Bred By the Final Bidder (Auctioned to the BRATVA #5)

Chapter 1

Liv

The invitation said black tie. That’s why I’m sitting in the back of a black sedan being chauffeured to a charity dinner in my mom’s forest-green vintage Dior.

The long sleeves are to help keep the cold night air off my skin.

The neck-line made to look like gathered lapels that criss-cross over my chest and down around my waist. Modest, but sleek and classically elegant.

I used to love when my mother wore this dress.

I’d hoped it would make me feel better about tonight when I shrugged it on over my head and zipped it up the side, but really, I just feel anxious.

“It’s just a dinner,” Cole, my little brother, had exclaimed for the hundredth time when I asked him a question about it. The same answer he gave me to every question I’d asked.

What charity?

What is a reasonable time to leave?

Is there a set menu?

Is anyone we know going?

The driver looks at me in the rear-view mirror but I pretend not to notice and keep my eyes fixed on the street passing by beyond the window.

I thought Cole was coming too, normally we do these things together since our parents died.

Trying to keep our faces, and our family name, in front of the right people.

Our uncle ran the family company while I raised Cole.

Then as soon as he turned twenty-one, he was given full reign of the business, with little to no experience, and promptly began driving it into the ground.

At least tonight I’ll be able to talk to people, real human adults, about something other than family strife, and get more than short, curt answers in response.

The door comes to a stop in front of two large gates that roll open steadily.

It’s unusual to attend a charity function at a private residence, but I suppose they could be trying to save money by not hosting it at a high-end hotel.

Cole mentioned there was a steep table fee and I wonder why he bothered when money is hemorrhaging from the business, but then I suppose it’s deductible.

I step out of the car when the driver opens my door, and nod a polite thank you to him.

I think about Cole again, how he didn’t join me tonight.

Optics, he'd said. Looks better if you arrive alone.

I should have asked what that meant. I didn't, because asking Cole things lately tends to end with him getting that tight, evasive look around his mouth, the one he's had since our parents died.

The doors open as I climb the steps and a hallway lined with gold sconces and a marble floor so clean it looks like ice, stretch out before me.

My stomach is a fist. I tell myself it's nerves about representing the family at a charity function I know nothing about, that I'll smile and make small talk and leave early, and Cole will owe me for this the way he owes me for a hundred other favors he's never once paid back.

A woman in a sleek black dress checks names off a tablet at the door. She finds mine, glances up, and something flickers across her face before she smooths it away.

"Miss Alivia Beckett," she says. "Yes. Right this way."

She doesn't hand me a glass of champagne or a program for the evening. She hands me a folder.

I stop walking. "What is this?"

"Your portfolio, Miss Beckett." She says it like I should already understand the word. "For the gentlemen this evening. Please check the information is accurate and let me know of any inaccuracies as soon as possible."

I open it before I can think better of it, and the bottom drops out of my night in one clean, vertical fall.

It's me. Pages of me. A photograph from my college graduation, my full name typed beneath it, my age, my education, a line about my "family background" that makes no mention of dead parents or a brother who can't hold his own in the boardroom, only the Beckett name and whatever weight it still carries in rooms like this one.

There's a section labeled Disposition. Another labeled Suitability.

Someone has written, in small clean type, that I'm gentle. Biddable. Loyal to family. Untouched.

My stomach surges. My ears start ringing.

"There's been a mistake," I say. My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I was told this was a charity dinner."

The woman's expression doesn't change. She's seen this exact moment before, I realize. Probably tonight. Probably a dozen times before tonight.

"Some would call it that," she says, like that's an answer. "If you'll follow me to the reception."

I don't follow her. I can't make my feet do it.

The hallway tilts, just slightly, the way a boat does right before you understand the water's gone rough.

Around me, women in beautiful dresses are clutching identical folders, and not one of them looks surprised.

They look like they dressed for exactly this. Calculated. Composed.

I am the only one who didn't know.

My brother knew. The thought lands hard enough that I have to put a hand against the wall. He paid the fee. I wonder how much it was.

Cole insisted I come tonight. Cole, who has been distant for months, who started taking calls in other rooms and flinching every time his phone buzzed at the dinner table. Cole, who wouldn’t look me in the eyes for the last week or answer any of my questions about tonight.

He didn't send me to a charity dinner. He sent me to a market.

"Miss Beckett?" The woman at the door is still watching me, polite and patient. "Is something wrong?"

Everything is wrong. My whole chest is wrong, hollowed out and ringing like a bell that's just been struck.

"I need a moment," I manage. "The cloakroom. Where is it?"

She points me down a side hallway, and I walk fast enough that my heels catch on the hem of my dress and I almost trip, the folder still clutched against my ribs like something I might be able to put back together if I just hold it tightly enough.

The cloakroom is empty except for racks of coats and a woman standing near the far wall, dark hair twisted up, a glass of water in her hand that she clearly poured for herself rather than waiting for someone to bring it to her.

She looks up when I come in, and whatever's on my face must say everything, because her expression softens instantly, the way you'd look at someone who just got hit by a car they never saw coming.

