The question lands wrong. Not because it's unexpected — though it is — but because it sounds genuine, and I don't knowwhat to do with genuine from him, and the room is watching, and the watch is cool against my pulse.
Is this a test.Of course it's a test. Everything is a test. The difference is I can see this one clearly: he wants to watch me make a choice. He wants to see what I choose when I'm given the option.
Fine,I think.I'll show you something real.
"Yes," I say. I step onto the floor with the young man — Liam, apparently, from the way someone nearby addresses him — and he holds me at a respectful and terrified distance and dances well enough, and I can feel Aleksei's eyes from the edge of the room the way you feel a change in air pressure.
He's watching.
He's not jealous — or he is, but that's not the primary register. He'sinterested.He's watching me navigate a situation he created to see what I do in it, which is the version of him I find most dangerous: the observer, the analyst, the man who studies me the way he studies telemetry data.
I dance one full circuit of the floor.
Then I pull back from Liam, who looks briefly relieved and briefly disappointed simultaneously. The song isn't over. I'm not finishing it.
"I have to go," I say.
"The song?—"
"Yes," I say, and I'm looking at Aleksei when I say it. "It is."
I walk back.
The crowd parts the way it always does when I move toward him. I stop in front of him and the silver dress is catching the chandelier light from two floors up and the watch is on my wrist and his expression is doing the thing — the fraction of a softening, the single frame of something before the control reasserts.
"Done already?" he says.
"He stepped on my toes," I lie.
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The infrastructure of a smile — the earliest possible indicator that one might be arriving, someday, when he decides it's allowed.
He reaches out and traces the strap of the Cartier with one finger.
"Good choice," he says. Quiet. Only for me.
He doesn't mean the dance.
He means:I see you. I see what you chose. I know it was real.
Which means he's been watching the real thing this whole time, behind all the tests, noting it.
Which means I'm going to have to be much more careful about what I let him see.
I look at the watch on my wrist — his time on my skin, every second — and I think:not if I see you first.
We leave the Opera House at 2 AM. The city takes us back.
12
SOFIA
"No."
The word is simple. Flat. He says it the way he says all refusals — not with visible irritation, not with performance, just with the quality of a door that has already closed.
I stare at his back as he ties his tie in the mirror. He does this every morning: the tie, the suit jacket, the watch — always in the same sequence, always in front of the same mirror in the same corner of the suite, the ritual of a man who performs no unnecessary movements and has structured his mornings accordingly. I've been watching it for six weeks. I know the sequence. I know which step means we're five minutes from leaving.
Right now it means he's leaving, and I'm staying, and he's already decided this.
