Bred By the Highest Bidder (Auctioned to the BRATVA #1)

Chapter 1

Claudia

The photograph has been on every screen in the city for six days.

Me, standing behind my father at the podium while the cameras devoured us.

My dress was tailored and pressed to perfection.

My posture was perfect. My make up was natural and flawless, my smile befitting the topic my father was addressing, my hair pinned back just right, and none of it mattered, because the headline wasn't about composure.

HARTLEY'S DAUGHTER KNEW. SOURCES CONFIRM CLAUDIA ATTENDED THREE DINNERS WITH SHELL COMPANY EXECUTIVES.

I didn't know. But the truth is quieter than a headline, and nobody has ever gotten famous being quiet.

The café I'm sitting in now is the kind of place my mother would have called beneath us six months ago.

Formica tables, weak coffee, a window streaked with old rain.

I chose it because nobody here reads the Financial Times.

Nobody here cares about Edward Hartley or his fall from grace or his daughter's alleged complicity in a bribery network that stretched from the senate to places best left unsaid.

My phone buzzes. I flip it over without looking.

It will be my mother, who has relocated to my aunt's house in the country and communicates exclusively through guilt.

Or it will be another journalist who somehow got my new number.

Or it will be one of the friends who stopped calling in the first weeks and now reach out only when they want to sell the story.

I take a sip of the terrible coffee and open the folder I brought.

Inside is a single printed page. Cream cardstock, heavy weight, embossed at the top with a monogram I don't recognize. The text is sparse. A date. An address. A dress code. And one line at the bottom, printed in ink so dark it looks wet:

By invitation only. All bidding final.

I found it three weeks ago, tucked inside a book at a charity shop near to the tiny studio apartment I rent now.

A book about Russian economic policy that someone had clearly used as a filing cabinet.

The invitation was wedged between pages one hundred and twelve and one hundred and thirteen, forgotten or deliberately hidden.

I almost threw it away. Then I Googled the address.

The building is owned by a holding company registered in Cyprus. The holding company is a subsidiary of another holding company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Three layers deep, the trail ends at a name I recognized.

Mostovoi.

I have known about the Mostovoi family since I was nineteen, when my father hosted a private fundraiser and five men walked into the room and every other man in it went still.

My father shook the eldest man's hand with both of his own.

The man accepted the handshake the way a king accepts tribute, with patience and absolute authority.

I asked my father afterward who they were. He told me to forget I'd seen them.

I didn't forget.

Over the next six years, I collected information the way other women collected shoes.

Rovin Mostovoi, the eldest son of Ivor Mostovoi, deceased.

Thirty-five now. Built like something carved from a material harder than stone.

Dark hair, close-cropped. Eyes that saw everything and revealed nothing.

He ran the family's East coast operations, the legitimate ones on paper, the rest in shadow.

He attended galas and fundraisers and sat in the back of rooms where laws were made, and nobody ever asked him to leave, because asking Rovin Mostovoi to leave a room was the same as asking him to remember your name.

I watched him from across the ballrooms, the tables, the galas.

From the edges of political dinners. Once, from three tables away at a charity auction where he bid forty thousand dollars on a painting he never picked up.

He didn't want the painting. He wanted everyone in the room to know he could have whatever he wanted and walk away from it without caring.

That night, I went home and couldn't sleep. I lay in my bed in my father's townhouse, stared at the ceiling, and thought about what it would feel like to be the kind of powerful. The kind that couldn’t be taken away. I touched myself that night, imagining his hands on me, his mouth…

My father's power was borrowed. It depended on votes, on public opinion, on reputation that was more fragile than a single pane of glass. One investigation, and all of it collapsed like wet paper.

Rovin Mostovoi's power didn't depend on anyone's opinion. It was structural. Built into the bones of things.

I want that. I have wanted it for years, and I have wanted him for years.

The invitation in my folder is six months old. The dinner it references has already happened. But the format, the monogram, the phrasing, all of it points to a recurring event.

I have spent three weeks confirming this.

Phone calls made from burner mobiles. Conversations with a woman named Petra who works the door at a club that doesn't officially exist. Two hundred dollars slipped to a driver who once worked for the Mostovoi household. And Grace. The woman my father fired and framed because she wouldn’t sleep with him.

I didn’t know about that either. She married someone who knows all about these dinners.

The next one is in nine days.

Rovin Mostovoi will be there. And Grace said that this time, he is looking for a wife.

I set down my coffee and look at the invitation again. I think about my father's face on the news, grey and diminished, and I think about my own face in that photograph, composed and complicit in something I had no part of.

I'm done being someone else's collateral damage. Grace made it clear why women attend these dinners. They are a polite cover for what’s really happening; an auction. I don’t care. I’ve made my peace with it.

I pick up my phone and call Grace.

"It's Claudia," I say. "I need a seat at the dinner."