Page 38 of Reckless Heir
He looks at me.
No — he looks at them looking at me. He watches the effect of my presence on their attention, and uses the moment of their distraction, and wins. I am a variable he has introduced into their cognitive environment. I am disrupting their calculations. This is my function at this table: to be looked at while he looks through them.
I hate this.
I also find it, against my better judgment, fascinating.
Watching him work, it occurs to me that I could apply the same principle. That being useful to him — being a talisman, an asset, a presence that disrupts rooms — is not the same as being defeated by it. That the space between compliance and strategy can be small enough to move through without being visible.
This is the thought I'm having when the shipping heir pushes the velvet box.
"I'm out of cash," he says. Voice shaking. "But this?—"
Aleksei glances at it. "Call." He flips his cards without theater. Royal flush.
The box contains a vintage Cartier watch — gold, mother-of-pearl face, the particular kind of beautiful object that was made to last a century and probably will. Aleksei weighs it in his hand and looks at me.
"Give me your wrist."
"I don't want?—"
"Wrist."
There's something in his voice tonight that is different from the command register. Not softer —warmerisn't the right word for him either, he doesn't do warmth as a register — but more present somehow. Less performed.
I extend my arm.
He fastens the watch. His fingers are careful at the clasp, more careful than they need to be to simply fasten a clasp, and I don't look at his face while he does it because I don't know what I'll find there and the champagne is still on the table and I need to be looking at something neutral.
The watch is cool against my pulse. Heavy enough to be felt.
"It fits," he decides.
"I don't need a watch."
"It's not for telling time." He lifts my wrist. His lips press against the pulse point just below the watch's edge — not a kiss, something more deliberate than a kiss, the placement of amark, a measurement. I feel it everywhere. I have stopped being surprised by the fact that I feel it everywhere; I have simply added it to the list of things that are wrong about this situation and kept going. "It's a reminder. You walk with my time on your skin. Every second. Every minute."
He releases my wrist.
"It all belongs to me."
He turns back to the table. The other men are looking at their chips. Not at us. They've been very carefully not looking at us for approximately the last thirty seconds, and the effort of that is visible.
Good,I think.You're all performing something.
So am I. The difference is I know what I'm performing.
Downstairs the party has shifted: the quartet has been replaced by something with more weight to it, the room darker, the crowd looser. The cards and the box and the weight of the watching have left me with an excess of something — not quite anger, not quite the other thing, some heightened version of the awareness I carry in these rooms.
A young man steps into our path.
Blond, eager, the kind of handsome that hasn't yet done anything interesting to his face. He looks at me, then at Aleksei, then back at me, and I can see him doing the calculation —is she approachable, what is the cost, does the reward justify the risk— and then he asks if he can dance with Miss Conti, and his voice cracks slightly on the second word, and I decide I like him for the crack.
I wait for Aleksei to dismiss him.
Aleksei looks at me instead.
"Do you want to dance, Sofia?"
