Page 23 of Reckless Heir
"I'm always somewhere." He glances at Aleksei with the specific social ease of a man who has spent his life navigating rooms where almost everyone is dangerous. "Luca sends his regards. He worries."
"Luca should worry about his own debts," Aleksei says, and his hand tightens at my waist by a fraction that Niko can certainly see and that I am choosing not to react to.
"He's family," Niko says easily. "We worry about family."
"She isn't family anymore." Aleksei's voice drops to the register I've come to understand as the end of a discussion rather than a point in one. "She's mine."
"She's a Conti," Niko says. "That blood doesn't wash off."
"It does," Aleksei says, "if you bleed it out."
The words are horrible and precise and designed to be heard, not just by Niko but by anyone in the immediate radius, and I feel them land in my chest in the place where I've been keeping the things that are wrong about this situation.If you bleed it out.As if what I am is an inconvenience that can be chemically resolved.
I keep my face even. I have been practicing this.
Then Aleksei raises his voice — just slightly, just enough — and addresses the room.
"This is Sofia."
The conversations nearest to us pause. A ripple effect outward: the room turning, registering, recalibrating.
"Mine."
The word drops into the room and the room accepts it the way rooms accept facts that have been delivered by the right person in the right tone with sufficient backing. No one challenges it. No one looks surprised. Some of them already knew — of course they already knew, this world has no information that doesn't travel — and the ones who didn't know are filing it away now, efficiently, the way this world files everything: as leverage, as context, as data.
I stand at his side and breathe.
He hands me a glass of champagne from a passing tray.Drink.I drink. The bubbles are cold and sharp. He murmursgood girlagainst my hair in a voice low enough that only I can hear it, which is worse than if he'd said it at volume because a thing said only for you is harder to be angry at.
He keeps me tucked against his side for the rest of the night.
His hand strokes my spine. My hip. The inside of my wrist. Not erotically — functionally, with the specific regularity of someone maintaining a claim. He's telling the room something with every touch, and the room is receiving the message, and I am the medium through which the message travels, and I am very aware of this.
I'm also aware — and this is the part I'm keeping entirely to myself — of the warmth of him. The specific heat of a body that radiates it without meaning to, without performing it, and what it does to stand in the radius of it for an hour.
I don't examine that.
Niko watches us from across the room for a long time. When our eyes meet, briefly, across the space, he lifts his glass a fraction.Holding up?The civilian translation. The translation for this world is more complicated and neither of us attempts it.
At some point in the evening, in one of the moments when Aleksei is occupied with a conversation that doesn't require my presence, I look out at the Manhattan skyline and I think about Luca. Furious. Fine. In equal measure, Niko will tell me later, in a Hamptons corridor months from now. Right now he doesn't know if I'm alright, and I don't have a way to tell him, and the city is thirty-eight floors below me and might as well be on a different continent.
The city is extraordinary from here. Thirty-eight floors of glass between me and the grid, Manhattan spread out in every direction, the specific quality of it at night when the density of light makes the dark irrelevant. I knowthis view. I know it from the civilian version — from the public observation decks and the rooftop bars and the specific kind of vertigo that comes from being very high up in a place very full of people. I don't know this view, which is private and expensive and surrounded by people who move through power the way I move through cities: as if they were born to it and can't imagine the alternative.
I am learning that world now.
I am learning it in the specific way I learn things I don't choose: by watching the room, by reading what doesn't show, by mapping the negative space. The man near the west window who talks too much is performing confidence. The woman in the center of the gathering who talks too little is the one everyone has already assessed correctly and deferred to. The two men in the corner — Heirs by their bearing, though I don't have names yet — are not talking to each other but angling for position relative to a third person who hasn't arrived yet.
I file all of it.
The woman in the center hasn't moved in forty minutes. People arrive at her — they don't approach, they arrive, which means she's the fixed point the room is organizing around. The conversations she holds are short and low and she ends them by looking away. Nobody challenges the ending.
I cross the room.
She watchesme approach with the attention of someone revising a preliminary assessment. I don't offer my House.
"The Convocation dinner in December,"I say. "Three hours. I'm trying to understand what's worth the room."
A pause."Everything that happens in the first forty minutes," she says. "The rest is maintenance."
