Chapter 11
Damien
She’s still sitting on the barstool, palms braced in the air as I shift my body from caging her in.
Her chest rises and falls with the kind of controlled breathing that tells me she’s working very hard not to lose her composure again.
The flush on her cheeks hasn’t faded. If anything, it’s deepened, spreading down her neck to the collarbone I keep noticing against my better judgement.
I need to think with my brain. Not my cock. My cock has terrible strategic instincts.
I take a step back—not because she asked, but because the proximity was starting to cloud something I can’t afford to have clouded right now. The mystery bidder is out there, regrouping, and I’m standing in my kitchen getting distracted by the way her lower lip trembles when she’s angry.
“Your two hours started when you got in the car,” she says. “How long do I have left?”
I check my watch. “Twelve minutes.”
“Then I’m counting every one of them.”
“Be my guest.”
She looks away first. I note that too. Not because it’s a victory—it’s not—but because it tells me the fight is costing her more than she’s letting on.
She’s running on fumes. The food helped, but she’s still a woman who’s been terrorised by a bidding war, manhandled into a car, and confronted with the fact that someone with serious resources wants her for reasons unknown.
A thought enters my head, and my lips curve up. I have twelve minutes to get her to stay of her own free will, which is pushing it. Even for me.
“Let’s move to the sofa,” I say. “That barstool is uncomfortable at best.”
“Not made for sitting on?” she spits out. “Just for decoration?”
“Precisely,” I say mildly.
The fact that I don’t rise to her temper infuriates her.
But it will wear her out eventually. She slides off the barstool with the reluctance of someone being asked to relocate from one prison cell to another.
I lead her through to the living room, and she follows at a distance that’s calculated to communicate maximum contempt.
Three feet. Close enough to not lose sight of the exits, far enough to pretend she’s not complying.
She stops when she sees the Basquiat up close. Her eyes trace the skull, the slashes of neon, the chaos that cost me seven figures and change.
“That’s hideous,” she says.
“That’s a Basquiat.”
“I have no idea what that is.”
I gesture to the sofa—black Italian leather, deep enough to swallow you, the kind of furniture that will make her relax just from sitting on it.
She perches on the very edge, spine rigid, knees pressed together, hands clasped in her lap like a woman waiting in a dentist’s reception.
She will not allow herself to be comfortable in my home.
I respect the commitment, even if it’s futile.
I take the armchair opposite. Not the sofa. Giving her space she didn’t ask for but desperately needs. Leaning forward, I rest my elbows on my knees and study her.
“Nine minutes,” she says without looking at a clock.
“You’re good at that. Counting down to escape.”
“Practice.”
“Take your shoes off. Your feet are killing you.”
“Excuse me.” Her sneer could weaken a lesser man. “You don’t know shit.”
“I am an observant man, solnyshko. I know that they are pinching your toes and giving you blisters. Take them off for the eight minutes you have left before you have to walk to the bus stop.”
Her gaze pins mine at my manipulation. “You aren’t even going to drive me home?”
“That would be going over the two hours, now, wouldn’t it, Lidiya?”
She looks like she wants to slap me again. But I have given her something to think about. She slips her shoes off, and I study the fleeting look of relief she allows herself.
“Sit back. You need hydration before you leave.” I rise and grab a bottle of water from the drinks cabinet.
She takes it without thanking me, cracks the seal, and drinks half of it in one go.
Her throat works, and a single drop escapes the corner of her mouth, trailing down her chin before she swipes it away with the back of her hand. She doesn’t notice me tracking it.
I settle back into the armchair and let the silence build. Seven minutes. Maybe six. I have minutes to make her choose the safer cage. “What happens when you leave here?” I ask.
“I go home. I sleep. I wake up. I go to work. I pay your family their blood money tomorrow, with interest and an inconvenience fee I can’t afford. The usual.”
“Ah, yes, the fee,” I say, glad she was the one to mention it. “How about we negotiate?”
She sits up straighter, instantly alert. “One pound,” she says, chin high.
I wait for the punchline, but then I realise she is deadly serious.
