Page 85 of Reckless Heir
Tonight something is coiled beneath the surface. Wound a degree tighter than usual.
He keeps me close. Not publicly possessive — he's too precise for that — but I'm aware of him in my peripheral vision at all times, and I suspect this is engineered. After the Hamptons, after the kitchen, after whatever the space between us has become in the past two weeks, there's a new quality to the way he monitors the room. Not just watching the room. Watching the roomandme. Calibrating what he sees against something he's keeping to himself.
I've learned to read this in him. I don't like what I'm reading tonight.
I'm standing near one of the stone columns with my Sancerre when Dimitri Drakos appears.
He's good at appearing. I'll give him that. One moment the column is between me and the crowd and the next he's there — silver suit, easy posture, the particular charm of someone who has decided on a long game.
"Sofia." His voice is warm. Familiar, which it has no right to be.
"Dimitri."
"You look extraordinary." His eyes move briefly to the red dress with the appreciative clarity of a man making a point. "Did Aleksei approve that?"
"I don't recall asking."
Something pleased moves through his expression. "Good." He tilts his champagne glass slightly. I've been in enough rooms with him by now to read the quality of his pauses — this one means he's arrived at the point he came here to make. "Has he told you much? About how the arrangement was structured?"
"The arrangement?"
"The debt. Your family. The specifics of how it was arranged." He holds my eyes. "The timing."
Something cool presses against my spine. I keep my expression neutral. "What about the timing?"
He reaches into the interior pocket of his jacket and produces a small envelope — cream, unsealed, my name in print across the front.
"There are things about how this started," Dimitri says, his voice dropping to something quieter, more serious, "that he hasn't told you. That you should know." He offers the envelope. "I'm not your enemy, Sofia. I'm the person who can give you the information you'd need to make a real choice."
I look at the envelope.
He is patient. He doesn't move the envelope closer or withdraw it, doesn't press me with expression or posture. He simply holds it steady and waits, because Dimitri Drakos does not fabricate — he finds true things and weaponizes them, and right now he's holding whatever true thing he's decided will work best.
I think about the photograph — the courtyard, the surveillance file, the analyst's notation.No public record.I think about the careful way Aleksei keeps facts at the right distance. The eighteen months he's been watching without telling me hewas watching. The debt he made sure would land at exactly the right moment.
I take the envelope.
Dimitri's expression goes satisfied. He inclines his head, just slightly, and moves away into the crowd.
I'm still holding it when Aleksei appears.
He doesn't look at Dimitri's retreating back. He looks at the envelope in my hand, and something happens in his face that I have never seen there before.
Not anger. Not the cold freeze I know, the shuttered calculation. Something rawer than that. Something that looks almost like fear, briefly — actual fear, the kind that doesn't belong on a face this controlled — before it's buried under the calm.
He looks at me.
"Sofia," he says.
His voice is very quiet. Very controlled. Neither of those things is reassuring.
"What's in it?" I ask.
His jaw sets. "What did he tell you?"
"He told me there are things about the arrangement you haven't." I hold up the envelope. "Are there?"
A long pause. Around us the gala murmurs on — chandeliers, string music, two thousand years of stone bearing witness. Somewhere on the far side of the gallery a woman laughs at something, a sound that belongs to a different conversation in a different room.
