Chapter 17
Rovin
Greta has been cooking since three in the afternoon, filling the kitchen and the downstairs hallway with garlic and rosemary.
Dinner for ten. My brothers and their women gathered around my table for the first time since the auction, and the awareness that this is what I asked for. What I demanded. Legacy. Family. The table used by more than just me.
I'm adjusting my cufflinks in the hallway mirror when Claudia comes downstairs.
She's wearing a dark green dress, fitted, not formal but deliberate, with her hair down the way I like it.
"You're staring," she says.
"I'm observing."
"You're staring." She stops in front of me and straightens my collar, a small, possessive gesture that she's begun doing without thinking. I let her. I more than let her. I lean into it.
"Are you nervous?" I ask.
She gives me a look that is pure Claudia, level and faintly amused. "Should I be?"
"My brothers can be a lot, collectively."
"I've met them individually. I survived."
"Individually is different. Together, they feed off each other. Volody gets louder. Akyl gets sharper. Serik and Dayan start competing for who can be the most irritating."
"Sounds like a family. Besides, there’s five women now to balance things out."
She says it simply, without weight, but I hear the thing underneath it.
The thing she doesn't say, which is that she hasn't had a real family dinner since before her father's indictment.
That the concept of people gathered around a table because they want to be there, rather than because cameras are watching, is something she lost and is quietly hungry to find again.
I take her hand. Her fingers close around mine with the easy certainty that has begun defining us.
"They'll love you," I say.
"They already love me. Volody told me so. Twice."
"Volody tells everyone he loves them. It doesn't mean what it means when I say it."
She looks up at me. Her eyes, that deep whiskey gold, go soft at the edges. She rises on her toes and presses a kiss to the corner of my jaw, and it takes more discipline than I'm comfortable admitting to not carry her back upstairs.
The doorbell saves us.
Akyl arrives first. It's a trait we share, this need to occupy a space before anyone else, to read the room and position accordingly.
He comes through the front door with his hand on the small of Katriona's back, guiding her forward with the subtle proprietary pressure I recognize because I do the same thing with Claudia.
Katriona is dark-haired, pale-skinned, quiet in the way that conceals rather than reveals. She was at the auction dinner, seated two places from Akyl, and I remember watching him watch her. She has sharp cheekbones and careful eyes.
"Brother." Akyl clasps my hand. His grip is firm, his expression neutral, but there's something different in the way he's carrying himself. Lighter, maybe. Or heavier, in a way that grounds him rather than weighs him down.
"Katriona," I say. "Welcome."
"Thank you." Her voice is low, measured. She looks at me with the calculation of someone assessing risk. Then her gaze shifts to Claudia, and recognition settles over her features.
Claudia extends her hand. "I'm Claudia."
"I know." Katriona takes it. Their handshake lasts a beat longer than necessary. "It’s nice to meet you."
Serik and Juliette arrive next, and the energy shifts.
Serik enters rooms the way he does everything, with a quiet competence that doesn't demand attention but commands it anyway.
He's the middle brother, the fulcrum, the one who balances Akyl's sharpness and Volody's chaos with a steadiness that the family relies on more than we acknowledge.
Juliette is beside him, and she is the first surprise of the evening.
She's tall, blonde, striking, and she moves with the confidence of someone who has decided that being afraid of things is a waste of time.
She scans the entrance hall with open curiosity, taking in the art, the ceilings, the security system's discreet blinking light above the door.
"This is nicer than Serik's place," she says.
"Everything is nicer than Serik's place," Volody announces from behind them, and I didn't hear the door open again, which means he let himself in through the back entrance because he has never once in his life used a front door when a more inconvenient option existed.
He fills the hallway immediately. Volody has always been the loudest brother, the largest presence, the one who walks into a room and reshapes it around his energy.
Beside him, with her hand in his, is Liv.
The redhead. She was at the auction dinner, seated near Akyl, and I remember the way she laughed behind her hand at something my brother said.
