Chapter 6
Lidiya
“The bidding starts at five thousand pounds.”
Madam Orlov’s voice rings out, and I frown, glancing at her to see if she made a mistake. Or if I blacked out from sheer terror for a few minutes while the bidding increased. Every other woman started at a thousand pounds.
“Five thousand,” a man’s voice says immediately.
I gulp.
I wasn’t expecting this. I was expecting everyone to remain silent and chat amongst themselves.
“Six thousand,” another man says.
“Seven.”
“Eight.”
“Ten thousand.”
There is a short pause as the heavily accented Russian voice states with so much authority, my knees quake.
“Fifteen thousand.”
Despite Madam Orlov’s warning, my gaze shoots straight to the man who just bid fifteen thousand pounds.
I recognise it.
As my gaze lands on him, his soft smirk nearly takes my breath away. The debt collector.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Do I hear sixteen thousand?” Madam Orlov calls out.
“Sixteen,” the heavily accented voice says calmly.
“Seventeen,” the debt collector bids.
“Eighteen.”
“Nineteen.”
“Twenty thousand.”
The bidding ping pong is making me lightheaded. Nausea rolls over me, and I resist the urge to vomit.
“Fifty thousand,” the debt collector bids.
“One hundred thousand.”
“Two hundred thousand.”
I whimper so loudly, Madam Orlov shoots me a death stare, and I plaster a smile back on my face.
“Three hundred thousand.”
“Five hundred thousand.”
The bids go up as calmly as if they were talking in pence rather than hundred-grand increments.
There is a dead silence in the air that practically drops the temperature.
“Do I hear six hundred thousand?” Madam Orlov asks, just as calmly.
“Six hundred thousand.” The man with the accent says.
I can’t see his face. He is at the back of the room, shrouded in darkness.
The icy calmness in his tone is enough to let me know that I don’t want to spend two seconds with him, let alone two hours.
I wonder if I can back out. Just run off the stage without my money and go.
“This is growing dull,” the collector states. “One million pounds.”
There is a collective gasp.
Even Madam Orlov shows signs of surprise by raising her eyebrows a fraction.
The silence stretches like a wire pulled taut. I can feel it vibrating through the floorboards, through my heels, through my teeth.
The man in the darkness doesn’t respond immediately. I count the seconds. One. Two. Three. Four.
“One point five million,” he says, and the words land like stones dropped into still water.
My vision tunnels. The spotlight is too hot. The room is too quiet. One point five million pounds for dinner with me. With me. The woman who ate toast crusts for dinner last night and taped her dress together with adhesive from the pound shop.
Something is very, very wrong.
“Two million.” The debt collector doesn’t hesitate. His voice carries the same mild, conversational tone he used when he told me he’d collect something else on Saturday. Like money is air, and he’s simply breathing.
I can feel my pulse in my fingertips, in the soles of my feet, behind my eyes. The room has gone so still, I can hear the ice shifting in someone’s glass three rows back.
“Two million pounds,” Madam Orlov repeats, and even her composure has thinned enough for me to see something beneath it. Not shock—calculation. She is recalibrating everything she thought she knew about tonight. “Do I hear two point five?”
The pause is longer this time. Five seconds. Six. Seven.
“Three million.” The accented voice has changed. Not louder, but harder. The civility has been stripped away, and what’s left is something territorial. Something that doesn’t lose.
“Three million pounds,” Madam Orlov announces. Her voice is steady, but I catch the way her fingers tighten on the edge of the podium. “Do I hear three point five?”
The debt collector tilts his head. From here, under the scorching white light, I can see his face clearly. He’s not rattled. He’s not even tense. He looks like a man deciding between two bottles of wine at dinner—mildly engaged, vaguely amused, and completely in control.
“Five million,” he says.
Someone in the front row whispers something to the person beside them.
I hear it as a hiss, nothing more. My body has gone numb from the waist down.
I’m standing in the spotlight in a taped-up funeral dress while two men I don’t know bid obscene amounts of money for the privilege of sitting across a dinner table from me.
Part of me wants to be flattered, but the more sensible part is starting to think this is about them, and not me. I am in the middle of their battlefield without a weapon, not even a shield to protect myself from this.
“Five million pounds.” Madam Orlov doesn’t ask if anyone wants to counter. She turns her gaze towards the back of the room and waits.
