Page 55 of Reckless Heir
Later — much later — I lie in the hotel room separate from his (always separate, always the correct distance) and think about what Niko said, what Aleksei confirmed, and what the confirmation means.
He was deciding when to tell me.
Not whether.
When.
There's a difference between those two things. I've been learning to pay attention to the difference between things that look the same from the outside but are completely different from the inside. This is one of them.
Not whether,I think.
I close my eyes.
The season is still running, and the yacht is ahead, and the Hamptons, and everything that comes after — but here, on the other side of a night race in Singapore, something has shifted by a fraction I don't yet have a name for.
I'm too tired to find one tonight.
But I'll know it when I see it.
17
SOFIA
The yacht is calledSovereign.
Of course it is.
It sits in the Miami marina like it owns the water around it — white hull, three levels, the kind of vessel that costs more per day than most people earn in a year. Fairy lights string across every railing, gold against the black water. Paparazzi bob on speedboats in the distance, lenses aimed like weapons, their flashes turning the marina into a low-grade lightning storm.
Aleksei's hand is at the small of my back as we board. Warm and light and entirely proprietary.
"Smile," he says quietly, for my ears only. "They're watching."
"I'm always smiling."
"That's a threat, not a smile."
"Same thing," I say, and he presses his fingers infinitesimally harder into my spine, which I choose to interpret as agreement.
The party is already in motion — heirs and their accessories, associates and rivals, the entire ecosystem of wealth and consequence that orbits Obsidian like debris around a black hole. Music thrums from somewhere below deck. The bar is doing excellent business.
I've been learning how to move through rooms like this. It took October to understand that the goal isn't to blend in — an Orphan in a room of Heirs will never blend — but to manage what information your presence releases. Stand too still and you look uncertain. Move too much and you look anxious. I've been practicing movement that reads as belonging: unhurried, aware, angled toward nothing in particular.
I circulate.
Niko Drakos is near the starboard railing, talking to a man I don't recognize, his posture exactly as comfortable as Aleksei's is controlled — broad, easy, taking up the space around him without calculation. He catches my eye across the deck and nods, the slight formal acknowledgment of someone who is being observed and knows it. He's been kind to me since the penthouse in October, in the specific way of someone who operates at the intersection of loyalty and survival and has decided that kindness costs him nothing here.
Ten minutes later he drifts close enough to speak without being overheard.
"Luca says — and I'm quoting precisely —tell her I know she's alright and if she's not alright don't tell me and I'll find out anyway." He says this into the middle distance, not at me, his expression unchanged. "He is, apparently, managing."
I look at the water.
"Thank you," I say.
He drifts away again before Aleksei comes back through the door.
Dimitri isn't in sight yet.
