Chapter 21 – Sofia
The wedding dress had been Camila’s idea.
White, Sofia. You’re still wearing white. Don’t let him take that from you too. She’d said it like it was an act of defiance, like the cut of the fabric meant something, and I’d let her believe it did because she needed to and because arguing would have cost me energy I didn’t have.
The ceremony was small. Tomas had arranged it with the same quiet efficiency he brought to every decision he’d made since the hospital.
Gregory’s people. My father’s people. A priest who had clearly done enough Bratva-adjacent ceremonies to know that certain questions were rhetorical.
Camila beside me in blush silk, her hand finding mine once and squeezing hard enough to ground me.
Yegor standing on Gregory’s side with the expression of a man who was choosing not to have opinions about this.
I kept my eyes on the middle distance through most of it. It was the only way I could manage.
The reception, such as it was, lasted two hours.
Long enough to satisfy the minimum requirements of legitimacy, not long enough for the situation to breathe into something it wasn’t.
I ate almost nothing and drank water and watched Gregory from across the room the way I’d spent the last week watching him—with the careful attention of someone trying to understand a threat without letting it understand them.
He moved through his people easily, that controlled stillness he carried everywhere like armor, and occasionally his eyes would find me across the space between us and rest there for a moment with an unreadable weight before he looked away.
I never looked away first. It was the only territory I’d left.
By the time we got back to the penthouse, the city had gone dark outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the silence between us had become unbearable.
I set my small bag on the chair near the bedroom door and stood in the middle of the room, trying to locate the version of myself that knew what to do next, and couldn’t find her.
The dress was the problem. It had thirty-two buttons running down the back—I’d counted them—and I hadn’t considered, in all of Camila’s well-intentioned preparations, that there would be a moment at the end of the night when I would be standing alone in a room with my husband and unable to reach them.
Gregory had poured himself a glass of water in the kitchen and was standing at the counter, jacket already off, the collar of his white shirt open at the throat.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was giving me the room, in the particular way he’d learned over the last week—not absence exactly, but a careful management of his own presence that I hadn’t expected from him and still didn’t entirely know what to do with.
“I can’t reach the buttons,” I said.
The words came out flatter than I intended. Not a request, exactly. More like stating a logistical problem that happened to require his involvement.
He set the glass down and crossed the room, and I turned before he reached me so he wouldn’t see my face. I heard him stop behind me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the air, and then there was a pause—brief, two seconds at most—that felt like him deciding something.
His fingers found the top button.
He was careful. That was the thing I wasn’t prepared for.
I’d spent a week building architecture against Gregory Kamarov and his particular brand of taking up space in a room, and the architecture had assumed a certain consistency—the controlled remove of a man who had decided I was a situation to be managed.
What his hands were doing now didn’t fit the architecture.
He worked down the row of buttons with a slowness that wasn’t efficient, his knuckles barely grazing my spine as the fabric parted, and the care in it was worse than anything else he could have done to me right then because I didn’t have a wall built for care.
“Thirty-two,” I said, because the silence was becoming something I couldn’t hold without speaking into it.
“I know.” His voice was low. “I counted.”
I closed my eyes.
When he reached the last button, he didn’t step back immediately.
He stood there for a moment, hands still at the base of my spine, not moving, not pressing—just present, the way a question exists in the air before anyone has the courage to ask it.
I felt his breath against the back of my neck, slow and controlled, the breathing of a man being very deliberate about something.
“Sofia,” he said. Just my name. Nothing attached to it.
I turned around.
I don’t know what I intended when I did it—whether it was confrontation or something else, whether I was going to say something that had been accumulating in my chest all week and finally needed releasing.
But when I turned and found him looking at me, the speech dissolved.
He was too close, and the expression on his face was the one I’d seen exactly once before, in a hospital corridor when he thought I wasn’t watching him.
He looked like a man standing at the edge of something and deciding whether to step off.
“You don’t have to say anything tonight,” he said.
