Chapter 7
Damien
My phone buzzes in my inner jacket pocket as I stand up. I know exactly who it is, but I’m not exactly in a position to answer it right now.
If this fucking arsehole who dared to threaten me in my own home thinks he is getting within spitting distance of Lidiya Kareva, he has some serious delusions of grandeur.
I let the silence hold for one more beat, just long enough for the room to think I’m done. Just long enough for the shadow at the back to taste something close to victory.
Then I turn back to the stage.
Lidiya’s face is chalk-white under the spotlight.
Her hands are fisted at her sides, and I can see the faint tremor running through her from here.
She looks like a woman standing on a trapdoor, waiting for the mechanism to engage.
Her eyes find mine, and in them I see something that clenches my gut harder than any punch I’ve ever taken.
She’s asking me not to leave.
She doesn’t know who I am. All she knows is the man who shows up at her café and ruins her week. Every week. The man who drinks black coffee and doesn’t tip. The man whose family bleeds her dry. And still—still—she’d rather have me than whatever’s lurking in the dark at the back of this room.
That tells me everything I need to know about her.
She’s petrified.
And that is not acceptable.
I straighten my cuffs. Tweaking the diamond and platinum cufflinks.
Slowly. Deliberately. The room is rigid with anticipation, everybody is angled towards me like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
I let them wait. Timing is everything—in a fight, in a negotiation, in the precise moment you decide to destroy someone’s evening.
“One hundred million pounds,” I say.
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. The words detonate on their own, clean and final, like a blade laid on a table.
The room doesn’t gasp. It doesn’t murmur. It simply ceases to function for three full seconds, as if someone has pulled the plug on reality and everyone is waiting for the reboot.
Madam Orlov’s composure cracks—not visibly, not to anyone who isn’t trained to read people the way I am, but I catch it. The micro-hesitation before she repeats the number. The barely perceptible shift in her posture as she recalculates her commission in real time.
“One hundred million pounds,” she says, and her voice is immaculate, but I hear the hairline fracture beneath it.
I don’t sit down. I remain standing, jacket buttoned, one hand in my trouser pocket, the other resting at my side. Relaxed. Unhurried.
The back of the room is a black hole. No sound. No movement. Nothing.
On the stage, Lidiya is trembling so hard I can see the fabric of her dress vibrating under the spotlight.
Her eyes are locked on mine, wide and glassy, and I can see the exact moment her body starts to betray her with the slight sway, the way her weight shifts too far left before she corrects it.
She’s going to faint if this goes on much longer.
I hold her gaze. Steady. Certain. A silent command dressed up as reassurance: Stay standing. I’ve got this.
Whether she reads it or not, she straightens. Just barely. Just enough.
I turn my attention to the back of the room and wait. Because the next few seconds will tell me exactly who I’m dealing with. A man with real money will counter. A man with borrowed ambition will fold. And a man with something darker than either will do something stupid.
The silence stretches past comfortable, into the territory where it becomes its own kind of violence.
“One hundred million pounds, going once,” Madam Orlov says.
Nothing.
My phone buzzes again. I ignore it.
“Going twice.”
A chair scrapes. The sound comes from the back left. He’s standing. I can feel the shift in the room’s gravity as heads turn towards the shadow that’s been outbid.
I wait for the number. I’m ready for it. I’ve already decided there isn’t one high enough to make me stop. But the number doesn’t come.
He’s gone.
Outbid by a man with deeper pockets. What a shock. I smile to myself. Winning is just so… victorious.
The tension in the room doesn’t break so much as deflate. I hear the exhales and the rustle of bodies relaxing into their seats.
“Sold,” Madam Orlov says, “for one hundred million pounds.”
The applause is polite, restrained, and completely irrelevant. My phone buzzes a third time. This time, I pull it out and glance at the screen.
Baron.
I chuckle darkly. He will have heard about this the second I walked in here.
He will be fucking fuming into his vodka, but his anger can wait, so I pocket the phone and sit back down as Lidiya is ushered off the stage with Madam Orlov’s steely gaze on her every move.
The room buzzes with the aftermath, conversations restarting in hushed, electric clusters.
