"Phei," she called softly.

He raised his head and met her eyes, amethyst against hers, and her cheeks turned red all over again.

Then his gaze dropped, and with his free hand he carefully helped her leg back down from the exposing position she had unknowingly assumed. The touch was gentle, respectful, and somehow that made it worse.

Her whole body shivered as his hand guided her leg down to hang properly from the side of the car, then adjusted the fabric of her dress back into place to cover her exposed self.

"Sorry, princess," he said softly.

Nastya swallowed, trying to regain the composure that had apparently fallen off the Cullinan and died somewhere on the polished floor.

"It is fine."

That small thing, the way he had covered her without making it a moment, without smirking, or taking the cheap advantage a lesser man would have grabbed with both hands, undid her more than any flattery had.

She had braced herself, somewhere deep, for him to be like the others she had known, the boys who treated a flustered girl as an opening. Instead he had simply protected her dignity and apologized for the privilege of doing it. The ugly past, the frozen years, the careful armor she and Victoria had built, all of it suddenly felt like wasted material against him — because Phei refused, again and again, to give her any reason to need it.

Phei smiled faintly and stepped back just enough to let her breathe. "Where are the others?"

Nastya gathered herself, then tilted her head. "Listen."

Of course he knew where the others were. He could still hear the roars of cars outside without needing any instruction, could hear the delighted chaos of engines, laughter and tires meeting expensive pavement with terrible intent:

He had asked only to break the moment before she drowned in it, and the knowledge made her look at him with something softer than pride.

"Ah," he said, smiling. "So they are racing."

She nodded.

"And what about you, princess? Why are you not racing with the others? Or did you simply want the lonely, dim, quiet room?"

"Far from it," Nastya replied, her voice smoothing now that she had caught herself again. "I do not have a car, so unfortunately, I could not join."

Phei’s brows lifted. "Princess, you turned me down when I offered to get you one. How can you complain that you do not have one to use?"

Nastya smiled.

He still had not let go of her hand. At first, she had been flustered, but now her composure had returned, and with it, the realization that her plan was playing out in her favor.

"Young Master Phei," she said, tugging his arm softly without needing to say the rest, to bring him closer to her.

Phei came closer.

Exactly as she wanted.

She leaned forward, surprising him for a moment with the sudden shift in her presence. The bashful princess from seconds ago vanished, replaced by a Romano girl with dark confidence and old blood burning beneath polished manners.

Then again, when had a Romano ever remained bashful for long, except when ambushed by feeling before pride could dress properly?

Her breath brushed the side of his ear as she whispered, low and dominant:

"This is exactly what I wanted. Alone time with you. Otherwise, how would I be alone with you if I went racing with the others?"

Before he could answer, she pulled back, reached behind her and produced a bouquet of flowers he had somehow failed to see. She pressed them into his other hand, and Phei stared at the flowers, then at her.

"Nastya..."

"I want to go out with you," she said, not asking weakly, not begging, but declaring it with the kind of assertive confidence that made even her blush look dangerous. "Promise me you will."

Phei was taken aback, not only by the flowers, but by the sudden domination in her voice, the strength in her gaze and the way she had turned the entire situation on him before he could prepare a single elegant response.

Then she leaned in and kissed him.

A quick peck.

It was soft but shocking.

Her lipstick remained faintly on his lips when she pulled away, and before he could process that properly, she had already taken out her phone and started recording him.

"Promise," she said, holding the phone up with bright, dangerous eyes. "That was my first kiss. You will take responsibility, right?"

Phei stared at her, the flowers in his hand and her hand still in his with lipstick on his mouth.

A dominating, assertive girl forcing a promise out of him after ambushing him with romance.

Wasn’t all of this familiar?

So familiar even?!

And there, watching his face for the flicker she had crossed a continent of pride to chase, it was Nastya the memory took, not him.

The showroom seemed to soften at its edges.

The cold gold light went warm and green, the polished floor became grass, the idling hush of expensive machinery thinned into birdsong and the far-off scolding of someone’s nanny, and for one suspended breath she was small again, standing in a garden that had been paved over years ago, her arms full of crushed wildflowers she had torn up by the fistful because a florist was for people who planned.

A much shorter Phei stood where this grown impossible one stood now, blinking at her in the exact same startled way, and Nastya had shoved the flowers against his chest and declared it with all the terrifying certainty she had carried before she was old enough to learn the world could ever tell her no:

"You will marry me. Promise. I am recording it in my head forever, so you cannot take it back."

He had promised.

Even back then, although he rarely came to Main Paradise, he had been the one boy in their gilded little world who never made her feel like a transaction, and she had decided, with the whole force of her fierce unbothered heart, that he was hers.

Then the world had taken that promise apart with both hands, and the years had gone cold, and the garden had been paved, and the boy had been buried under so much loss and cruelty that she had spent a long time terrified the version of him who had stood in that garden no longer existed anywhere but inside her.

So she had rebuilt the same scene. Brick by brick. The flowers. The demand. The recording, upgraded now from a child’s memory to a phone she held in a hand she would not let tremble.

She had staged the whole ambush not only to win a date, but to set the past gently in front of him and pray, with a hope she would have died before admitting aloud, that somewhere behind those amethyst eyes a door would open and he would say it: "I remember. I remember the garden. I remember you."

The garden faded back into chrome and glass.

Phei looked at the flowers, at the phone and then looked at her, flushed and fierce and pretending the hand holding the camera was perfectly steady, and she watched his expression with her heart hammering against the cage of her pride, searching, searching for recognition.

What she found instead was warmth. Real, genuine, helpless warmth — Phei thoroughly and happily ambushed, charmed past the point of resistance by a beautiful girl and a fistful of flowers and a stolen first kiss.

But he did not remember.

And Nastya, who had braced for exactly this and still felt it land like a quiet blade between the ribs, smiled anyway, brilliant and unbroken, because she was a Romano, and a Romano did not let a man see the cost of a hope he had not even known he was failing.

’He will remember.’

She would simply have to be patient, the way she had been patient for years already; she had gotten him to promise twice now.

’The third time,’ she decided, watching him open his mouth to surrender, ’I will make sure he never forgot again.’

"I promise," Phei said.

Nastya’s smile, for half a second, was not a weapon at all. It was just a girl in a garden that no longer existed, getting the one answer she had crossed her whole life to hear again.