The silence is suffocating. I can feel sweat beading along my spine, pooling at the small of my back where the belt digs in. My hands are trembling at my sides, and I press my fingernails into my palms hard enough to feel the sting cut through the fog.
“Six million,” the voice says, and now it carries something that wasn’t there before. Finality. As if anyone dares to bid higher, he will remove them from the face of the earth.
Saliva floods my mouth, but I can’t swallow. My throat has stopped working.
The debt collector shifts in his seat. It’s the first real movement I’ve seen from him since the bidding started, and it sends a spike of ice through my chest. He crosses one leg over the other, adjusts the cuff of his sleeve with the kind of precision that belongs to a man who never does anything by accident, and then he smiles.
It’s the smile he gave me in the café. The one that isn’t a smile at all but a promise wrapped in violence.
“Ten million pounds,” he says.
The room doesn’t gasp this time. It goes somewhere beyond sound—a vacuum where even breathing feels like an intrusion. My ears ring. The number doesn’t compute. It sits in my brain like a foreign object, something my mind keeps trying to reject because it cannot possibly be real.
Ten million pounds.
Madam Orlov turns to the back of the room. The spotlight catches the edge of her jaw, and I see something I haven’t seen all night on her face: respect. Not for the money—she’s probably been swimming in money her whole life. For the audacity.
“Ten million pounds,” she repeats.
The back of the room is silent. I count again because counting is the only thing keeping me upright. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Nothing.
Six. Seven. Eight.
My lungs burn. I’ve forgotten to breathe.
Nine. Ten.
“Going once at ten million pounds,” Madam Orlov says.
The air in the room is thick enough to chew. I can feel every pair of eyes in this place—not on me, not anymore. They’re oscillating between the debt collector and the shadow at the back like spectators at an execution, waiting to see who falls.
“Going twice.”
A chair creaks somewhere in the darkness. The sound is small, insignificant, but in this silence, it detonates like a gunshot. My heart slams so hard against my ribs, I’m certain the front row can hear it.
I wait for the counter-bid. I brace for it like a blow.
It doesn’t come.
Until it does.
“Twenty million.”
My throat starts working again due to shock, and I choke on the saliva that has accumulated in my mouth, causing Orlov to fire me with another stare that could kill an oak tree.
“Well, now,” the collector says with a soft smirk. “This is getting fun.”
Fun?
I’m ready to pass out, and he thinks this is fun?
“Twenty million, going once.”
Nothing.
Oh, God, please don’t let me be sold to the man at the back. Please. I’ll do anything.
I don’t know why I feel safer with the threatening debt collector, but better the devil you know. Right?
My hands are shaking. I am numb. I think I’ve gone into shock. What am I going to be expected to do for twenty million pounds?
“Going twice.”
A loud sigh echoes around the room. “Thirty million.”
No one dares breathe now, so the growl that reverberates from the back of the room is unmistakable.
“Thirty million pounds,” Madam Orlov says, and her voice has taken on a quality I can’t quite name. Reverence, maybe. Or the particular thrill of a woman who takes a hefty cut.
The growl from the back resolves into words. “Forty million.”
My knees buckle. I catch myself before I go down, locking my legs so hard my calves scream. Forty million. Forty. Million. Pounds. For dinner. With me. The girl who counts bus fare like it’s currency from a dying civilisation.
“Fifty,” the collector says, and he sounds bored. Actually bored. Like he’s ordering another round at the pub, and the barman is taking too long.
I want to scream. I want to rip off these pinching heels and sprint barefoot through Mayfair until I find a bus that will take me back to my bedsit, where the worst thing that can happen is the radiator doesn’t work, and I eat cold toast in the dark.
That life made sense. This doesn’t. Nothing about this makes sense.
“Fifty million pounds,” Madam Orlov repeats. She doesn’t ask for a counter. She simply turns to the back of the room with the patience of a woman who has all night and the contractual right to take a percentage of whatever astronomical figure these two lunatics land on.
The silence stretches. It’s different this time. Heavier. The kind that comes before something breaks.
“Fifty million, going once.”
“Sixty.”
“Seventy.”
“Eighty.”
The debt collector turns now to look at the back of the room and rises, buttoning his jacket. He’s going to leave. He’s going to leave me at the hands of the man who won’t even show his face while he bids extortionate amounts of money for me.