Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
Natasha
The gala logistics binder has forty-seven tabs.
I built it three weeks ago when Victoria handed me the event coordination file and said, "You're the most terrifyingly organized person alive. Please make this beautiful."
With a level of shame I had no idea I possessed, I didn’t point out that terrifyingly organized is simply what happens when you find emotions easier to manage in spreadsheet form. I simply took the binder and I made it beautiful.
I have been running catering timelines, security rotations and stage setup checklists ever since because it’s easier than examining why I have slept four hours a night for the past three weeks.
Three weeks since Chicago, which is either coincidence or the universe being extremely literal about what constitutes a distraction.
Or why I have twice ordered the wrong lunch, which I never do.
Or why I stood in the elevator on the eleventh floor and stared at my reflection for six seconds too long.
The Kane estate in Malibu, owned by Jax Kane, founder of Kane Records, is objectively the most spectacular private property I have personally set foot on.
I’ve always liked being here. It’s beautiful.
The Pacific unspools behind the terrace in long, glittering sheets, and the evening light is doing something unreasonable to the sky, all amber and deep violet bleeding together at the horizon.
I clock the catering stations, the stage setup, the bar placement, the flow of the room.
All of it is correct and running on my timeline.
This morning, I sit on the edge of Victoria's bed in the guest suite while she holds up two dresses and looks between them with the serene authority of a woman who knows she is the most beautiful person in any room. "The navy," I say before she asks.
She looks down at herself, at the very early curve of the pregnancy she is still wearing under careful silhouettes. "You think?"
"The navy makes you look like someone who runs a record label and is also inexplicably good at everything. The green makes you look like someone who recently became very happy." I meet her eyes in the mirror. "Wear the navy. Save the green for when you want Alex to stop breathing temporarily."
Victoria laughs, setting the green dress aside and stepping into the navy. I button the back for her and she squeezes my hand twice before I let go, the way she has done since we were both twenty-three and new and figuring out how to survive Crawford Sterling's philosophy together.
Crawford Sterling, founder of Sterling Record and Victoria’s late father and mentor to me, was a calculating, controlling man used to getting his way - until his heart finally gave in. Together, we weathered his influence and together we survived him.
Over the years we grew close, bonded, almost like sisters.
We barely tell each other I love you, and the truth is that we don’t need to. We both know what the hand-squeeze means.
Downstairs, Brandy Chen, Operations Manager at Kane Records - now Sterling-Kane Records - is drinking espresso at the kitchen island and looking at his phone with the expression he wears when something is factually inconvenient.
"You're wearing red," he says, when I walk in.
"Correct."
"You never wear red."
"And yet I am." I pour myself a cup of Rosa's Cuban coffee, which smells like a religion.
"You look terrifying," Brandy says. "I mean that as the highest possible compliment."
"I know you do,” I say sweetly. “How else would you mean it?”
Rosa, Jax Kane’s long-term house keeper and an absolute sweetheart, appears from the direction of the outdoor kitchen with a plate of something that smells of garlic and citrus and home, and sets it in front of me with the matter-of-fact tenderness she brings to every act of feeding people she has decided belong to her.
"Eat," she says, in the tone that is not technically a request.
I eat. Rosa watches me with satisfaction and pats my shoulder once, and I feel it travel further into me than it should.
Further than a shoulder pat warrants. Further than I would ever admit to anyone living.
She sends food to my Chicago apartment via Victoria, little containers of rice and black beans and notes that say things like eat this, it helps.
I always do because Rosa is a sweetheart.
These people are my family. I didn’t choose them in any organized way.
They accumulated around me the way furniture accumulates in a room someone has started, without planning to, to make it habitable.
I do not examine it too closely because examining it too closely would require me to acknowledge the void it is filling.
Emma Kane finds me at the terrace railing at four-thirty, an hour before guests arrive, while I am running a final headcount on the seating chart.
She is twelve years old and she has Jax's radar and Melody's emotional acuity assembled into a person who has not yet learned to be diplomatic about what she detects, which makes her either the most useful or the most dangerous person at any gathering depending on your current vulnerability level.
