Chapter 4
Volody
I don't make it five steps from the table before I know I'm in trouble.
I keep walking anyway, because that's what you do when you've just felt the floor shift under you in a room full of armed men who'd notice if you stopped to process it.
I nod at Yevgeny Sidorov's idiot cousin, accept a glass of something dark from a passing tray, say something to Akyl that makes him roll his eyes, and the whole time my brain is still back at that table, watching a redhead confess to faking reading an entire book series just to spend some time with her brother.
I've sat through three years of these dinners.
I've heard every flavor of rehearsed charm a woman can dress herself in, every careful answer designed to make her sound exactly soft enough and exactly accomplished enough to be worth a Mostovoi's signature on a contract. I could recite the script in my sleep.
She didn't give me the script. She gave me the truth, almost by accident, like it slipped out before she remembered she wasn't supposed to hand it over for free.
I want more of it. Immediately. Embarrassingly.
I find her again twenty minutes later, near the doors that lead out to the terrace.
She’s half hidden behind a curtain the way she was half hidden behind that column earlier, like hiding in plain sight is just something she does without noticing.
The terrace itself is empty, cold air drifting in off the water.
"Going somewhere?" I ask.
She startles, hand flying to her chest. "You move like a cat."
"I move like a man who's spent his whole life sneaking up on people for a living." I lean against the doorframe, giving her room, because something about her tells me she'll bolt if I crowd her, and the last thing I want tonight is to be the reason she bolts. "You looked like you needed air."
"I needed about ten minutes where nobody could see my face." She wraps her arms around herself, and I notice, for the first time, that she's cold, that the sleeves on that vintage dress aren't doing much against the winter night. I shrug out of my jacket without really deciding to and hold it out.
She stares at it like it's a trick question.
"It's just a jacket," I say. "I promise there's nothing hidden in the lining."
That gets a small, surprised laugh out of her, and she takes it, pulling it around her shoulders. It swallows her whole, sleeves hanging past her wrists, and something low in my chest goes warm and stupid at the sight of her drowning in something that belongs to me.
"Thank you," she says.
"Don't thank me yet. I'm going to use this as an excuse to stand near you for the rest of the night so I can get it back eventually."
"Is that how this works?" she asks, raising one eyebrow so slightly it’s barely noticeable.
"I'm making it up as I go,” I confess. “So far it's working."
She actually smiles at that, real and unguarded, and for a second neither of us says anything, we just stand there with the cold air and the candlelight and several strangers' worth of noise muffled behind glass doors.
"Can I ask you something," I say, "and you can tell me to go to hell if it's none of my business."
"That's an ominous way to start a question."
"I'm an ominous man. Ask anyone." I study her face, the way it's still doing that thing it was doing across the table, every feeling sitting right there on the surface, completely unprotected.
"What happened to you tonight? Before dinner.
You disappeared down that hallway like the building was on fire. "
She goes quiet for a second, long enough that I think she's going to deflect, go back to the easy banter we'd built like a fence between us and the rest of the evening. Then something in her shoulders drops, the same way it dropped earlier when she walked back into that room with her chin up.
"I didn't know," she says. "What this was. I thought I was coming to a charity dinner. My brother told me it was a charity dinner. I found out what it actually was when a woman handed me a folder with my photograph and…details in it at the front door."
The warmth in my chest curdles into something colder and considerably more dangerous.
"Your brother sent you here," I say slowly, "without telling you what here was."
"He's never been good at telling me things.
Not for a while now." She pulls the jacket tighter around herself, not from the cold this time, I don't think.
"I keep trying to find a version of tonight where that makes sense.
Where there's some explanation that doesn't end with him knowing exactly what he was doing and deciding it was worth it anyway. "
I have killed men for less.
"That's not a small thing to do to someone," I say, careful to keep my voice level, because the last thing she needs right now is my temper doing the talking. "Sending you in blind. Letting you find out from a stranger at a door."
"No," she agrees, her voice quiet. "It isn't."
"For what it's worth, and I realize this is coming from someone you met for the first time tonight, you didn't deserve that."
She looks up at me, and there's something in her face, surprise mixed with something rawer underneath it, like she expected me to laugh this off or use it to my advantage and instead I just handed her something close to anger on her behalf, no strings attached.
"You're not what I expected," she says.
"Most people say that. Usually right before they ask what's wrong with me."
