Bred By the Ruthless Bidder (Auctioned to the BRATVA #2)

Chapter 1

Katriona

The painkillers are wearing off.

I can feel it happening in layers like a tide going out. First the dull warmth in my lower back fades, then the tightness returns to my pelvis, then the cramping starts, low and insistent.

I have forty-five minutes before it gets bad. Maybe an hour if I stay very still and breathe through it the way the physio taught me three years ago, back when I could still afford a physio.

Only I can’t stay still tonight. Tonight, I have to stand in four-inch heels in a room full of the most dangerous men in the whole world and convince one of them to marry me.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

I lean closer to the bathroom mirror and finish my eyeliner with a hand that is steady through sheer force of will.

The face looking back at me is thinner than it was six months ago.

Sharper at the cheekbones, darker under the eyes.

I've lost weight I couldn't afford to lose because eating has become a negotiation with my own body.

A careful calculation of what will stay down and what will send me to the bathroom floor, vomiting with bone-racking pain.

The dress helps. Grace bought it for me.

Midnight blue, long-sleeved, high-necked, fitted close enough to suggest a figure without revealing how much of it has been eaten away by years of inflammation and exhaustion.

The fabric is heavy, drapey silk. The kind that holds its shape fluidly regardless of what's happening underneath it.

My phone buzzes on the counter. I glance at it. Grace.

"Car's five minutes away. How are you feeling?"

I text back: "Spectacular. Ready to be sold to the highest bidder like a prize cow at a country fair."

Three dots appear. Then: "You're more like a racehorse. Far more expensive and infinitely more temperamental."

I smile, and the expression feels foreign on my face.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she sends, with an emoji of a heart to soften the blow.

I have no choice. At least, I don’t feel like I do. And when Grace mentioned she was helping someone get into the auction, my pulse rate spiked… I could do that too… I could finally get what I need if I just marry someone.

“Yes.”

It’s been three years since the diagnosis became undeniable.

Three years since a doctor with kind eyes and a cluttered desk told me I had severe endometriosis with adenomyosis, that it had spread aggressively through my pelvic cavity, that I needed specialist excision surgery, and that it would cost somewhere around sixty-five thousand dollars.

I remember laughing. I remember the sound of it in that small office, high and bright and completely unhinged, because I was earning twenty-two thousand a year as an administrative assistant and my savings account contained four hundred and twelve dollars.

Since then, I’ve been rationing medication.

Skipping treatments. Working double shifts at a temp agency while my body slowly turned against me.

I’ve gotten frighteningly good at hiding it.

Standing when I want to drop to the floor.

Smiling when I want to scream. Saying "fine, thank you," when someone asks, because the truth takes more energy than I have and nobody really wants to hear it anyway.

The doctors I could afford told me I was being dramatic. One of them, a man whose name I’ve got filed away for later, told me the pain was in my head and suggested I try yoga.

Another offered to help me, privately, for free. His hand on my knee while he said it. His smile was professional, and absolutely predatory.

I walked out. I didn’t report him. I didn’t have the energy, and anyway I knew nothing would come of it. Women like me, with no money and no leverage, learn that pretty fast.

Grace is the one who told me about the dinners. The Orlov’s and Bontoft’s have worked together in the past, but after my father died, my uncle took over, and everything seemed to just…disappear. Saoirse Orlova introduced me to Grace at my father’s funeral, and somehow, we became friends.

It was after she saw me in pain during lunch that she brought up the auction dinners. I’d let my mask slip when a sudden flare threatened to tear me apart from the inside.

She told me there is an auction dinner where women with specific qualities are presented to men who have specific needs. A marriage market dressed in silk and candlelight, but a market nonetheless.

"It's not what you think," she’d said once we got back to my apartment.

She was sitting on the edge of my bathtub, holding my hair back for me, while I threw up for the third time.

"These aren't mail-order brides. These are negotiations.

The women have power too, if they're clever enough to use it. "

"And if they're not clever enough?"

"Then they end up married to very rich men and living in very large houses and being very well looked after. There are worse fates, Kat."

"Being looked after isn't the same as being well,” I’d argued. Because that’s what I want most. To be healthy and pain-free and live as normal a life as any other woman.

"No," she agreed. "But it's closer to it than dying in agony in a rented apartment because the cost of healthcare outweighs the average income."

She wasn't wrong. That's the thing about Grace. She’s never wrong and far more intelligent than people give her credit for. Apart from her husband, who utterly worships her and makes sure everyone knows how brilliant she is. I’d been sighing dreamily about finding a man like that when another wave of nausea washed over me.

The car arrives as I take one last look in the mirror.

I slip my feet into the heels, feeling the immediate shift of pressure through my pelvis.

I take another pain killer. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to stand in these for approximately two hours before the pain becomes visible. Two hours should be enough.

In the back of the car, I open the folder Grace gave me. Inside are photographs, names, financial summaries. Men from various families. All Bratva.

But one name catches my eye.

Mostovoi.

There are five of them. A family that operates in the space between legitimate business and the kind of power that doesn't require legitimacy.

I've done my research. Three weeks of it, late at night, with my laptop balanced on my knees and a hot water bottle pressed against my stomach because the cramping is always worse after midnight.

I know their names, their ages, their estimated net worth.

I know which properties they own, which politicians they've purchased, and which businessmen owe them favors.

Rovin, the eldest, is rumored to be selecting a wife tonight. And if that’s the case, his brothers will likely follow. At least that’s what Grace thinks.

I'm not here for romance or passion or a love story worthy of a Netflix deal.

I'm here because there’s a surgery that will stop my body from destroying itself, and I can’t afford it, but the men at this dinner can.

That's the transaction. My body, my loyalty, my future fertility, in exchange for the medical care that will allow me to have a future worth living at all.

I close the folder. The cramp tightens in my lower stomach and I press my hand flat against it, breathing through the pulse of it.

The car moves through the city, headlights slicing through the drizzle, and I watch the wet streets blur past. I’d laugh at how ludicrous this was if it weren’t for the wire of desperation threaded through my veins.

What scares me is dying at twenty-six with nothing to show for it except a filing cabinet of medical records and a body that betrayed me before I ever got the chance to use it properly.

If men like the Mostovoi’s want wives badly enough to buy them, then I intend to make myself invaluable.