“I know I don’t.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I know exactly what I’m obligated to do and what I’m not, Gregory. I don’t need you to manage my expectations.”
Something shifted in his jaw—not hurt, exactly. More like recognition. “I’m not trying to manage anything.”
“You’re always trying to manage something.”
“Not this.” He held my gaze with the steadiness of someone who had decided this was worth the exposure it required. “Not you. Not anymore.”
I should have had something to say to that.
I’d been carrying words around for a week—sharp ones, accurate ones, assembled in the sleepless hours of his guest room when I lay awake and rehearsed the conversation we hadn’t had yet.
About the mission. About the months of watching me while I thought he was something he wasn’t.
About Nico’s voice in that basement about being used—and the nauseating recognition that I hadn’t entirely been able to dismiss it.
But standing in front of him now, in the partial dark of his penthouse, with the city spread out behind the glass and the thirty-two buttons undone and his hands no longer touching me but the warmth of them still registering on my skin—the words wouldn’t organize themselves into the weapons I’d spent a week sharpening them into.
They sat in my chest like stones, heavy and uncomfortable.
“I’m angry at you,” I said. It was less than what I’d rehearsed but more honest.
“I know.” He didn’t look away. “You should be.”
“I’m not asking your permission to be angry.”
“I’m not giving it.” A pause. “I’m just telling you it’s justified.”
I took a step back. Not away—I didn’t have anywhere to go—but enough to think.
“What happened to needing separate rooms?” I said.
“The rooms are still separate.” His eyes didn’t move from mine. “That hasn’t changed unless you want it to.”
The way he said it—unless you want it to—put the weight exactly where it was, which was with me, which was either the most respectful thing he’d ever done or the most strategic, and I was no longer entirely sure those two things were as distinct as I’d been treating them.
I looked at him for a long moment. At the scar tracing the line from his cheek toward his temple.
At the hands that had undone thirty-two buttons with a patience that had nothing of management in it.
At the expression he was still wearing, open in a way I suspected cost him considerably, held steady for me.
“Don’t be gentle because you feel guilty,” I said. “I don’t want that. If you touch me, it needs to be real.”
Something moved through his face—quick, unguarded, the flicker of a man who had just been told exactly what he needed and hadn’t expected to be told it directly. His throat moved.
“It’s real,” he said.
He didn’t reach for me. He let me close the remaining distance, which I did with the same stubbornness I brought to everything—not because I’d forgiven him, not because the week of accumulated hurt had resolved itself in the last five minutes, but because I’d been honest with him and he had been honest back and the current between us had always preceded my better judgment and I was tired, in the most fundamental sense, of pretending I could outrun it.
When I kissed him, his hands came up to my face with a gentleness that was so unlike every version of this we’d had before that I felt it in my sternum.
He kissed me back like it was something he was allowing himself rather than taking, and that distinction—the difference between allowing and taking—was the thing that finally dismantled what remained of my defenses.
He knelt between my legs, his hands hooking behind my knees to pull me to the very edge of the bed. He didn’t rush. He started with a slow, swirling exploration of my inner thighs, his tongue tracing the lace of my garter belt until I was arching off the sheets.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice muffled against my skin. “I want to see you when you break.”
I dragged my eyes open, but I couldn’t even see him—everything was just a blur of heat and jagged light. He didn’t flinch, even when my body finally snapped. The first wave of release hit me like a physical blow, a hard, rhythmic throbbing that made my teeth chatter.
I choked on his name, a broken, desperate sound that seemed way too loud in the dead silence of the room.
I tried to pull away, to hide, but he wasn’t having it.
His hands stayed locked on my hips, his fingers digging in so hard I knew there would be marks by morning.
He forced me to stay right there, pinned against him, making me feel every single second of the internal earthquake until I was shaking and completely wrecked.
I couldn’t even catch my breath before he was over me.