"That's not what I meant." She tilts her head, studying me the way I've been studying her all night, like she's trying to find the seam where the charm ends and the real thing starts.
"Everyone in there is some version of dangerous.
You're the only one who's actually being kind, and somehow that's the more frightening option. "
"Frightening how?"
"Because I think I could fall for kind faster than I could ever fall for dangerous." She says it like it surprises her, like the words came out before she'd fully vetted them, and then immediately looks like she wants to take them back. "I'm sorry. That was a strange thing to say out loud."
"Don't apologize. It's the best thing anyone's said to me all year, and the bar was genuinely on the floor.
" I mean it as a joke, the way I mean most things, but it comes out quieter than I intend, more honest, and she hears the shift, because she's already proven tonight that very little gets past her either.
We stand there a little too long, the noise of the party going on without us, and I think, with a clarity that should probably alarm me more than it does, I'm not letting another man in that room near her.
It isn't a calculation. I've made plenty of calculations in my life, weighed risk against reward with the cold patience my brothers respect and occasionally fear.
This isn't that. This is something that arrives whole and finished, the way gut decisions always have for me, the kind that's gotten me through more dangerous rooms than this one because I trust it more than I trust anything else.
She's mine. I decided it somewhere between the fun run confession and right now, and I'm not interested in pretending otherwise to make the evening feel more dignified.
"Liv," I say. "I have to go do something inside in a few minutes. Boring, ugly, very much part of how tonight works. I'd like you to be there when I do it."
Her brow furrows. "Why?"
"Because I don't want you finding out about it from a stranger at a door. Not twice in one night." I hold out my hand. "Trust me. I know that's a big ask from a man you've known for barely an evening."
She looks at my hand for a long moment, and I can see the exact second she decides, something settling behind her eyes, equal parts terror and resolve. She puts her hand in mine.
We walk back inside together, my jacket still wrapped around her shoulders, and I steer her toward the corner of the reception room where Pietty's already hovering with his little leather folder, waiting to collect cards.
"Mr. Mostovoi," he says, surprised to see me approaching him instead of the other way around. "We're about to close the rooms for the evening, the bidding has drawn to an end—"
"Not without my bid it hasn’t." I pull the thick cream card from my back pocket, the kind every man in this house carries for exactly this purpose, along with a pen, the tip sharp and unforgiving as I slice it over the pad of my thumb.
Instead of walking off to do this in some back room the way custom dictates, the way every other man here has done it tonight, I set the card down on the small table beside us, in plain view, with Liv standing right next to my shoulder.
"Volody," she says, low, alarmed. "What are you doing?"
"Something I hope you won’t mind." I write her name with a number under it quickly, no hesitation, no need to check what anyone else in that study might offer, because it doesn't matter what anyone else offers. I'm not competing with them. I'm just making sure nobody bothers to try.
I turn the card so she can see it.
Her breath catches audibly. Her eyes go wide, fixed on the number like it might rearrange itself into something more reasonable if she stares hard enough.
"That's," she starts, then stops, then starts again. "That's not a normal amount of money."
"No," I agree. "It isn't."
"You can't just—" She looks up at me, searching my face for the joke, the angle, the part where this turns out to be elaborate cruelty dressed up as generosity. She doesn't find it, because there isn't one to find. "Why would you do this? You don't know me."
"I know enough." I fold the card closed and hand it to Pietty, who's gone very pale, very quickly.
"I know you'd rather tell me something true and embarrassing than something safe and rehearsed.
I know you walked back into that room tonight with your chin up after finding out exactly what it cost you to be here, and most people don't manage that on their best day, let alone their worst."
Her mouth drops open. "That's not enough to know someone."
"It's enough to know I want the chance to know the rest." I take her hand again, gentler this time, my thumb brushing once over her knuckles.
"I'm not asking you to fall in love with me by morning, Alivia.
I'm asking you to let me be the one who gets the chance to try.
That's the whole offer. Everything else, we figure out together. "
She's quiet for a long moment, looking down at our joined hands, and I watch something war behind her eyes, fear and disbelief and underneath it all, faint but unmistakable, something that looks dangerously close to hope.
"Okay," she says finally, soft enough I almost miss it. "Okay."
A single small word from a woman who's had an entire night ripped out from under her and is choosing, deliberately, to hand the next part of it to me anyway.
I think it might be the best thing anyone's ever said to me.