She leans on the railing beside me, chin in her hands. "You look amazing, Natasha."
"Thank you, querida."
A beat. "How come you never bring a date to these things?"
I keep my eyes on the seating chart. "Because I haven't met anyone who deserves to have me on their arm."
Emma turns her head and gives me a look so thoroughly unimpressed that it briefly makes me feel caught out by a seventh-grader. "That's not a real answer," she says.
"It’s the truth."
"Mom says you're the bravest person she knows," Emma says. "But also that you're scared of the same stuff as everybody else. You're just better at not showing it."
I fold the seating chart, feeling my throat tighten. "Your mother is very perceptive."
"So are you." Emma straightens, already moving away toward the sound of the twins arguing somewhere inside. She tosses over her shoulder, "You should bring someone next time."
I stand at the railing for another moment after she goes, watching the Pacific do its unhurried thing.
The gala is, by every measurable metric, a triumph.
Ghost is midway through his second set, and the room has gone still. There are songs that just reach through whatever armor you’ve bolted on and find the soft tissue underneath, and he’s currently playing one of them.
I’m standing beside Victoria near the stage. I feel a genuine, sharp-edged pride for her—for this night, for the way Sterling-Kane has grown under her hands. Her fingers brush mine, and I squeeze back, twice.
But beneath the celebration, there’s that hum again. Quiet, persistent, steady as a bass note.
I’ve lived with this ache for so long that it’s become part of the background noise of my life, like a laptop fan running under a heavy workload.
But tonight, it’s louder. I’m surrounded by people I love, in a room vibrating with success, and yet I feel like I’m standing in a vacuum.
It’s a hollow, ringing sensation that no amount of efficiency can patch.
Ghost strips the third song back to just his voice and the guitar. It’s a melody that sounds like a question asked in a language I don’t speak, yet somehow understand perfectly.
The silence that follows isn't just polite; it’s the kind of heavy, collective stillness that happens when a room full of people is forced to acknowledge the one thing they’ve all agreed not to name.
My throat tightens. I’m not crying—I don't do public displays of unraveling—but my chest feels brittle, like glass under pressure. I stand there with my vodka, maintaining a perfect, statuesque posture, while my internal systems begin to redline.
The ache has found its frequency. It’s resonating in my sternum, turning into something dangerous and unbidden. I’m about to fall apart in a room full of people who take their cues from me, and the sheer inconvenience of it makes me want to scream.
My left hand clenches into a fist, digging into the fabric of my dress until my knuckles turn white. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until the song ends. I pull my hand away, turn on my heel, and head straight for the bar.
I don't need the drink. I need the distance.
The bar is quiet on the western side of the terrace, far enough from the stage that the music arrives as texture rather than volume.
I am recalibrating. Two minutes of standing still with a cold glass and the Pacific spreading out below the terrace lights, and then I will return to my excellent composure and my forty-seven tabs and my very scheduled life.
"We should stop meeting at bars," a voice says, from just behind my left shoulder. "It's becoming a pattern."
My body recognises the voice before my brain catches up. Three seconds of involuntary physical recall—his palms at my waist, his mouth at my pulse point. Then I turn around.
I’m shocked to see him, the handsome stranger from our unforgettable night, standing there in a dark suit with no tie, looking at me the way he did across the auction room in Chicago.
If anything, he looks better than I remember. This is deeply inconvenient.
"You're at my company's gala," I deadpan.
"I was invited,” is his response. "Guest of a business associate. I had no idea whose event it was until I arrived."
I study him. He holds my gaze steadily - that same attention that does not waver or deflect, that simply remains present as if he has nowhere else to be. "That is either a remarkable coincidence," I say, "or you're a very good liar."
"I'm an excellent liar," he says. "But not tonight."
He extends his hand. The social gesture, the introduction, the handshake that acknowledges we are in a room full of people and industry machinery and the performance of professional context is required.
