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“Fine,” I said, and hung up before he could press further.

The apartment told a different story than the one I wanted to believe. A lipstick print on the rim of the water glass she’d left on the nightstand, faint but unmistakable. Perfume that emanated from the sheets when I moved, the same scent she’d worn all week to unsettle me.

I had built this apartment specifically so nothing could invade it. Glass and steel, surfaces that held no memory of anyone who’d passed through them. Just one night, and she’d already left fingerprints on a life I’d spent years keeping spotless.

Even the housekeeper, arriving at her usual hour, paused in the doorway of the bedroom a half-second longer than normal before moving on to strip the sheets. I noticed everything that morning, which was a problem in and of itself.

I should have felt relief at her absence. Instead, the irritation sharpened the longer I stood there.

*****

By the time I left for the casino that evening, I’d stopped pretending the feeling was fatigue.

She was working the main floor when I arrived, moving between tables with a tray balanced on one palm exactly the way she had every night before the one that mattered. She laughed at something a pit boss said. She refilled a glass for a regular at the blackjack table, touched his shoulder briefly the way she touched every lonely old man who tipped well, and didn’t so much as glance in my direction the entire time I stood watching from across the floor. She moved through the crowd like the last twenty-four hours had never happened at all, her hips swaying without any indication of how many times I’d held them hours ago.

That absence of attention landed harder than any look would have.

I told myself it meant nothing. I found myself almost admiring it, just how I might admire a competitor’s clean books before remembering the books were hiding something.

Still, it put a knot in my jaw I couldn’t quite loosen.

I finally moved, catching her near the restricted hallway that led back toward the private elevators, somewhere empty enough at that hour that no one would overhear whatever came next. She saw me coming and didn’t flinch or slow her pace. She simply adjusted her path enough to walk past me entirely if I let her.

I didn’t let her. I stepped into her path, close enough that she had to stop or collide with me.

“You left without a word,” I said.

“I had an early shift.” She didn’t look up from the tray she was straightening, her voice light in a way that felt forced rather than natural. “Figured you’d rather I not make a thing of it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She finally looked at me then, and whatever I’d expected—nerves, performance, some crack in the composure she’d worn all night—wasn’t there. “Last night was a mistake, Nikolai. You know that as well as I do. I work for you. Actually, I work for someone who works for you.”

The explanation was reasonable enough that most men would have accepted it without a second thought. I wasn’t most men. I’d built a career noticing exactly when a reasonable explanation covered something else.

“You’re hiding something; that’s not the only reason,” I remarked.

“I’m being sensible.” She stepped past me then, close enough that I caught the same perfume still on her skin. “You should try it sometime.”

She walked away before I could answer. I let her go because I couldn’t immediately think of a reason for stopping her that wouldn’t have revealed exactly how much her leaving affected me.

I did not pursue women. That principle had never required conscious enforcement before tonight. Attachment created leverage other people could use against me, and I had spent years arranging my life so no one held that kind of power over anything that mattered to me. Every woman who’d shared my bed had understood the arrangement without needing it stated. They had wanted things from me I could give without cost, whether that was money, protection, or the thrill of proximity to danger.

Camila wanted none of that. She had walked away from all of it entirely, and the fact that her rejection scraped against something in me I’d thought long since armored over told me more about my own weakness than it did about her.

I spent the rest of the shift watching her anyway. I told myself it was surveillance. But I also knew surveillance didn’t explain the heat that moved through me every time she laughed at something a customer said or every time a man at her table let his eyes linger a beat too long on the curve of her waist.

I caught myself tracking which tables kept her longest. I caught myself measuring the distance between her hip and a regular’s shoulder when she leaned in to refill his drink. When a young dealer laughed too easily at something she said near the cage doors, I felt something ugly tighten in my chest, recognizing it as an irrational spike of possession over a woman who’d made it clear an hour earlier that she wanted nothing further from me. Yuri caught me watching at one point and said nothing, though the look on his face told me he’d noticed exactly what I was doing and had the good sense not to comment on it.

I did not like what that told me about myself.

By the time the floor emptied toward closing, I’d stopped pretending the two halves of what I felt for Camila Alvarez existed separately from each other. One instinct told me to pull Yuri’s file back out, force the truth from her directly, and end the uncertainty permanently, without sentiment attached. The other instinct wanted nothing more than to drag her back into that hallway and finish whatever conversation she’d cut short, consequences filed away for later consideration.

Both instincts agreed on one thing. Camila Alvarez had stopped being a simple problem the moment she’d grabbed my jacket in that hallway. And every hour that passed only complicated what she actually was to me, from a threat to something closer to obsession.

I stood at the glass long after the floor had emptied, the same window where I’d watched her cross beneath me on an ordinary night before any of this had started, tracking the spot where she’d last entered my line of sight.

Finally, I admitted plainly to myself that Camila had become dangerous in more ways than the one I’d originally suspected her of. The account discrepancies and deleted searches were the least of what she now threatened to unravel.