I can feel the weight of every glance that slides my way.
Some are curious, some calculating, a few openly hostile.
I catalogue them without turning my head.
Force of habit. You don’t survive in my family by ignoring the room.
A waiter materialises at my elbow with a tray of Champagne.
I take a glass, not because I want it, but because it gives my hands something to do that isn’t reaching for the knuckleduster in my pocket while I hunt down the man who wanted her enough to try and outbid me.
The bubbles are fine, the vintage excellent. I don’t taste any of it.
My phone buzzes again. Baron’s patience has a shelf life measured in seconds, not minutes, and I’ve just burned through about six hundred of them. I pull the phone out and answer it.
“Baron.”
“Damien,” he growls, his accent slightly heavier with his impatience. Ex-FSB, he can kill a man in ways that would make you wish you had never fucked with him in the first place.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Please tell me that this is all some kind of sick joke.”
“What? The auction? No. Deadly serious.” My tone has gone from informal to ice.
“You spent one hundred million pounds on a girl who owes us money. Money that wouldn’t cover the cost of the Champagne you’re drinking right now.”
“Technically, I haven’t paid yet. And the Champagne is complimentary.”
The silence on the other end is the kind that precedes violence. I know it well. I’ve created it often enough. My lips curve up knowingly.
“Damien.” His voice drops to that register that used to make me straighten up when I was twelve. It still works, but I’ve learned to hide the reflex. “You will explain this to me. Now.”
“Someone else wanted her. Someone who sent a courier to my gate with a fake bomb and a phone call telling me to stay away from the auction. Someone with deep enough pockets to push past eighty million without flinching.”
The silence changes texture. Baron is many things—ruthless, cold, a man who once broke a rival’s fingers one by one over a business dinner without raising his voice—but he is not stupid. He hears what I’m telling him, and the calculation begins.
“Who?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet. Russian, obviously.”
“And you decided the appropriate response was to spend a hundred million pounds rather than follow him out of the building.”
“I decided the appropriate response was to make sure he didn’t get what he wanted.”
“And what does he want with a waitress who can barely cover her weekly payment?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I take a sip of the Champagne. It’s Dom Pérignon. Wasted on me right now. “Someone doesn’t spend eighty million on a companion experience. That’s acquisition money. That’s ownership money.”
“You spent a hundred million.”
“Yes, but I’m charming.”
Baron exhales through his nose. I can picture him in his study, the one lined with books he’s read and reread, standing at the window with a tumbler of Beluga Noble in his hand, his reflection glaring back at him from the glass.
He’ll be wearing one of his bespoke suits, even at this hour, because Baron Voronov doesn’t do casual. He considers it a character flaw.
“You will find out who this man is,” he says. It’s not a request. “And you will bring me a name before the week is out.”
“Already on it.”
“And the girl?”
“What about her?”
“She is a debtor, Damien. She belongs to this family in the only way that matters—financially. If someone else has an interest in her, I need to know why. If there is something about the Kareva debt that I’ve missed, I need to know that too.”
“You don’t miss things.”
“Everyone misses things. The trick is catching them before they spread.” He pauses. “Do not let this girl out of your sight.”
“I won’t. For the price I paid, she will be a live-in by the end of the night.”
“Damien,” he growls.
“What?” I shrug.
“Your mother despairs.”
“And you indulge, even though you don’t want to.”
He knows I’ve got him. He could cut me off, shut down my accounts, disown me, have me removed from existence and buried next to the M25… but he doesn’t.
“Do not lose that acquisition,” he snarls and hangs up.
I pocket the phone and let the smile linger.
Baron’s fury is a familiar weather system—violent, predictable, and ultimately something you learn to dress for.
I allow myself one more sip of the Champagne before setting the glass down on the tray of a passing waiter.
The room is thinning now, bidders collecting their prizes, Madam Orlov’s staff moving through the space with the quiet efficiency of people who’ve done this a hundred times.
But I don’t care about the room anymore.
I care about the corridor behind that stage, where a terrified woman in a taped-up dress is probably hyperventilating into a paper bag.
Or running.
If it’s the latter, I hope she’s ready to be chased.