Searching her eyes, I see the sheer terror in them that I’m going to break her by taking every last penny she has. “I have no use for a pound,” I say, watching the flinch as the words land. “But I do have use for you being where I can see you.”
“Meaning?” she croaks.
“It is an inconvenience for me to travel all the way back down to Brixton tomorrow to collect money that you have on you right now.” I indicate the envelope sticking out of her cardigan pocket.
She clutches it instantly. Protectively.
“My fee is you staying the night here, safe, warm, well fed, and you can pay the hundred pounds tomorrow, no more, before I drive you home. How does that sound, solnyshko?”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. The war playing out across her face is spectacular—pride, exhaustion, suspicion, and the raw animal need for safety all fighting for dominance behind those blue eyes.
“You want me to stay the night,” she says slowly, as if translating from a language she doesn’t trust. “In your house.”
“In a guest room. With a lock on the door. A lock you control.”
“And in the morning, I hand over the hundred pounds. No twenty per cent. No fee.”
“Correct.”
“And then you drive me home.”
“Also correct.”
She narrows her eyes. “What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch.”
“There’s always a catch with men like you.”
“Men like me,” I repeat, amused despite myself. “And how many men like me do you know, Lidiya?”
Her lips tighten. “I know Bratva men,” she spits out like venom.
“You know men who collect debts and deliver threats,” I correct. “You don’t know the men who make the decisions behind them. There’s a difference.”
“Enlighten me, then. What’s the difference between the man who takes my money and the man who orders it taken?”
“About a hundred million pounds, apparently.”
The joke lands wrong. Her expression doesn’t shift. If anything, it hardens, calcifying into something brittle and sharp that I recognise from the men I’ve broken in warehouses. The face people make when they’ve decided they have nothing left to lose.
“Two minutes,” she says quietly.
I let the silence sit for two of them. She drinks the rest of the water.
Her eyes drift to the window, where the London night presses against the glass like something trying to get in.
Rain has started—a fine, persistent drizzle that turns the streetlamps into smeared halos.
She’s calculating—bus stop, dark streets, that long walk home with a target on her back. And she knows it now.
I don’t push. Instead, I wait, because I’ve learned that silence is the most persuasive argument I own.
“If I stay,” she says, and the word if is doing heroic structural work in that sentence, “you don’t come near the guest room.”
“Agreed.”
“You don’t knock. You don’t check on me. You don’t stand outside listening.”
“I don’t stand outside listening to anything. That’s creepy, and I’m many things, but creepy isn’t one of them.”
“Debatable,” she mutters.
“Anything else?”
She chews the inside of her lip, and I can practically hear the gears grinding. “Breakfast.”
“What about it?”
“You feed me before I leave. A proper breakfast. Not whatever leftover fusion catastrophe is lurking in your fridge.”
I feel my mouth curve. She’s negotiating. Which means she’s staying. Which means my gamble just paid off, and I didn’t even have to play the safety card again.
“I’ll have something delivered,” I say. “Full English. Or whatever you want.”
“Full English,” she says immediately, and the speed of it tells me she hasn’t had one in a very long time. “With proper toast. Not sourdough. Not brioche. Actual bread.”
“Noted.”
“And tea. Not your fancy vodka with orange juice. Not Champagne. Builder’s tea. Strong. Milk. One sugar.”
“I’ll write it down.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“I’m memorising your order. There’s a difference.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment, searching for the trap.
I let her look. There’s nothing to find—not because there isn’t a longer game at play here, because there absolutely is, but because the parts she can see are exactly what I’m showing her.
The rest comes later, when she’s rested and fed and less likely to bolt at the first sign of complexity.
“Fine,” she says. The word drops like a stone into still water. “One night.”
“One night,” I confirm.
She stands, and the absence of her heels makes her shrink by three inches.
Barefoot on my marble floor, clutching a water bottle and a cardigan with five hundred quid in the pocket, she looks smaller.
The kind of small that makes something primal and violent stir.
The bone-deep certainty that anything that tries to touch her will have to come through me first.