Chapter 63

Chapter 63


Alejandro’s POV

Her name was Sofia.

Or Sophia. She’d told me twice and both times it had slipped through my head without catching on anything. 

She was beautiful in the way that most women in these circles were beautiful, deliberately and expensively, dark hair, a red dress and a mouth that knew exactly what it was doing when it smiled across a bar at a man like me.

She’d approached me at Danny’s thing, some rooftop event I’d attended because staying in that house with Candy’s perfume soaking into every room was becoming a specific kind of torture. 

She’d introduced herself, touched my arm within the first two minutes, laughed at everything I said with that particular laugh that meant she wasn’t listening to the words, just the voice.

I knew the routine because I’d written it.

We ended up at her apartment.

Nice place. City view. The kind of bedroom that had been arranged with intention, soft lighting and expensive sheets. 

She was lovely, she genuinely was, pulling me toward her with warm hands and that smile. I was present for approximately the first thirty seconds of it. Then my brain went somewhere else entirely.

It did it without permission.

One moment Sofia’s hands were in my hair and the next I was thinking about a different pair of hands, smaller, slightly cold the way Mira’s always were even in warm rooms, the way she’d press them against my chest sometimes like she was checking that I was real. 

I thought about the specific sound of her laugh, the genuine one that she tried to swallow before it fully escaped, the one that meant something had actually caught her off guard.

I thought about the way she looked at me sometimes when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, that careful, complicated look that she’d deny completely if I ever mentioned it.

Sofia said my name.

I came back to the room.

“Hey,” she murmured, studying my face with a small uncertain frown. “Where did you go?”

“I’m here,” I replied.

But I wasn’t.

I stayed another hour out of something that felt uncomfortably close to politeness, which was a new low for me if I was being honest, then found my jacket and my phone and left while Sofia was in the bathroom, because walking out mid evening was apparently who I was now.

Marcus was waiting outside without being asked.

Smart man.

I got in the car and sat in the dark for a moment before he pulled away from the curb, the city lights doing their usual thing outside the window, bright and indifferent.

I checked my phone but the message from Mira had stopped. 

Which made sense because I hadn’t answered her three calls and she had too much pride to make it four, which was exactly the kind of thing about her that made the Sofia situation feel as hollow as it had.

Danny’s laugh carried across the entire booth.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he managed between the kind of laughter that required physical recovery. “You left? You actually left?”

“Drop it,” I muttered into my drink.

“Bro.” Marlo was trying harder than Danny to keep his face straight and failing at a similar rate. “She was gorgeous. I saw her. The whole room saw her.”

“I’m aware.”

“So what happened?” Danny demanded, leaning forward with the energy of someone who had found the most entertaining thing to happen all week.

“Nothing happened,” I replied flatly. “I left. People leave.”

“Not you,” Danny pointed out. “You have literally never left. You are historically the last person to leave any situation involving a beautiful woman and an empty apartment.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I drank my drink.

“It’s the Martinez girl,” Marlo said, quieter than Danny, his tone carrying something that wasn’t quite amusement anymore.

“Don’t,” I warned.

“I’m not saying anything bad,” he replied carefully. “I’m just saying what it is.”

Danny snorted. “Mate, she’s a stripper. Was a stripper. Whatever. You’re Alejandro Montenegro, you can have literally anyone, and you’re sitting here miserable over someone who—”

“Finish that sentence,” I said quietly, “and we’re going to have a problem.”

The table went very still.

Danny looked at me.

I looked back.

Something in my expression made him close his mouth, pick up his drink and look at the middle distance with the energy of a man who had just made a very quick and very sensible decision.

Marlo watched the whole thing without a word.

The music from the bar filled the silence between us, loudly.

“She did something to you,” Marlo said eventually, not as an accusation, just an observation, the way Marlo delivered most things that mattered.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told him.

“I know.” He nodded once. “I’m just saying it out loud so you don’t have to.”

I looked at him sideways.

That was the thing about Marlo. He had a way of sitting with uncomfortable truths that didn’t make them feel like attacks, just facts that needed air. It was both useful and deeply annoying depending on the day.

“The bet,” he said carefully.

“What about it?”

“When are we calling it?”

I turned to look at him fully.

He met my gaze without shifting. “Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look like a bet anymore. And I think you know that.”

Danny was very busy examining his glass.

“There’s no bet,” I replied.

“There was,” Marlo pressed gently.

“There was,” I agreed. “And now there isn’t. And that’s all I’m saying about it.”

He nodded slowly, accepting that, filing it somewhere.

We drank in silence for a while.

The rooftop hummed around us with other people’s easy Friday nights, laughter and glasses clinking and the specific collective noise of people who didn’t have Reeves building a file somewhere or Candy rearranging metaphorical furniture or three unanswered phone calls sitting in their chest like something lodged.

“She called three times,” I said to nobody in particular.

Marlo didn’t look surprised.

“Are you going to call back?” he asked.

I thought about Sofia’s apartment and the way my brain had gone somewhere else without asking.

Thought about Mira’s cold hands and her genuine laugh and the way she’d said come back to me like she already knew I would before I did.

“Not yet,” I replied.

Marlo nodded.

“But soon,” I added quietly.

He picked up his glass.

“Yeah,” he said simply. “I figured.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​