I look at his hand for one full second - the familiar scarred knuckles, the shape of his fingers - and then I take it because refusing would reveal the exact magnitude of what is currently happening in my nervous system.
His grip is warm and unhurried. He holds it a beat past the professional threshold and releases.
"Nikolai," he says.
"Natasha," I reply.
We don’t exchange surnames and I don’t push for it. It’s rather like a mutual, unspoken decision. The bubble is not entirely popped, just relocated to a different room.
"Sterling-Kane Records," he says, glancing out at the gala. "Impressive operation."
"We think so."
"The merger has performed above projections by twenty-two percent. I read the industry report."
I tilt my head. "You follow the music industry."
"I follow interesting information." His eyes come back to mine. "Was this event you're doing? The logistics have a particular intelligence behind them."
"It’s a forty-seven-tab binder," I say.
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. "Of course it is."
"Is that a criticism?"
"Quite the opposite," he says. "A forty-seven-tab binder means you care about something the event to be meticulous about it. With that level of precision, I don’t think you can fake it.”
I take a swallow of vodka to give myself something to do with my hands. "Are charity galas philanthropy or performance?"
"Both," he says, without hesitation. "The performance funds the philanthropy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either naive or fundraising."
"That is a remarkably cynical position for someone standing at a charity gala."
"I'm here for the music," he says. "Ghost is extraordinary."
I look at Ghost for a moment. "Yes. He is."
"You were touched by it." It wasn't a question.
He read it off me during the set from wherever he was in this room, and the fact that he located and watched and noticed me unsettles my equilibrium in a way I don't have an explanation for.
"You touched your knee," he adds quietly. "During the third song."
The air leaves my lungs in a slow, controlled exhale. I quickly fix my expression. "I don't know what you mean."
He doesn’t push. He simply looks at me with that dark, steady attention and lets the silence work. And he's good at silence, almost as if he understands it better than most people.
Across the room, Victoria is standing with Alex, but her eyes are trained on me, filled with what I recognize to be curiosity laced with confusion. I get it. It’s not every day I talk to men I don’t have any professional affiliations to in public.
"Dance with me," he says.
"No," I say.
“That was quick.”."
"I’m a quick person."
"You're a careful person," he says. "There's a meaningful difference. Quick doesn't think. Careful is weighing the pros and cons on the spot and choosing the least damaging choice.”"
"Your confidence in your own correct answers is something to behold."
"Dance with me, Natasha."
The way he says my name is the problem. Like it fits in his mouth. Like he has been saying it for longer than one evening in Chicago and one gala in Malibu. Like it belongs somewhere in his regular vocabulary and he is simply returning it to where it lives.
"No," I say again.
Victoria materializes at my left elbow with the timing of a woman who has been inching closer for the last four minutes.
"Tasha," she says pleasantly, looking between us and already composing the story she will tell Alex later. "Introduce me to your friend."
"Victoria, this is Nikolai. Nikolai, Victoria Sterling-Thompson, co-CEO."
They shake hands. Victoria's eyes flick to mine with a precision that communicates volumes. Then she looks back at Nikolai. "Are you enjoying the gala?"
"Enormously," he says, and he is not looking at Victoria when he says it.
Victoria follows his gaze to me. Her smile curves with the slow satisfaction of watching a forecast she made three weeks ago prove accurate in real time. She turns to face me fully, dropping her voice to the register she uses when she is being completely sincere underneath the theatrics.
"If you do not dance with that man," she says, "I will divorce Alex and dance with him myself. And you know I will. I am pregnant and therefore untouchable and I will absolutely cause a scene."
My breath expels from my lungs in one tired rush. "Victoria."
"The forty-seven-tab binder will survive one song without you." She squeezes my hand once, a single press, and then she glides back toward Alex as if she hadn’t just turned my evening upside down.
I turn back to Nikolai.
He is watching me with amusement and seriousness in equal measure, his hand already extended. Not insistently. Simply available, the way he does everything - present and patient and utterly certain without being aggressive about it.
His hand finds my waist before I have finished deciding.
The music begins.