The Spaces Between Us

Prologue:

Some stories don't begin with thunder.
They don't begin with heartbreak or kisses stolen in shadows.
They begin quietly—like mine did—with a glass of champagne, music too loud for my taste, and the unsettling sensation of someone's gaze resting on me across the room.
I told myself it was nothing. Just another evening in another city.
After all, I had Alex waiting for me back home in Kolkata, the man who knew my laugh better than I did, the man who could read the rise and fall of my silences. My life was already spoken for, already promised.
And yet...
That night in Stockholm, everything I believed about myself began to fracture.
The ballroom glittered with chandeliers and frost-laced windows, diplomats and executives twirling through polite conversation. I remember tugging at the sleeve of my gown, fidgeting with a nervousness I couldn't explain. My colleague Tina was talking beside me, her wedding ring catching the light, her voice warm and reassuring as always.
I was there for work, expecting an evening of measured conversations and rapport building.
Then I felt it.
That pause—an almost imperceptible shift in the air. The moment when the crowd blurred and I knew I was being seen. Not glanced at. Not observed. Seen.
I turned, and his eyes found mine.
Leonardo Savoy. Heir to a name older than the chandeliers themselves, a man born of old money and older pride, the kind of man my mother would have warned me about.
I didn't know what he wanted, who he really was, or how much I would come to lose in the shadow of that first look.
All I knew was this: when his gaze touched me, I forgot the careful plans, the carefully built life. For a heartbeat, I forgot Alex.
And that—though I didn't admit it then—was where my story truly began.