He moved with a heavy, predatory grace, his body a searing weight that pinned me to the mattress as he settled between my thighs.
There was just the silent, electric demand in his eyes.
He waited, hovering just inches away, until my own hands betrayed me, reaching down to guide his thick, pulsing heat toward the ache he’d created.
Then he pushed.
He entered me in one slow, punishing surge that felt like it was splitting me open.
The fullness was a blunt, stretching pressure that reached all the way to my bones.
He stopped there, buried deep, his forehead crashing against mine.
We both stayed frozen for a heartbeat, the only sound the ragged, desperate hitch of our breathing as he fought the urge to lose control completely.
“Sofia,” he choked out, his voice breaking.
“Don’t talk,” I whispered, wrapping my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. “Just stay.”
He began to move—a steady, rhythmic depth that felt like he was trying to fuse our lives together through the sheer force of friction.
It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t cruel; it was an honest, jagged collision of two people who had spent too long pretending they didn’t need this.
The tension built, a heavy, pulsing heat that radiated from my chest outward, until we hit the cliff together.
He came with a shattered groan, his body locking against mine as he anchored us both to the bed.
The silence of the penthouse returned, but the air was still charged. Gregory didn’t pull away; he shifted, his hands strong as he flipped me onto my stomach, pinning my wrists into the pillows.
“I told you once,” he growled into my ear, his chest a wall of fire against my back. “That once I had you in this bed, I wasn’t letting you go.”
He entered me again from behind—a blunt, deep reclamation that felt sharper, more visceral. He began a heavy, frantic drive, his pace increasing until the bed frame groaned against the wall.
As he moved, his hand reached down between my thighs.
I felt the sudden, electric shock of his thumb pressing against the sensitive, puckered skin of my asshole.
He didn’t just touch; he pulsed his finger against the rhythm of his thrusts—a sharp, insistent pressure that sent a completely different kind of fire through my nervous system.
The combination was a total sensory hijack.
The deep, stretching fullness of him inside me and the rhythmic, insistent pressure against that forbidden edge created a circuit of heat that bypassed my brain entirely.
I let out a broken, high-pitched cry, my fingers digging into the silk until it tore.
“Gregory—” I sobbed, my body clenching around him in a frantic, desperate rhythm.
He let out a final, guttural roar, his body shuddering as he spilled into me, the weight of him crushing me into the mattress as the city lights continued their silent dance outside.
The room was still. The amber light of the city had shifted across the floor, illuminating the discarded white silk of my dress. I lay in the dark, the unfamiliar weight of his arm draped across my waist, his thumb idly stroking the skin above my hip.
“Gregory,” I said, to the ceiling.
“Mm.” Low, half-drowsy, the sound of a man who had not yet decided whether to stay awake.
I turned the question over in my head—the one I’d been carrying since the basement, since Nico’s voice telling me things I hadn’t been able to fully dismiss.
I wanted to ask it cleanly, without making it into a confrontation, and I couldn’t find that version of the question either.
It existed somewhere between anger and need, and I didn’t have the vocabulary for the middle.
“Did any of it start real?” I said finally. “In the beginning.”
He was quiet for long enough that I felt the quality of the silence change—not avoidance, but the particular stillness of a man choosing his words with the full weight of what they needed to carry. His thumb moved once against my hip, slow, like punctuation.
“I told myself it wasn’t,” he said. “I was wrong.”
The city hummed below us, indifferent and vast, and somewhere out there, Nico Calderon was still alive and still calculating, and the war Gregory and his people had spent months choreographing was not finished, and morning would arrive with all of its complications still intact.
None of that had changed. I was still angry.
The wound was still there, layered and unresolved, and one night didn’t suture it.
But he had fallen asleep with his arm around me like it was somewhere he’d decided to stay, and the anger and the wound and the complicated truth of all of it existed simultaneously with that, and I was, in the most exhaustive way, done pretending they didn’t.
I closed my eyes.
Outside, Chicago went on.