The estate is something. Some significant amount of money and acreage in a version of the Hamptons that ordinary tourists don't access — private road, private beach, a stone house that looks like it was airlifted from the Scottish Highlands and placed here with complete indifference to geographical logic. The event is in the ballroom, which shouldn't exist in a house like this but does, built out from the east wing in a style that matches perfectly and must have cost a fortune to match.
The gala is frozen Venetian dream made real. Someone with unlimited budget and a strong aesthetic has transformed the ballroom into a canal city: gauze drapes in ivory and gold, mirrored surfaces catching candlelight, a string quartet doing something haunting and complicated in the far corner. Ice sculptures. An actual gondola in the indoor water feature, whichis operating — there's a gondolier in striped shirt and straw hat moving very slowly across a channel of dark water in the center of the floor. Everything expensive and slightly surreal, the way Obsidian events always are — beauty as power demonstration.We can do anything. We have gondolas in our ballrooms.
Aleksei works the room with the same precision he applies to everything: the exact greeting, the exact amount of time, the exact departure. I circulate in the orbit of him and outside it, as I've learned to do — near enough that the association is clear, independent enough that I'm not an accessory. I've gotten better at this. The performance of belonging without the performance of subordination.
I am wearing the white gown Aleksei approved and the diamond choker Aleksei locked around my neck and I have been smiling since we arrived.
My face aches.
"You look like you're planning something," says a voice behind me.
I turn.
Niko Drakos looks exactly like he did at the first Obsidian gathering — like a man who has decided to find everything slightly amusing, because the alternative is finding it alarming. He has the particular ease of someone who grew up inside this world and made his peace with it early. He hands me a fresh glass of champagne when he reaches me, as if he's been expecting to find me standing here with an expression I need to modulate.
"Or an escape route," he amends, reading my face. "Same look."
"Niko." I exhale. "I didn't know you'd be here."
"I'm always somewhere," he says. His eyes flick briefly to the choker, then back to my face with the same careful neutrality he used the first time we met in the Midtown penthouse. Heregisters what he sees and files it and doesn't comment, which is a specific form of kindness I've started to recognize in him. "Luca sends his regards, by the way. He's been asking Dante to ask me to ask — it gets complicated."
The information lands somewhere soft. Luca. Asking about me, through the only channel still available.
"Is he alright?"
"He's Luca. He's furious and fine in equal measure." A pause. Something warm behind the neutrality. "He wanted me to tell you — and I'm quoting —that he's keeping her plants alive.Do you know what that means?"
My throat closes briefly.
Three terracotta pots on the windowsill of my Conti bedroom. A lemon tree that's been technically dying since I was sixteen and somehow hasn't died. "Yes," I say. "I know what that means."
"Good." Niko tilts his head toward the dance floor. "Dance with me. It's either that or I spend the next hour pretending I don't notice Dimitri watching you from the other side of the room, and that requires more patience than I have tonight."
I should say no. Aleksei is somewhere in this room. I can feel it the way I feel things about him now — not sight, not sound, just an alteration in the air that means he's present and reading the room.
Which is exactly why I say yes.
Niko is a good dancer. He makes it easy, which surprises me — he carries himself like a man who moves through the world on his own terms, and apparently that extends to ballrooms. He talks about nothing important for a few minutes: a horse race he lost money on, a business trip to Lisbon that turned into something else. The comfortable patter of someone who knows how to make a person feel normal for five minutes and is performing that service now, deliberately.
It works. Five minutes into it, I'm not thinking about the choker.
"He looks at you, you know," Niko says, without changing his tone.
"Everyone looks at everyone at these things."
"Not the way he looks at you." A pause. "I've known Aleksei Romanov a long time. He doesn't look at things. He assesses them. Acquires them. Moves on." He spins me once, lightly, in the way of someone who does this effortlessly. "He looks at you."
"That sounds like a compliment."
"It's an observation." His voice is careful. "Luca would want to know you're alright, Sofia. I don't have an answer for him."
Am I alright.What a question. What an utterly destabilising question to be asked in a ballroom at a Venetian-themed event while wearing a choker I can't remove.
I'm standing in a room where I've learned to perform belonging so well that the performance has stopped feeling like performance. I'm in the world of the man who arranged my captivity and is currently somewhere across the room and I can feel the specific weight of his attention without seeing him. I'm wearing diamonds locked around my throat and my brother is keeping my lemon tree alive.
Am I alright.
"Tell him?—"
