Chapter 4
Claudia
The auction dinner is held in a private house just outside the city. A car collects me at seven. The driver doesn't speak.
My dress is black. Floor-length, high-necked, long-sleeved, and backless.
Grace chose it. She said the arrangement dinner aesthetic is deliberate modesty with one calculated reveal.
The back of the dress opens to just below my waist, a clean line of bare skin that says: I know what I'm offering, and I'm choosing to show you just enough.
My hair is down. Rovin's preference, according to the women who have observed him, is minimal artifice. He wants to see the woman, not the construction.
Inside, the house is exquisite. Low lighting, heavy drapes, furniture that looks older than my father’s father.
The air smells like beeswax candles and freesias, with a sharper scent underneath.
Cigar smoke, I realize. There are fewer people than I expected.
The entrance hall is staffed by two men in dark suits who check my name against a list on a tablet, then escort me through double doors into a long reception room.
Crystal glasses on a sideboard. White orchids in low vases.
A fire burning in a marble fireplace despite the mild weather outside.
Six women are already here. Two blondes, one dark-haired, one redhead, two brunettes. All beautiful. All polished to perfection.
I don't try to look like I belong. I walk to the sideboard, pour myself a glass of water, and stand by the fireplace where the light is warmest and the angle gives me a clear view of the door.
I wait.
I am very good at waiting. Six years of watching Rovin Mostovoi from across rooms has taught me patience. So has the last six months of watching my life disintegrate and knowing that the only way through was forward.
The doors open again at seven forty-five.
Three men enter. I don't recognize them. They are older, heavyset, wearing wealth like armor. They scan the room with the efficiency of men who are used to assessing value quickly. One of them looks at me, pauses, and moves on.
At seven fifty, two more men arrive. Younger. One looks nervous.
At seven fifty-five, the energy in the room changes.
I feel it before I see him. A shift in the air, like the barometric pressure dropping before a storm.
The women near the door straighten. One of the men already in the room adjusts his cufflinks, a gesture so small it's almost invisible, but I recognize it.
It's the gesture men make when they want to appear composed in front of someone who unsettles them.
Rovin Mostovoi walks into the room, and everything else falls away.
He is exactly as I remember, and nothing like I remember, because memory can’t hold the reality of him.
He is tall, broad through the shoulders, narrow through the waist. His suit is charcoal, impeccably cut, with a white shirt underneath and no tie.
His hair is dark and cropped close to his skull, and his jaw is the kind of angular that makes you think of cut glass, pretty and deadly.
His eyes find the room. They move across it, systematic and unhurried, touching each face for a fraction of a second before moving to the next. It is a military assessment performed in the guise of a social entrance.
Those eyes reach me.
They stop.
I don't know how long he looks at me. It could be one second or five. His face gives away nothing. His body doesn't shift, doesn't lean, doesn't signal. But his gaze stays, and staying is its own kind of statement.
Then he moves past me and walks to the far side of the room, where a man I recognize as a broker steps forward to greet him. They exchange words I can't hear. Rovin accepts a glass of dark liquid, whiskey or cognac, but doesn't drink from it.
Behind him, another man enters. Leaner, sharper-featured, with a smile that moves across the room like a blade. Akyl Mostovoi. The second brother. He is wearing a navy suit and looking at the women in the room with the kind of unabashed assessment that would be offensive from anyone less dangerous.
Akyl's eyes find me too, and unlike Rovin, he lets his interest show. One eyebrow lifts. The corner of his mouth moves.
I set down my water glass. The evening is structured, Grace told me, in phases. First, the reception. Then dinner, seated at a long table with assigned positions designed to create proximity between potential matches. After dinner, private conversations. Offers. Negotiations. Bidding.
I don't intend to wait for the assigned seating.
The broker is speaking to Rovin, gesturing toward the blonde on the far side of the room. Rovin listens without expression. His glass sits untouched in his hand.
I cross the room.
The distance between the fireplace and Rovin Mostovoi is perhaps twenty feet, and I cover it in the time it takes for the broker to notice me approaching and for his sentence to die in his mouth.
Rovin turns his head. Not his body. Just his head, tracking my movement the way a predator tracks motion in its periphery.
I stop three feet from him. Close enough to be deliberate. Far enough to be polite.
"Mr. Mostovoi," I say. My voice is steady. "My name is Claudia Hartley. I'd like five minutes of your time before the formal proceedings begin."
