Chapter 3
Amelia
Lionel Pietty finds me by the coat check, and I know before he opens his mouth that something has already happened to me without my permission.
He's a small man with a smile like a wet handshake. He holds a cream envelope between two fingers the way a waiter holds a bill he's certain you can't afford.
"Miss Foxhall." My name in his mouth sounds like it's already been sold. "Congratulations are in order."
"Are they?"
"You've had an offer." He pauses, savoring it, and I want to slap the silence out of him. "Accepted, I should say. The matter's settled."
The floor does something strange under my feet. "Settled?"
"There was no negotiation." He says it like it's a compliment to me. "Highly unusual. He simply named a figure and closed the matter. I've never seen the like."
I take the envelope because my hand reaches for it before my brain has even processed. The wax is the color of dried blood. There's a signet pressed into it, some crest I don't recognize, sharp-edged and old.
I think of Harriet's voice. Negotiations. I'd pictured a conversation. A meeting. Something with a table and two chairs and at least the dignity of being asked.
Nobody asked me anything.
"I didn't agree to anything," I say.
"You agreed to attend." Pietty's smile doesn't move. "The terms were on the contract you signed at the door, Miss Foxhall. I'd assumed a woman of your background reads what she signs."
My stomach drops through the floor and keeps going.
I’m furious. The prickle of it is somewhere under the cold spreading up my arms, but it's tangled up with something else, something hot and curious that I don't like the uncertainty of.
Because I know whose seal this is. I watched him press his ring into the wax with his eyes on me the whole time, like the wax was incidental and I was the thing he was actually sealing.
The ominous one. The silent one The one in the corner who didn't smile.
The one I couldn't stop looking at.
"Where is he?" My voice comes out steadier than I thought it would.
Pietty tilts his head toward the far doors. "He'd like to speak with you. Privately." A beat. "You may refuse, of course. The arrangement allows for one withdrawal, no questions asked. He insisted on that clause himself."
That stops me.
A man pays a sum that makes Pietty's eyes shine, doesn't haggle, doesn't blink, and then builds me a door out. Insists on it. Himself.
What kind of man buys a woman and then hands her a key to her escape?
I should take the key. Any sane woman takes the key, calls a car, books a flight home, and tells this story at dinner parties for the rest of her life with a glass of wine in her hand and a safe distance behind her.
I fold the envelope into my palm.
"Show me," I say, and I follow Lionel Pietty towards what could well end up being my future. Or my end…
Fuck.
He's standing in a smaller room off the main hall, by a window, exactly the way he stood all night.
Up close he's worse, or better, I haven't decided which word is right. There's a stillness to him that most men fake and can't hold past the first drink. This isn't fake. He holds it like it costs him nothing, like silence is his first language, and the rest of us are the ones with the accent.
There's a thin red line drawn across the side of his index finger. The pen. He cut himself to write my name and didn't flinch when the blood pooled. I doubt he has even thought about it since.
"You bought me," I say. "Without a single word or negotiation."
"Yes."
I wait for more. But it’s not coming.
"That's it? That’s all you’re going to say to me? Yes?"
"You asked a question." His accent sits low in his throat, the consonants heavier than mine, somewhere east of everywhere I know. "I answered it."
My eyes drag over him and I know I should feel cold towards him. Indifferent, even. I've been cold to better-looking men for less. But my pulse is doing something undignified at the base of my throat and I'm fairly sure he can see it.
"I don't even know your name," I say.
"Dayan Mostovoi."
"Well, Dayan." I hold up the envelope. "You understand how insane this is. You wrote a number on a card like I'm a horse at auction."
"You came to an auction." His features settle into almost annoyed lines and irritation skitters through my stomach.
I press my teeth together until the urge to be impolite passes.
"Pietty says I can walk out," I say. "One withdrawal. No questions."
"You can." He doesn't move toward me, doesn't move at all. "You can return to whatever your life was before tonight."
My life before tonight. I mull over those words and wonder if he knows how sharp they feel to me.
The idea that I’m in some kind of limbo flickers through me.
There’s the before tonight, and the after tonight, but this moment here is the space between.
It feels like an atmosphere only we can breathe.
"You'd just let me go." I'm testing it, pushing on the door to see if it's real, but I can already feel something shifting inside me.
"I don't want a woman I have to hold down." He says it flat, like a fact about the weather. "If you go, you go. If you stay, you stay because you decided to."
And there it is. The thing he's done that no man at that endless engagement party managed, that James-of-the-oil-money and Oliver-the-potted-plant and every careful suitor my mother lined up like ducks could never do.
He's handed me a choice and meant it.
My whole life people have decided things at me.
My family deciding I'm too particular. My aunt deciding I need a wardrobe that turns heads.
My father deciding civility isn't the same as trying.
Decision after decision landing on me like weather, and here's this dangerous, silent stranger who paid a fortune for me and then put the only real choice I've had in months flat in my open hand.
It's the most attractive thing anyone's done for me in years. And I'm aware that’s a deeply alarming sentence to be thinking.
"You're not safe," I say. “I can feel the danger radiating from you.”
"I am dangerous," he says. He still hasn’t moved from his spot by the window. I can see now he isn’t even standing at full height. The nerves in my stomach try to turn into something else.
"You're not even going to pretend?"
"You'd know I was lying." His eyes don't leave mine. "You knew across the table. You've known all night."
I have. That's the awful, glittering truth of it.
I clocked the danger of him the second my gaze snagged on his in that room, and instead of looking away like a sensible woman, I looked longer.
The skin on my arms goes tight just standing here.
My heart's beating ferociously like I've already started to run.
Hours from now I could be on a plane heading back to the UK. A quiet apartment, a quiet life, a phone full of my mother's eligible bachelors waiting to be ignored. I know exactly what that life looks like. I could draw you a map of it with my eyes shut.
I don't know what this is. I have no map. I've got a dangerous stranger, a wax seal in my fist, and a feeling like standing at the open door of a plane with the wind pulling at me.
"If I get in that car," I say slowly, "and go back to my hotel… We're done. You said so."
"Yes."
"And if I don't?" The questions hangs there and my legs begin to shake. I’m glad I chose a long dress to wear tonight, because it’s the only thing hiding the fat that my knees are trembling.
He's quiet for a moment. Outside, an engine turns over, soft, patient, waiting for whichever version of me walks out the door.
"Then there's a different car," he says, finally moving towards me from where he was leaning against the wall. He stops just short of being toe- to-toe with me, and even in my heels he must have eight inches on me. I have to tip my head back to maintain eye contact.
He takes my chin in his hand and the contact shocks me. His grip is firm and his fingers and rough and calloused.
“But if you come with me,” he says, his dark eyes boring into mine, “you will become my wife and everything that means.”
I look at him and think about the red line on his finger. The stillness on his face tells me he is genuinely willing to watch me walk away. But whatever it is in his eyes tells me that he will absolutely make me his wife…
"Then I suppose you'd better show me to your car," I say.
He holds onto my chin a beat longer, his eyes dropping to my mouth. Just as I think he is about to kiss me, his hand drops away and he turns to the door.
I follow him out into the dark.