Chapter 4
Akyl
I read her file in the study while my brothers negotiate with their chosen women elsewhere. Rovin is already completely enraptured by the disgraced senator’s daughter, which surprised me, in a good way. He needs a challenge.
Medical records. Employment history. Financial statements. The file is thin where family should be, her parents are listed as deceased, father from a heart attack just last year, mother from cancer three years previous, and thick where suffering should never be documented this extensively.
Three doctor referrals dismissed. Two specialists who declined to operate because she couldn't pay the surgical fee up front. One open referral that she hasn’t returned calls to. I make a note of the name, Dr Richard S. Hale.
Her employment record reads like a list of how hard she’s fought to keep going.
Temp placements, one after another since her father passed, office admin, data entry, reception cover, the kind of work that needs you upright and professional every single hour.
Nine jobs in three years. The gaps between them line up with her medical records, flares that lasted weeks, hospital trips that ended in a paracetamol prescription and a note telling her to go home and rest.
Rest. As though rest is something available to a woman with bills to pay.
Her financial records are the worst part.
Not because they are dramatic, but because they are relentlessly ordinary.
One current account that fluctuates between solvent and overdrawn.
Transactions at pharmacies for over-the-counter painkillers.
A regular payment to a medical charity that she maintained even when her account was in negative numbers, five dollars a month, donated to a fund for women who can't afford healthcare.
She was giving money she didn't have to help other women access treatment she couldn't afford for herself.
Her savings account is useless, and likely something that just came with her current account. The interest rate is below zero, and just as she manages to build a decent amount, it all goes to ob/gyn clinics that tell her the same thing.
Rest. Exercise. Healthy diet…
I set the file down and walk to the window.
The skyline shows a familiar territory. But tonight the city looks different.
Tonight, I am looking at it through the lens of a woman who has been living amongst the lights of it in pain for three years.
Who has been navigating its systems, being processed and dismissed and redirected and abandoned by the very structures designed to catch people before they fall.
She didn't fall. That's the thing that I keep returning to.
She should have fallen but she didn't. She found temp work. She rationed her medication. She maintained her rent, barely. She donated to charity. She got dressed tonight in a beautiful dress I know she can’t afford, and she stood in heels that are causing her visible pain.
Then she entered a room full of predators with a strategy and three non-negotiable conditions.
She didn't fall because she wouldn't let herself. The cost of that refusal is written in every line of her medical records and her financial statements.
There’s a kind of anger that lives right where strategy and feeling meet, and it’s a place I almost never go, because I’ve spent my whole life keeping the two apart.
Strategy is useful. Feeling gets you killed.
I learned that from my father, who was all feeling, all rage, all the violence he called love and that felt like living inside a storm.
I’m not my father. I’m the opposite of my father. I’m precision where he was chaos. I’m silence where he was noise. I’m control where he was destruction.
But right now, reading about a woman who has been systematically failed by every institution designed to help her, I feel something that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories I have constructed.
It’s not pity. Pity is condescension wearing a kind face. Pity looks down.
What I feel looks outward. At the doctors who dismissed her. At the one who offered help in exchange for a sum of money that was impossible for her to find. At a world that told a woman in agony that she was being dramatic and then left her to manage the pain alone.
Rage. Clean and cold and patient, the kind that doesn’t burn out. The kind that just settles in and stays.
I pick up my phone and call my personal physician.
"Dr. Asante. I need you to review a patient's medical file. Severe endometriosis with adenomyosis. I need the name of the best excision surgeon in the country and I need a consultation booked within the week."
"Mr. Mostovoi, I'll need the patient's consent before I can..."
"You'll have it. Do the research now. I want options by morning."
I end the call. I sit in the study with the file open on the desk in front of me, and I think about Katriona Bontoft standing by the fireplace in a blue dress, pressing her hand against her side when she thought no one was watching, and telling me she would like to live.
The phrasing stays with me. Not "I want to live.
" Not "I need help." She said "I would like to live," quiet and almost polite, like a woman who’s asked for what she needs and been told no so many times that she’s stopped demanding her own survival and started treating it like a thing she’s allowed to prefer.
I would like to live.
As though living is something she is requesting permission for.
I close the file and walk downstairs to the reception room. It’s emptier now. Men and women, including my brothers, have moved off to various smaller rooms to negotiate their terms, payments, expectations. The broker sees me and straightens, his tablet ready.
"Mr. Mostovoi. Have you made a selection? I have the Koralev girl available for private conversation. Excellent pedigree, very cooperative..."
"Katriona Bontoft."
He pauses. "Ms. Bontoft. She's... an unusual choice, if I may say, her background is not what we typically..."
"Process the arrangement."
"Sir, her medical situation is quite complex. There may be concerns about viability regarding..."
"If you finish that sentence, Lionel, you and I are going to have a different kind of conversation."
He stops. He makes a note on his tablet.
"The financial terms?" he asks, after a suitable pause.
"Full medical coverage. Immediately. Surgery, specialists, ongoing care, everything she needs, arranged and paid for before the wedding date is set. Everything else standard. Whatever Rovin paid, match it."
"That's... extremely generous for a candidate of her profile."
I look at him, and whatever he sees in my eyes makes the professional mask slip for a moment, revealing the ordinary, frightened man underneath.
"She's mine," I say. "Process it."
I leave the broker and walk back toward the reception room. On the way, I pass the hallway where I first heard her voice, calm and warm and dry, making a terrified woman laugh before the biggest night of her life.
She was being kind because someone near her was scared and she couldn't help herself.
In a room full of greed and ambition and fear, she was the only person who looked at someone else's suffering and reached for it.
I have built empires with my brothers. I have destroyed competitors. I have sat in rooms where the air itself felt dangerous and never once lost control.
And this woman, this underpaid, overworked, medically abandoned woman who gives five dollars a month to a charity she can't afford, has cracked something open in me that I’m not entirely sure I know how to close again.
I find her by the fireplace. She is standing exactly where I left her, her posture perfect, her expression composed, her left hand pressed against her hip in that brief, controlled gesture that tells me the pain has worsened.
"Come with me," I say. "We should talk privately."
She looks at me. Her eyes are the color of an overcast sea, grey and green and steady.
"Okay," she says.