She isn’t laughing now. She's looking at the gathered women with an expression that I recognize from my years of reading rooms.
Uncertainty. Not about Volody, not about the situation in the broad strokes, but about whether she belongs here. Whether the other women will accept her or whether this dinner will confirm what some part of her suspects, that she's different from them, separate, less.
Claudia sees it before I do. She always does.
"Liv," she says, stepping forward with the warm, deliberate grace that I've watched her deploy at political functions and charity galas, the social skill that was trained into her and that she now uses for her own purposes rather than her father's.
"I'm so glad you're here. Come on in, and let me show you the house. The library's my favorite part."
She takes Liv's arm with a naturalness that makes it look unrehearsed, and Liv's shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. Volody catches my eye and gives me a look that says, very clearly, keep her.
As if I needed the instruction.
Dayan arrives last. He's holding the door open for a woman I haven't met, and his hand is hovering near her elbow without quite touching it.
The woman is Amelia Foxhall, a British aristocrat’s daughter who I was surprised to see at the auction. She's smaller than the others, with brown hair cut around her shoulders, and a face that is striking in its expressiveness.
"Sorry we're late," Dayan says. His expression is the same controlled mask he always wears, but his voice has a texture to it that I haven't heard before.
"You're not late," I say. "You're Dayan. This is on time for you."
Amelia looks at me with the same careful assessment I've received from every woman tonight. I wonder what she sees. A man in an expensive shirt and tailored trousers, with a controlled expression and a reputation that precedes him like a weather warning.
"Mr. Mostovoi," she says. "Thank you for having us."
"Rovin," I correct. "If you're going to be family, we drop the formalities."
The word family changes the atmosphere in the room.
I feel it ripple through my brothers, through the women, through Claudia, who has returned from her house tour with Liv and is standing near the kitchen entrance with one hand resting on the doorframe.
She heard it. She's watching me with that knowing expression, the one that says she can see the man underneath the discipline, and she loves what she finds there.
We move to the dining room.
Greta has outdone herself. The table is set for ten, which is more people than have ever sat at it simultaneously.
White linen, heavy silverware, candles in low holders that cast warm, shifting light across the walls.
The food is already on the table, family style, because I told Greta I didn't want courses.
I didn't want the formality of served plates, the choreography of waitstaff, the performance of a meal.
I wanted a table where people pass dishes to each other and reach across for bread and argue about wine.
I wanted a family dinner. An actual one.
The seating arranges itself organically, which is its own kind of revelation.
At the auction dinners, placement is strategic.
Here, my brothers drift toward their habitual positions.
Akyl to my right. Volody at the far end, because he needs space the way fire needs oxygen.
Dayan in the middle, quiet and watchful.
Serik beside Volody, where he can moderate the chaos.
The women settle beside their men, and then something happens that I didn't anticipate.
Juliette picks up the wine bottle and pours for Katriona, who is seated next to her. "Red okay?" she asks.
Katriona nods. "Thank you."
"I'm Juliette, by the way. Serik's." She says Serik's with a directness that makes my brother look at her with visible surprise. She catches his expression and shrugs. "What?” she asks. “I am. Let's not pretend we're at a networking event."
"I like her," Claudia says from beside me, and she says it to the table, not to me.
Juliette raises her glass toward Claudia. "Likewise. You're the one who walked up to Rovin at the dinner and told him you were choosing him? You’ve got brass…"
"That's a generous summary. I believe the word 'negotiation' was involved," I counter.
"Negotiation," Akyl repeats with amusement. "Is that what we're calling it?"
"What would you call it?" Claudia asks.
"A hostile takeover."
The table laughs. All of it, brothers and women, and the sound fills the dining room in a way that I have never heard it filled.
I've had meetings in this room. Business dinners. Conversations with men who smiled with their mouths and calculated with their eyes. I have never heard laughter like this in these walls. I didn’t know how much I needed it.