"Are you okay?" she asks.

My laugh comes out wrong, more of a sob with a ribbon of a laugh wrapped around it. "I didn't even know what this was. I thought I was coming to a dinner. A real one. With food and a silent auction for some hospital wing or orphanage."

"There's food," she says gently. "And technically, it is an auction."

My legs give out before I decide to let them. I sit on the little velvet bench against the wall and put my face in my hands, the folder sliding off my lap onto the floor, my own photograph staring up at the ceiling.

The woman crosses the room and sits beside me. Up close, she's striking in a controlled way, dark eyes assessing me without making it feel like an inspection.

"I'm Katriona," she says.

"Liv." My voice cracks around the single syllable.

"Liv." She says it like she's filing it away somewhere safe. "Breathe. In through your nose. You're not the first woman to sit on this exact bench and feel like the floor disappeared."

"My brother set me up." Saying it out loud makes it realer, makes it land somewhere deep in my sternum where it's going to live for a long time. "He told me to dress nicely and represent the family."

"He knew," Katriona says. It isn't a question.

"He knew." The words taste like metal. "He had to have known. People don't accidentally end up at a place like this."

Katriona doesn't flinch.

"Why would he do this?" I'm not asking her, not really.

I'm asking the room, the universe, anyone who might have an answer that doesn't break something fundamental about how I understand my own brother.

"I raised him. After our parents died, I gave up everything, every plan I had for my own life, so he could finish school and have something stable.

And this is what he does with it. He sells me to the highest bidder… for what?"

Katriona is quiet for a moment, and when she speaks again, her voice has gone careful in a different way, less comforting and more honest.

"The men here aren't ordinary men," she says. "Whatever your brother owes, or wants, or thinks he's buying his way into, it's not small. People don't sell their sisters for small things."

That should scare me more than it does. Maybe it will later, once the shock burns off and leaves something sharper behind. Right now it just confirms what I already suspected the second I saw my own face printed inside a binder full of…well, me.

"I should leave," I say. "I should walk straight out that door and call a cab and never speak to him again."

"You could." Katriona's tone stays even, no judgment in it either direction.

"But think about what happens after. If you walk out of this building in the middle of an auction, every family in that room will know your name, and they'll know it as the woman who ran.

That kind of story travels. It attaches itself to a name and follows it. Your brother's name. Yours."

"So I'm trapped either way." A fresh wave of tears fills my eyes.

"You're not trapped." She turns slightly toward me, and something in her gaze sharpens into focus, like she's deciding to hand me something valuable.

"You're choosing. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like one tonight.

Walking back in there with your head up is a choice.

Staying long enough to understand exactly what you're dealing with before you decide anything, that's a choice too.

The worst thing you can do is let fear make the decision for you. "

I look down at the folder on the floor, at my face smiling up from a photograph taken on a day I thought my biggest decision had been which college lecture to skip. I think about Cole's tight jaw and the way he wouldn’t answer any of my questions.

I think about every version of myself I gave away in the last six years so he could have a future, and how easily he just handed mine over without asking.

"I'm not going to fall apart in a cloakroom," I say, mostly to myself.

"No," Katriona agrees. "You're going to walk back in there, and you're going to let them see exactly what kind of woman they think they're buying. Let them be wrong about you in real time. There's a particular satisfaction in that."

A laugh actually escapes me this time, thin but real. "You sound like you've done this before."

"I haven’t. But I was lucky enough to walk in here with my eyes wide open." The corner of her mouth lifts, the first real warmth I've seen from her. "Hey. Look at me. You're okay."

"I can't do this.” I’m not made like Katriona or the other women here.

All I’m cut out for is cozy nights in front of the fire reading Pride and Prejudice for the millionth time and making sure Cole actually turns up for the meetings he is meant to chair.

“I thought I could, but I can't. They're all, they're so... "

"Terrifying? Absolutely. That one with the jaw could cut glass with his cheekbones alone. But you know what? He puts his trousers on one leg at a time, same as anyone. Probably has someone iron them first, but the principle holds."

I let out another wet, shaking laugh.

"Listen to me," she continues with a steadiness and a warmth that has edges of iron underneath. "If we're going to be sold to terrifying billionaires tonight, at least let's do it with waterproof mascara. Here. Tilt your head back."

She pulls a tissue from her clutch and dabs under my eyes gently.

"There. You're gorgeous. Now. We're going to walk back into that room, and we're going to hold our heads up, and we're going to remember that those men need us more than we need them, because without wives, they're just men with guns and property portfolios, and that's not a dynasty.

That's a bachelor party that never ended. "

I laugh again, stronger this time. "You're funny."

"I'm hysterical. It's my primary coping mechanism. Shall we?"

I take her hand, and I let her pull me to my feet, and for a moment we just stand there, two strangers bound together by whatever this is.

Then I square my shoulders, because Katriona's right. Whatever Cole has done, whatever this room full of dangerous, well-dressed men are here to buy, I refuse to walk in looking like prey.

I walk the cloakroom door, and the music drifts louder from the reception hall. I walk toward it with my chin level and my pulse still hammering.