Volody
My best friend, Tommon, arrives forty minutes after I make the call, because some part of him clearly suspected this was urgent enough to skip his usual theatrics about being summoned.
He finds me on the balcony with my second coffee gone cold in my hand, staring out at a city that suddenly looks smaller than it did yesterday.
"You look like you're about to do something I'll have to clean up," he says, dropping into the chair across from me, tablet already balanced on his knee.
"Tell me what you found."
"Good morning to you too." He taps the screen, scrolls through something I can't see from this angle, and the easy half smile he walked in with starts fading the further down the page he goes.
"Cole Beckett. Twenty-one. Took over the family company six months ago from his uncle who was only keeping the seat warm after the parents died.
Since then he's restructured exactly nothing and borrowed against exactly everything. "
"How much."
"Enough that I checked the number twice." He turns the tablet toward me, and the figure sitting on the screen makes something cold settle in my chest. "Most of it's owed to Voloshenko. You remember him. Charming at parties, considerably less charming when payment's late."
I know exactly who Voloshenko is. I know exactly how Voloshenko collects when payment's late, and none of those methods involve patience.
"He's been borrowing for six months," I say, working it through out loud, "and he’s already deep enough that he sent his sister to Pietty’s auction last night."
"That's the part that gets interesting." Tommon leans forward, voice dropping into the register he uses when he's about to say something he knows will matter.
"He didn't just send her there because he was desperate and panicking.
He's been in talks with Voloshenko's people for weeks about exactly this.
There's a paper trail, sloppy, but it's there.
He floated the idea of a marriage alliance as collateral before he even knew about the auction.
Pietty's people confirmed his name was on a shortlist of families looking to place a relative with old money or new protection.
He wasn't improvising last night. He'd already started selling her before she put her dress on. "
The mug in my hand creaks under the pressure of my grip, and I have to consciously and deliberately set it down before it shatters.
"He planned this," I say, very quietly, because quiet is the only register that's safe right now. "Weeks out. Knowing exactly what she'd be walking into, and let her believe it was a charity dinner until a woman handed her a folder at the door."
"That's the read, yes."
"And the money. Where's it going. Not the loan, the six months of it."
Serik scrolls again. "Some into the business, genuinely, trying to plug holes that probably should have sunk the company a year ago.
Some into things that have nothing to do with the business at all.
Cars. A condo he's not living in. A woman who isn't his sister and definitely isn't on any company payroll.
" He glances up. "He's been spending like a man who expects someone else to cover the difference eventually. "
"He expected Liv to cover the difference."
"He expected your family's name to cover the difference. Liv was just the mechanism."
I sit with that for a long moment, the cold in my chest settling into something heavier, something with edges.
I think about the texts, I told them you'd be amenable, and I think about the way Liv described him last night, sweeter, before, softer, and I understand now that the boy she's still half mourning died somewhere along the way to becoming this version, the one who looks at his own sister and sees collateral instead of family.
I sit very still, listening to my own pulse in my ears, and I think about every quiet thing she said last night about late nights and parent-teacher conferences, like that was the whole of it, like that summary did any justice at all to six years of a woman quietly erasing her own future one decision at a time so her little brother could have an uninterrupted one.
She didn't tell me about the stuff Serik had told me earlier in the night.
The scholarship, the night school, the job opportunity.
She mentioned it like an afterthought, like it barely registered as a sacrifice worth naming, and that, somehow, makes the whole thing worse.
She's so used to giving pieces of herself away that she's stopped counting them.
"He took all of that," I say, low, "and the second he needed something to leverage, he sold the rest of her without blinking."
"It certainly looks that way." Tommon drops his tablet on the glass table, the chair groaning beneath his bulk as he makes himself more comfortable.
I’m quiet for a moment, weighing up my options. Voloshenko is not an ally of ours, but he is important enough that I can’t just walk into his office and put a bullet in his head. And Liv’s brother seems mostly stupid and greedy.
Tommon sighs. "Liv's brother is the only family she's got left, whatever he's done. If you handle this the way you handle your actual enemies, you'll lose her the second she finds out, even if everything you did, you did for her."
I hate that he's right. I hate it specifically because it means the fury sitting in my chest, hot and certain and entirely justified, has to get rerouted into something slower, more careful, less satisfying.
"Then tell me what I can do," I say. "Because sitting here doing nothing while he sends her deadlines about her own future isn't an option I'm willing to live with."
"Buy the debt." Tommon says it simply, like it's obvious, which, once he says it, it is.
"Voloshenko's a businessman before he's anything else.
He doesn't care who pays as long as someone does, with interest, on schedule.
Buy Cole's debt out from under him, and Voloshenko stops being a threat to either of them overnight.
Then Cole's leverage disappears too. He's got nothing left to bargain with, no urgency to push, no one breathing down his neck. "
"And Liv?"
"Liv gets her brother back without anyone collecting a debt off her body to do it." Tommon closes the tablet. "You get to be the reason the threat disappeared without ever having to tell her exactly how dangerous it was in the first place."
I look out at the skyline, turning it over, and something settles into place.
"Buy it," I say. "All of it. Quietly. I don't want Cole knowing where the money came from, not yet. Let him think Voloshenko got bored or got paid off through some other channel. I want him scared and confused, not grateful and emboldened."
"You've fallen hard," he says.
"I've fallen completely," I correct, and the admission costs me nothing at all.
If anything, it surprises me with how easily it comes.
"I watched a woman walk into that house last night believing the worst thing that could happen to her already had.
Then I find out her own brother spent six years taking everything she had to give and called it love the whole time he did it.
" Something rough moves through my voice.
"I'm not interested in being one more person in her life who takes from her and calls it affection.
I want to be the first one who hands something back. "
He leaves, and I sit alone on the balcony a while longer, coffee gone fully cold beside me, turning over everything I just learned, every quiet erasure she's never once described as a wound.
I think about walking back inside, finding her curled up in my sheets, and saying nothing about any of it yet, because some truths need handling before they need confessing.
I think about Cole Beckett sitting somewhere right now, smug and impatient, waiting for a Monday deadline he has no idea is about to become entirely irrelevant.
And I think, with a certainty that should probably alarm me more than it does, that whatever this thing between Liv and me started out as last night, a transaction, a rescue, an accident of timing in a room full of bad intentions, it stopped being any of those things somewhere around the moment I found out exactly what she's spent the last six years quietly giving away.
I'm not letting another person take a single piece of her again. Not her brother. Not Voloshenko. Not anyone.