Chapter 2 #2
I think about what happens if Kir wins her. What his hands will do. Where he'll put them. The sounds she'll make, not the ones he wants but the ones he'll force out of her, and my vision narrows to a single red point.
"Boss," Ilya says. "We need to move. Intermission is coming."
I straighten my jacket. Adjust my cuffs. And then I do the most irrational thing I've done in fifteen years of running the Voronov operation, the thing that violates every rule my father ever taught me about separating emotion from business.
I walk toward the stage.
The crowd notices. I don't blend into crowds. I've been told I move through rooms the way a shark moves through shallow water, and whether that's true or not, people tend to get out of my way without being asked. A path opens for me. Chairs scrape. Conversations stop.
Kir sees me. His grin falters.
I stop at the edge of the bidding floor and look up at the girl on the stage. She's staring down at the chaos of paddles and shouting men, and her chest is heaving under that ridiculous dress, and I can see her pulse in her throat, beating fast, fast, fast.
"One million," I say.
I don't raise my voice. I don't need to. The room went silent at some point between me standing and me reaching the stage.
Morozov blinks behind his microphone. "I, ah... one million dollars. We have one million dollars from..."
He looks at me. He knows who I am. Everyone in this room knows who I am.
"From Mr. Voronov," he finishes.
Kir's face cycles through several colors. He grips his paddle and opens his mouth.
I look at him. I don't speak. I don't threaten. I don't reach for the gun against my ribs. I let him see what's behind my eyes, the thing I usually keep locked behind politeness and tailored suits and the careful performance of civilized behavior.
What's behind my eyes is very simple: I will kill everyone in this room before I let you have her.
Kir closes his mouth with a gulp.
"One million going once," Morozov says, his voice cracking. "Going twice."
The room holds its breath.
"Sold. To Mr. Voronov."
The gavel comes down, and I am looking at the girl on the stage. This trembling stranger in her paper-thin dress with her chin up and her fists clenched and her dark eyes full of a terror and think: You have no idea what just happened to you. You have no idea what just happened to me.
Ilya is at my shoulder. I can feel his frustration radiating off him like heat. Three weeks of planning. Men in position. A clean kill, thrown away for a girl neither of us has ever seen before.
"The Kir situation," he says carefully.
"Will be handled differently now."
"Differently how?"
I watch the girl being led off the stage by one of Morozov's handlers. She looks back over her shoulder, once, at the room full of men, and her expression is the expression of someone who has just been told the date of their own execution.
"I don't know yet," I tell Ilya, and it's the first honest thing I've said in years. "But I'm not leaving this building without her."
Ilya stares at me. He's known me since we were fourteen, since we were running cigarettes and stolen electronics through the docks for my father's men. He has seen me shoot a man in the face over a five-percent discrepancy in a shipment. He has never once seen me act without a plan.
Until tonight.
"Get the car," I say.
Morozov's people are efficient. Papers are signed. Money is wired. They bring her to me in a side room off the main floor, a windowless space with leather couches and a mini bar, like this is a backstage lounge and not a holding pen for human beings.
She stands in front of me, she's smaller than she looked on stage.
The heels add four inches, but without them she'd barely reach my chin.
Up close, her makeup is flawless but I can see where her mascara has feathered at the corners, where tears were wiped away and painted over, and her fingernails have left half-moon indentations in her own palms from clenching so hard.
She doesn't look at me. She looks at the floor, at the wall, at the door behind me, anywhere but my face.
I take off my jacket.
She flinches. A recoil so visceral that it punches through every layer of control I've spent the last twenty minutes maintaining, and for one white-hot second I want to go back out to the auction floor and put a bullet in every man who made her learn that reflex.
Instead, I step forward and drape my jacket over her shoulders.
I'm not doing it out of kindness or chivalry or some noble impulse that I don't possess and have never pretended to.
I'm doing it because I can see every man in the hallway looking at her body through that dress, and something ancient and vicious in my blood says: no. Mine. All of it. Every inch.
The jacket swallows her. She pulls it around herself instinctively, burrowing into it, her fingers brushing the lapel. I watch her breathe in the scent of my cologne and I think, yes. That's right. Get used to it.