The broker stares at me. This is not how the evening works. Women don’t approach men directly. Women are presented, curated, offered. The whole system depends on a choreography that I’ve just shamefully broken. The thought sends a thrill through me.
Rovin looks at me. His eyes are dark, nearly black in the low light, and they study my face with an attention that feels almost physical. Like being touched by someone who knows exactly how much pressure to apply.
"Hartley," he says. His voice is low, accented, unhurried. "The politician's daughter."
"The former politician's daughter," I correct. "He doesn't hold the title anymore."
The corner of his mouth twitches upwards. If he were anyone else, I would call it amusement.
He turns to the broker. "I’ll catch up with you later, Lionel."
The broker hesitates, then retreats. Rovin doesn’t watch him go.
His attention stays on me, total and undivided, and I understand suddenly why the women who have faced this before left in tears.
Being the focus of Rovin Mostovoi's full attention is like standing in a searchlight. There’s nowhere to hide.
I don't want to hide.
"Five minutes," he says.
"You're attending this dinner to find a wife."
His chin lifts slightly. A fraction of an inch, but I'm watching closely enough to catch it. "You're well informed."
"I'm thorough. You've attended two previous dinners and left without choosing anyone. You're looking for something specific, and you haven't found it yet."
"And you believe you are what I'm looking for?" One perfectly arched eyebrow rises up his forehead. He isn’t used to being addressed so directly. That sends another thrill through me.
"I believe I'm the only woman in this room who walked in knowing exactly who she wanted and why."
The silence between us is dense and warm. Around us, the room continues its careful choreography. Glasses clink. Voices murmur. A woman laughs, soft and practiced. None of it reaches the space between Rovin and me.
"Why me?" he asks.
I’ve rehearsed this answer. I have stood in front of my bathroom mirror and said these words a dozen times, testing them for weakness, for hesitation, for any crack that might let him see uncertainty.
But standing in front of him now, the rehearsed version feels wrong. It feels polished in the way he apparently dislikes. Constructed. So I drop it. I tell him the truth.
"Because you can't be destroyed," I say.
"My father was powerful, and they dismantled him in six days.
Headlines, investigations, public opinion.
He existed at the mercy of people who could withdraw their approval.
You don't. You are the only man I've ever watched who doesn't depend on anyone else's permission to exist."
His eyes narrow, infinitesimally. I keep going.
"I watched my family's name become worthless overnight. I am not interested in building a life on a foundation that someone else can pull out from under me. I want permanence. I want a name that cannot be taken. And I want to give that name to children who will inherit something unbreakable."
I watch the ripples of my words move across Rovin's face. His jaw tightens. His gaze drops, for one instant, from my eyes to my mouth, then lower, to the line of my throat that disappears beneath the black silk of my dress, then back up.
"You're very direct," he says.
"I was raised in politics. I've seen what indirectness costs." I feel calm. The kind of calm that happens right before something big smashes into your life from a place you don’t expect. Panic tries to claw a warning into my psyche, but I’m too amped to listen to it.
"And you came here tonight specifically for me?" I have his absolute attention now. I know it. I feel it.
"Yes." I keep my eyes on his. I don’t even twitch, because the loss of that connection right now feels like it would destroy what chance I have.
"You know what I am?" he asks, narrowing his eyes and turning his head slightly.
I smile then. "I know exactly what you are, Rovin Mostovoi."
He takes a step closer. The distance between us shrinks from three feet to two, and I can smell him now. Clean, cold air and sandalwood, with a darker, amber-like note underneath.
"The other women here," he says, his voice lower now, pitched for my ears only, "have been vetted for months. Their families have been researched. Their medical histories reviewed. Their backgrounds are impeccable."
"Their backgrounds are constructed,” I argue in a tone low enough to match his. “Mine is real."
"Your background is a scandal."
"My background is proof that I know what it feels like to lose everything. And I'm standing in front of you anyway. Not because I have nowhere else to go, but because this is where I choose to be." I gesture to the women around us. “How many of these chose to be here tonight?”
He studies me for a long moment. I hold perfectly still under his gaze and let him look.
Let him see the intelligence Grace told me to hide and the ambition my mother told me was unladylike and the hunger that has lived in the pit of my stomach since I was nineteen years old and watched this man walk into a room and change the gravity of it.
"Your five minutes are up," he says.
I smile in return. What else can I do?
"Sit beside me at dinner."
It isn't a request. I nod once and step back, giving him the space to turn away first. He does, slowly, and walks toward the dining room without looking back.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, where heat has coiled itself into a knot, and I follow.