Chapter Rovin
Rovin
I take her to a study on the second floor.
The room is paneled in dark wood, the shelves lined with leather-bound volumes that have never been read and a desk that gleams with the patina of age and careful maintenance.
Two leather armchairs face each other across a low table.
A bottle of cognac sits on a tray with two glasses.
I don't pour. Neither does she.
Claudia sits in the chair across from me with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, and I am struck, not for the first time tonight, by the strangeness of this situation.
In three years of attending these dinners, no woman has ever walked up to me and announced her intentions.
No woman has ever told me, in plain language, why she wanted me.
No woman has ever sat across from me without a broker between us and treated the conversation as an equal exchange.
For some insane reason that’s beyond my comprehension, it feels right.
"I’ll be direct," I say. "What you are proposing is permanent. Marriage in my family is not a contract that can be renegotiated. It is a commitment enforced by loyalty, expectation, and, if necessary, less pleasant mechanisms. There is no divorce. There is no separation. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"You will live in my household. You will carry my name. You will be expected to produce heirs. Soon."
The word hangs between us. Heirs. The clinical frame of it, the transactional surface, doesn't disguise what lives underneath.
I want children. I want a son who will grow up in the world I've built and inherit it.
I want a daughter who will be fierce and protected and impossible to destroy.
I want a family that is mine in every sense of the word, permanent and unbreakable.
Claudia's expression doesn't change, but her fingers tighten slightly in her lap. "I understand the expectation."
"You're twenty-five."
"Yes."
"You have years ahead of you. Other options. Why choose this now?"
"Because I don't have other options. Not real ones.
My name is ruined in the legitimate world.
Every job application, every introduction, every conversation starts and ends with my father's scandal.
I can spend the next decade trying to rebuild a reputation that other people control, or I can build something new.
Something that doesn't depend on public opinion. "
"Something that depends on me."
"Depends on us." She meets my eyes. "I'm not looking for a protector, Rovin.
I'm not looking to be kept. I'm looking for a partnership with a man whose power is real and whose family is permanent.
I am offering myself as a wife, as a mother to your children, and as someone who understands exactly what she's walking into. "
She stops there, but I can see there’s more.
I lean forward. The space between our chairs is perhaps four feet, and I feel every inch of it like a physical thing, a distance I want to close.
"What do you know about me?" I ask. "Specifically."
"I know you run the operations for the Mostovoi family. I know your wealth is estimated at over six hundred million, though I suspect the real number is higher. I know you have four brothers, two of whom I’ve seen tonight, and that you are the eldest and the decision-maker.
I know your mother died when you were twelve and your father when you were twenty-three.
I know you do not tolerate disloyalty and that the consequences for it are severe. "
She pauses, and when she continues, her voice is different. Lower. More intimate.
"I know you bid forty thousand dollars on a painting at a charity auction three years ago and never collected it. I know you sit in the back of every room you enter and you leave before the end. I know you have been watching me tonight the same way I have been watching you for six years."
There it is.
Six years.
The number lands in my psyche like a fist on a table top. She has been watching me for six years. While I was building empires and attending dinners and dismissing candidate after candidate, this woman was watching me from across rooms, collecting information and waiting.
She chose me before I knew she existed.
It takes me a moment to identify the feeling that unfurls in my chest, because it’s not an emotion I experience often. It is the feeling of being wanted, specifically and deliberately, by someone who has considered her options and decided that I am not one of them.
I am the only one.
"Stand up," I say.
She stands. Her movement is fluid and unhesitant, and she watches me with those amber-hued eyes, waiting.
I stand, and move until I am near enough to see the faint pulse in her throat, the tiny catch in her breathing that she can’t entirely control. She doesn't step back.
"If I choose you," I say, "you will belong to me. Fully. Publicly. Privately. There will be no half measures."
"I don't want half measures."
"You will sleep in my bed. Tonight. You will sit beside me in every room I enter, and everyone in that room will know you are mine."
Her chin lifts. Her eyes blaze. "That's what I came here for."
I raise my hand. I touch her jaw, just the tips of my fingers against the line of it, tilting her face toward the light. Her skin is warm and impossibly soft, and the contact sends electric through my blood.
She doesn't flinch. She leans into the touch, fractionally, just enough for me to feel the pressure of her jaw against my fingers.
"The bidding process is a formality," I say. "I will outbid everyone in this building without effort. But I'm telling you now, before any of that happens, that if I take you home tonight, you are not leaving."
"I know."
"Say it."
"If you take me home tonight, I'm not leaving."
I brush my thumb across her lower lip, lightly smearing the lipstick there. Her breath catches, and this time she lets me hear it.
"Wait here," I say. "I'll handle the broker."
I leave the room. The walk downstairs takes forty seconds, and in those forty seconds, I think about the women I've dismissed over the past three years. Beautiful women. Well-connected women. Women who would have been perfectly adequate wives and mothers and trophies on my arm.
None of them walked across a room to claim me.
None of them told me the truth about why they wanted me.
None of them said children the way Claudia Hartley said it, with hunger disguised as composure.
It doesn’t take a PhD to decipher that she wants a family because she wants to belong to something that won't abandon her when the chips are down.
Six years?
The broker is in the reception room, managing the remaining negotiations. He sees me coming and straightens, his tablet clutched to his chest.
"Mr. Mostovoi. Have you made a selection? I have several excellent candidates still available for private conversation. The Koralev girl is particularly—"
"Claudia Hartley," I say. "She's mine. Process the arrangement."
"Mr. Mostovoi, Ms. Hartley was not formally vetted through our standard—"
"I said process it."
I don’t know if it’s the sharp tone in my voice or the hard look in my eyes, but he stops talking. This is the correct response.
"And the financial terms?" he asks, quieter now.
"Whatever the highest bid would have been tonight, I'll triple it."
His eyebrows climb. He makes a note on his tablet. "I'll prepare the paperwork."
I turn and walk back upstairs. On the landing, I pass Akyl, who is leaning against the banister with a glass of wine and an expression of genuine curiosity.
"The Hartley girl," he says. "Really."
"Her name is Claudia."
Akyl tilts his head. Studies me. "You're different."
"I'm the same."
"No." He smiles, and for once it is without edges. "You're not. You should see your face right now, brother."
I don't ask him what he sees. I already know. He sees what I am only now beginning to understand.
I climb the stairs, and Claudia is standing exactly where I left her, by the window, looking out at the grounds.
She turns when I enter.
"It's done," I say. "You're coming with me."