Chapter 11
Volody
The call comes up from the front desk a little after ten in the morning, Paul's voice clipped and careful.
"Mr. Mostovoi. A Cole Beckett is here. Says he's here to see his sister. He's, ah, insistent."
I glance across the kitchen island at Liv, who's gone very still over her coffee, knuckles white around the mug.
"Send him up," I say.
She looks at me like I've lost my mind. "You're letting him in?"
I shrug. "I'm curious." I set my own mug down, lean against the counter, arms crossed. "You don't have to be in the room if you don't want to be."
"I want to be in the room." Her jaw sets in a way I've come to recognize, the same set it had the night she walked back into Pietty's ballroom with her chin up after finding out what kind of evening she'd actually walked into. "I'm not hiding from my own brother in my own home."
My home, she said. I file that away to enjoy properly later, when there isn't a problem currently riding the elevator up to my front door.
Cole Beckett turns out to be smaller than I expected. Good suit, slightly too new, the kind a man buys when he wants to look like he belongs somewhere he hasn't actually arrived yet. He steps off the elevator already talking before he's fully through the doors.
"Liv. Thank God. You haven't been answering anything, I was starting to think—"
He stops when he sees me.
"Mr. Mostovoi." Recalibrating fast, the way men like him always do, swapping panic for performance in under a second. He extends a hand I don't take. "I'm Cole. Liv's brother. I think we should talk."
"I think you should sit down," I say, gesturing at the sofa, pleasant as anything. "Coffee?"
"I'm fine." He doesn't sit. He looks around the penthouse instead, taking in the windows, the height, the unmistakable smell of money that clings to everything in this building, and I watch the calculation move behind his eyes, the same look I imagine he wore weeks ago floating his sister's name to Voloshenko's people like a chip on a table.
"This is a hell of a place," he says.
"It does the job." I sit, unhurried, and gesture again at the sofa across from me. This time he takes it. "You said we should talk. Talk."
"Right. Yes." He glances at Liv, who's standing near the kitchen island her arms crossed, watching him with an expression I haven't seen from her before, something flat and careful, like she's bracing for a blow she already knows is coming.
"I wanted to come congratulate you both properly. In person. Skip the text messages."
"Generous of you," I say. "Considering the text messages weren't going particularly well."
A flicker of irritation crosses his face before he smooths it back into something more diplomatic. "I want to talk about the timeline. The wedding. I think it's in everyone's interest to move quickly on this. There are advantages to formalizing things sooner rather than later."
"Whose interest, specifically."
"Everyone's." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, shifting into what I imagine he thinks is his closing posture, the one that's worked on boardrooms full of men less patient than me.
"I run a company, Mr. Mostovoi. A good one, with real potential, that's currently going through a rough patch with financing.
A connection to your family, formalized, official, would go a long way toward reassuring certain partners that the Beckett name still carries weight. "
"You want me to lend you, my name."
"I want us to help each other. That's how families work, isn't it?
You get Liv. I get a little breathing room with people who are currently making my life difficult.
" He says it so easily, so reasonably, like he's not describing his own sister as a line item in a financing round.
"I'm not asking for much. A statement. Some visibility at the wedding.
Maybe a small advisory position, nothing serious, just enough that my partners see the Mostovoi name attached to my company. "
I let the silence sit for a long moment, long enough that he starts to fidget, long enough that I watch him glance at Liv again, checking, I think, whether she's going to step in and smooth this over the way she apparently always has.
She doesn't move. Doesn't even say a word.
"Let me make sure I understand," I say finally, voice level, almost friendly.
"You sent your sister to an auction without telling her what it was.
You promised a stranger she'd be, and I'm quoting your own text here, amenable, before she'd even walked through the door.
You let her find out what was happening from a folder handed to her by a woman she'd never met.
And now you're here, in my home, asking me for a business favor. "
"I wouldn't put it that way."
"I would.” I keep my voice calm even as my temper threatens the frayed edges of my patience. “I just did."
His jaw tightens. "It's not as simple as you're making it sound."
"It's exactly that simple. You needed money. You found a market that pays for women. Only you sent her in blind instead of ready to negotiate because you didn’t understand what you were sending her into.
" I keep my voice mild the entire time, conversational, the way I'd discuss weather, because I learned a long time ago that men like Cole Beckett don't fear volume.
They fear the absence of it. "Tell me where I've misread the situation. "
He doesn't answer, which tells me everything I need to know.
"Here's what's interesting," I continue.
"I went looking into your situation the day after the auction.
Out of curiosity, mostly. I found a man named Voloshenko, who I understand has been quite patient with you for quite a while, all things considered.
I imagine you came here today partly because that pressure's gone quiet recently.
Suddenly nobody's calling. Suddenly the deadlines you've been living under for months just evaporated, and you don't know why. "
The color drains slowly out of his face.
"It was you," he says, ashen. “You paid him.”
"That I did." I don't bother dressing it up as a favor, because it wasn't one, not for him. "I bought your debt out from under him. Quietly. Which means Voloshenko's no longer a threat to you, I am."
"You can't just—" He stops, recalculating fast, trying to find the angle that still works. "Look, that's actually good news. That's even better, that means you're already invested in my situation, it makes sense for us to formalize—"
"I'm not invested in your situation," I say, and for the first time the warmth drops out of my voice entirely, replaced by something colder, the part of me that men usually know better than to provoke.
"I'm invested in Alivia. The debt was never a favor to you.
It was removing a threat to the only thing in this conversation that actually matters to me. "
He looks between me and Liv, finally, properly, like he's only just now remembering she's a person in the room and not a topic under discussion.
"Liv," he says, voice shifting, softer now, wheedling in a way that probably worked on her for years before tonight. "Come on. Talk to me. You know I wouldn't have done any of this if I had another option."
I watch her face. Watch the old instinct flicker there, the one that's spent six years protecting him from consequences, finding the soft landing even when he didn't deserve one.
Then I watch her set her jaw and stay exactly where she is.
I stand, because this is the part where I remove myself, where I make sure neither of them mistakes who actually holds the next move.
"He's not negotiating with me," I say, looking at Liv. "Whatever happens from here, that parts already settled. There's no version of this conversation where your brother gets anything from me directly. That door has closed."
Cole opens his mouth, closes it again, says nothing.
"This is your decision," I tell her, and I mean every part of it, the conversation, the outcome, whatever she wants to say to him next. "Whatever you need to say to him, you say it on your own terms. I'm not going to stand here and referee it for you."
I cross the room, press a kiss to her temple, quiet and brief, and feel her lean into it for just a second before straightening her spine again.
Then I walk into the bedroom and close the door behind me, leaving the two of them alone with six years of silence finally about to break wide open.
I don't listen at the door, though every instinct in me wants to.
I sit on the edge of the bed instead, hands loosely clasped, and wait, because she didn't ask me to fight this battle for her, and the entire point of buying that debt quietly, of removing every weapon from her brother's hands before he ever walked through that door, was so that when this conversation finally happened, it would happen on her terms, with her voice, and nobody else's.
I hear her voice rise through the wall a few minutes later, sharp and clear in a way I haven't heard from her yet, and my chest swells with a pride so fierce it nearly aches.
Whatever's happening in that room right now, she doesn't need me standing over her shoulder to survive it.
She just needed someone to finally clear the room of everyone who'd ever made her feel small enough to need permission.