around me in every direction with complete disregard for the fact that I’d just done something I couldn’t undo and was now attempting to convince myself it didn’t matter.
The light turned green.
I didn’t move.
The car behind me registered its displeasure.
I pulled forward on autopilot, turned right onto a street I hadn’t decided to turn onto, and spent approximately thirty seconds pretending I was driving somewhere with intention before I accepted the truth, which was that my body had already made the decision my mind was still arguing about.
She had walked away.
That was the thing I couldn’t stop replaying—not the kiss itself, though that was there too, sitting in my chest like something with weight and heat and a half-life I couldn’t calculate.
Not the way she’d felt, or the sound she’d made when I’d pulled her closer, or the specific devastating detail of her hand in my jacket.
All of that was filed somewhere I wasn’t looking at directly.
What I couldn’t stop replaying was the moment after.
The way she’d gone still when I pulled back.
The way her face had done something—just briefly, just for a single unguarded second before the composure came down like a curtain—that I recognized because I’d spent forty years learning to recognize the face people make when they’ve offered something real and had it returned to them with less than they put in.
I’d done that.
I’d put that expression on her face with both hands and then sat there and watched it arrive.
We should stop before this goes further.
Seven words. Even. Controlled. The voice of a man who had made a decision.
What I hadn’t said, what I hadn’t let myself examine while she was still in the car, was that the decision had cost me something.
That pulling back had required the specific, grinding effort of a man fighting against every instinct he had, and that I’d won that fight by the thinnest possible margin, and that the victory felt exactly like a loss.
I turned left.
Then right.
Then I was idling outside her building again, staring up at its lit facade with the engine running and the heat on and the accumulated weight of everything I was supposed to be pressing down on the thing I apparently couldn’t stop being in her presence.
Weak.
That was the word. I was weak, and I knew it, and I hated it with the specific, burning resentment of a man who had built his entire identity on the absence of this exact feeling.
I didn’t want things I couldn’t have. I didn’t chase things that complicated missions.
I didn’t sit outside buildings in the dark debating whether to go back inside because a twenty-two-year-old girl with dark eyes and a silver bracelet had kissed me back with everything she had, and I’d been stupid enough to stop it.
I gave myself two minutes.
That was the deal I made—two minutes to find a reason strong enough to justify driving away again.
Matvey’s voice. The folder. Tomas Alvarez.
The mission that had put me in her orbit in the first place, the mission that required my proximity to her to remain strategic rather than personal, the mission that became significantly more complicated the moment it stopped being a mission and started being the reason I had access to someone I was increasingly aware I had no business touching.
Two minutes.
I sat there, and I listed every reason.
The mission. Her age. Eighteen years between us—not a gap, a canyon.
The fact that her father was under investigation for crimes that, if confirmed, would end in violence I would be responsible for delivering.
The fact that she was innocent of all of it, which made using her proximity worse rather than better.
The fact that Matvey had specifically, deliberately chosen me because I didn’t feel things, and every minute I spent in this car outside this building was evidence that Matvey had been catastrophically wrong.
Two minutes passed.
I’d not found a reason.
I took a sharp U-turn and pulled back to the curb.
***
The truth, and I’d the honesty to admit it only because there was no one in the car to admit it to, was that tonight had always been pointing here.
Not consciously. I hadn’t stood in the club and thought, This is where it ends.
But somewhere underneath the decisions, in the part of me that operated below language, the direction had been set from the moment I’d turned away from a random woman at Kazan’s because none of them had dark eyes and an unguarded face and the specific way of looking at me that made me feel simultaneously seen and challenged.
I’d come to the club to clear my head.
I’d driven Sofia home instead.
The universe, apparently, had opinions about what I needed, and they didn’t align with mine.
I parked. Got out. Stood on the pavement for a moment longer than necessary, which was my last reasonable window to make a different choice.
The lobby light caught the glass doors in amber.
Above, somewhere in this building, she was in her apartment—possibly still in the navy dress, possibly angry, probably doing the thing she did where she held everything behind her face and processed it alone and quietly, the slow-burning way of her that I’d read in the first five minutes of knowing her and had not been able to stop reading since.
I went inside.
The elevator was quick. The hallway was quiet. I stood at her door and looked at the number on it for a moment that was mostly just the last few seconds of a man acknowledging that after this, the architecture of things changed.
Then I knocked.
She opened the door and looked at me, and I watched the emotion move across her face—surprise, then something warmer and immediately controlled, then hurt.
“What are you doing here?”
Her voice was steady. Of course it was. She was always steady on the surface, always the composed, clear-eyed version of herself that the world got to see. But her eyes—those enormous, expressive, catastrophically honest eyes—were doing the full conversation that her voice wasn’t having.
I didn’t answer with words.
I walked in.
She stepped back, and I closed the distance between us, and I kissed her, and it was nothing like the car.
The car had been an accident, something that happened in the space between one decision and the next. This was deliberate. This was chosen, completely, with full knowledge of what it was and what it wasn’t and what it was going to cost me in the morning.
I pulled back just enough to say it against her mouth.
“What do you think I’m doing here?”
She answered the only way that mattered.
Her hands came up—one at my jaw, one at my chest—and she kissed me back with the same completeness she’d brought to everything I’d seen her do.
No hesitation. No performance. Just Sofia, entirely present, entirely herself, making a decision with the same quiet certainty she’d used when she slipped her hand into mine at the fundraiser.
Choosing.
Something in my chest came undone.
We moved through the apartment, too focused on each other to navigate carefully.
Her hands found my jacket. Mine found the zip at the back of her dress.
I was aware of her breathing, of every small sound she made, of the way she looked at me when we paused—not shy, not uncertain, just present and warm and entirely unguarded in the way the photograph had captured and the person had exceeded.
“Wait,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of our breathing. “Before we…before this goes any further. I need you to know something.”
I felt the heat in my blood reach a boiling point, but the tremor in her hands kept me anchored. “What is it, Sofia?”
“I’ve never…I’ve never done this before,” she said, the words tumbling out in a rush of honesty. “I’m a virgin.”
The world seemed to stop for a heartbeat. I looked down at her—really looked at her. The weight of what she was giving me, the “itch” I’d so callously planned to scratch, suddenly felt like a lead weight in my gut. This wasn’t just a hookup for her. This was everything.
I leaned down, pressing a lingering, soft kiss to her forehead, trying to pour a tenderness into it that I didn’t know I possessed.
“You’re sure?” I asked. My voice had dropped, thick and gravelly with a hunger that felt more like a warning. “Because once I start, I’m not stopping. I’m going to ruin you for anyone else.”
Sofia didn’t blink. Her fingers laced through mine, her grip bruising. “I’m sure,” she hissed, her eyes locking onto mine with a defiant heat. “Now, fuck me.”
Her hands flew to my chest, bunching the fabric of my shirt and yanking me forward until our heartbeats collided. I walked her back and slammed her against the hallway wall, the thud echoing in the quiet house.
I needed her skin. I shoved my hands under the hem of her sweater, my palms scraping against her ribs until I found the small of her back. The second I touched her, she let out a soft, broken moan that vibrated against my mouth, nearly undoing me right there.
“Gregory,” she breathed, her head falling back to expose the long, pale line of her throat.
“Look at me, Sofia,” I commanded, my voice a low snap.
When she opened her eyes, they were glazed, dark with a terrifying kind of vulnerability.
I didn’t give her a chance to look away.
I hiked her hips up, guiding myself into her with a hard, steady pressure that made her gasp.
The friction was immediate and punishing—the sheer physicality of holding her pinned against the plaster while I moved inside her created a frantic, unstable energy.