"Come," I say.
She follows me because she has no choice.
I know that. I'm not deluding myself into thinking there's anything voluntary about the way she falls into step behind me as we walk through the corridor and out to the service entrance where Ilya has the car waiting.
She's following me the way a prisoner follows a guard to a new cell.
The car is a black Escalade with tinted windows and bulletproof panels. I open the back door.
"Get in."
She climbs in and moves to the far side of the seat, pressing herself against the door like she's trying to merge with it, to disappear into the upholstery. She still won't look at me.
I don't get in the back with her. Instead, I walk around to the driver's side. Ilya raises an eyebrow.
"I'll drive," I tell him. "Follow in the second car."
He wants to argue. He doesn't. He's smarter than that.
I adjust the rearview mirror.
She's sitting hunched in the back seat, my jacket pulled tight around her, her knees pressed together, her face turned toward the window even though there's nothing to see through the tint but darkness.
"Sit back," I say.
Her eyes snap to the mirror. She sees me watching her.
"I said sit back. Against the seat."
She does. Slowly. Like she's moving through wet concrete. Her back touches the leather, her body rigid with the effort of obeying a stranger's commands.
I pull out of the lot and onto the empty street, and the city slides past us in a blur of streetlights and shadow.
I adjust the mirror again.
She's staring at the back of my head. I can feel it. That wide-eyed, terrified attention, like an animal watching the thing that caught it, waiting to find out if it's going to be eaten or released.
"What's your name?" I ask.
Silence. Then, so quietly I almost miss it under the hum of the engine:
"Wren."
Wren. A small bird. A plain bird. A bird that builds its nest in the cracks of things that other creatures have abandoned.
Fitting.
I look at her in the mirror. She's watching me, waiting for whatever comes next, and I can see the pulse in her throat again, that wild, hammering beat, and I want to press my mouth to it.
I want to feel her heartbeat against my lips and know that it's beating for me, because of me, this frantic, living proof that she exists and she's here and she's mine.
"Wren," I say, and I watch the way she shivers when I say it, the way her name sounds in my voice, foreign and intimate and permanent. "I'm going to ask you to do something, and you're going to do it."
Her jaw tightens. But she doesn't argue. She's too smart for that, or too scared, and right now I don't care which.
I hold her gaze in the mirror.
"Spread your legs."
The words are a slap. I see it in her face, the shock, the flare of something hot and immediate that might be anger or might be shame, and her fingers curl into the leather seat on either side of her thighs.
"Show me."
She doesn't move. For five seconds, ten, she sits there breathing hard, and I can see the war happening behind her eyes, the calculation of risk versus resistance, the terrible math of figuring out how much defiance she can afford.
Then she spreads her legs.
Slowly. Inch by inch. The champagne dress rides up her thighs, and the fabric is so thin it might as well not exist, and in the dim glow of passing streetlights I can see the shape of her, the shadow between her legs, and something detonates in my chest.
I don't touch her. I don't pull over. I don't do any of the things my body is screaming at me to do because the point of this isn't gratification.
The point is establishment. I need her to understand, right now, in this car, before we arrive at my home and she enters the rest of her life, that I am not a man who asks.
I am a man who takes. And everything she is, everything she has, every trembling, terrified, defiant inch of her belongs to me now.
Not because I paid for her.
Because the click happened, and there is no undoing it.
There's no contract that can be voided, no receipt that can be returned.
What happened in that auction room wasn't a purchase.
It was recognition. The universe putting something in front of me and saying: this one.
This one is yours. This one has always been yours. You just didn't know it until now.
I swallow, then say. “Lift your knees.”
She does, and to my surprise, she keeps her eyes right on mine, even when mine slide to the space between her thighs.
“Touch yourself.” My voice is scraped raw now. I only take my eyes from her pussy to make sure I’m still on the road.
Her fingers slowly find their way to her center, part her puffy lips, stroke up and down her slit.
Her jaw is set in resistance. She is telling herself she is doing what she has to survive.
But when I see the first drops of her arousal being smeared through her folds by her fingertips… I know she won’t ever be leaving.