Chapter 17
Damien
She’s sitting at my kitchen island in my t-shirt with nothing underneath, her hair still damp from my shower, her lips parted from a question that’s doing things to my self-control that border on structural damage.
What do you intend to do with me?
The answer that wants to come out of my mouth first is not the strategic one. It’s the one that involves the granite countertop, her thighs parting, and approximately zero conversation. I swallow it back with a mouthful of coffee that’s gone lukewarm.
“That depends,” I say, setting the mug down. “On how cooperative you’re willing to be.”
Her eyes narrow instantly. “Cooperative.”
“There’s that echo again. We really should get your hearing checked.”
“I heard you perfectly. I’m trying to work out whether cooperative means answering your questions or something significantly worse.”
“It means staying alive.” I pocket my phone and come around the island to her side, not crowding her this time but close enough that she has to tilt her chin up to maintain eye contact.
She does. Of course she does. This woman would stare down a freight train if it looked at her wrong.
“It means staying here, where I can keep you safe, until I find out who sent those men and why your name is worth eighty million but not a penny more.”
The colour drains from her face. “Staying here.”
“Yes.”
“As in, living here. In your house.”
“You’re doing the echo thing again. Should I be concerned?”
“You should be concerned about the fact that you’re asking me to move in with you after knowing me for less than twelve hours, half of which involved you killing people.”
“Technically, the killing took about four minutes. The rest was admin.”
She makes that sound again—the strangled growl-scream hybrid that I’m rapidly becoming addicted to.
Her hands tighten around the mug, and I can see the war behind her eyes.
The part of her that knows this is insane versus the part that remembers the sound of bodies hitting walls and glass shattering while she hid in my bathtub.
“I have a life,” she says, and the word life comes out brittle enough to snap. “I have a job. A flat. Rent to pay.”
“You have a bedsit in Brixton with a broken radiator and a landlord who overcharges you for the privilege of freezing. You have a minimum-wage job at a café where you’re now a story. And your weekly payment to my family is due today.”
The silence that follows is nuclear. She is figuring out how much I know about her, but most of it is surface-level stuff that anyone observant enough can figure out.
“It’s still my life.” She glances at the clock on the wall. “It’s still my job that I have to get to.” She climbs off the barstool, flashing me more than enough thigh and part of her backside to make me drool.
“You aren’t going back to that job.” My tone is dark, commanding.
“It’s the only one I’ve got, and I need to pay my bills.”
She walks towards the stairs, and I make a snap decision. “Your debt has been wiped clean.”
She freezes, her foot on the bottom step. Her back stiffens, and she squares her shoulders. When she turns around, her eyes are like thunder. “Say that again,” she whispers.
“Your debt. The Kareva debt. It’s gone. Paid in full. You don’t owe my family another penny.”
She doesn’t move. Not a single muscle. She stands there with one bare foot on the bottom step and the other on the marble floor, and I can see the information trying to find a place to land inside her skull.
It’s bouncing off walls, ricocheting through corridors of disbelief, searching for somewhere to settle that doesn’t require her entire reality to restructure itself.
“That’s not possible,” she says.
“It is when someone writes a cheque.”
“Who wrote a cheque?”
“I did.”
The silence that follows is different from any of the others. I see the violence flash in her eyes and brace myself for it. She launches herself at me, teeth and claws out, spitting obscenities in Russian that would make a hardened pakhan blush.
Her nails scrape down my face for the second time in only a few hours as she slaps me so hard, she leaves a blood trail. With a snarl, I grip her wrists as she thrashes, kicking out and nearly catching me where it hurts.
“I told you not to do that again, solnyshko. You’re turning me on.”
“Bastard!” she screeches so loudly, I nearly flinch. She kicks out again, this time connecting with my shin and hurting her toe more than me.
I spin us and walk her back to the sofa until she hits it, caging her in as I press my body closer.
Her chest heaves against mine, and the thin cotton is the only barrier between her skin and my shirt.
I can feel the heat of her through it, the rapid staccato of her heartbeat drumming against my ribcage like it’s trying to escape both of us.
“Let me go,” she hisses, but her body has stopped thrashing. Not because she’s given up—I can feel the coiled tension in every muscle—but because she’s realised that fighting me at this range is like fighting a wall. Pointless and exhausting.
“Not until you stop trying to claw my face off. I happen to like my face.”
“I happen to hate it.”
I lean in closer, whispering in her ear, “Liar.”
Her breath catches. Just a fraction. Just enough for me to know the word landed somewhere she didn’t want it to.
Her wrists are small in my grip, her pulse hammering against my thumbs, and the scratch on my cheek stings in a way that’s far too enjoyable for polite company. “You had no right to do that.”
“Actually, I had every right. I do what I want. No one stops me.”
“Your pakhan will have something to say about it,” she snarls.
“My pakhan doesn’t care where the money comes from. The debt is paid.”
She whimpers because she knows I’ve made sense, and now she has nothing. “Why?” she asks, her lower lip trembling. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what? Saving you? Protecting you? Taking care of you?” My voice rises with the last question because I don’t have a fucking answer to that that won’t scare her into running.
Her eyes glisten. Not tears but the precursor.
The sheen that comes before the dam breaks, and I can see her fighting it with everything she has.
Her jaw is clenched so tight the tendons in her neck stand out, and her wrists have gone limp in my grip even as the rest of her remains rigid.
“You’re not saving me,” she says, and her voice is a wreck.
Quiet and devastated and furious all at once.
“You’re buying me. You bought me at that auction, and now you’ve bought my debt, and next you’ll buy my flat and my job and every last thing I have until there’s nothing left that’s mine.
That’s not protection, Damien. That’s ownership. ”
The words hit like a blade between the ribs. Clean. Precise. The kind of wound you don’t feel until you look down and see the blood.
I release her wrists.
She doesn’t move. Neither do I. We stand there, inches apart, her back against the sofa, my arms braced on either side of her, and the truth of what she’s said hangs in the air like smoke after a gunshot.
She’s not wrong. What I was doing when she came down for breakfast was hashing out a deal to buy the building where she lives, to transfer it into her name, so that she has an insurance policy that will bring in income for the rest of her life. The café was next on my list.
I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s irrational.
It’s bordering on stupid. Baron will flay me alive and have fun doing it.
Roman will give me that look that tells me how disappointed he is in me, which is somehow worse than Baron’s outrage.
Mum will wring her hands and lament in Russian how her wayward son has lost his way and cannot be redeemed.
But I can’t bring myself to care.
Not when she looks up at me with those big blue eyes, swimming with tears, fear and anger. I reach up to cup her face instead, pulling her even closer to me.
“Damien,” she croaks.
“Let me take care of you, Lidiya,” I murmur.
“No,” she says. “It’s not real. It’s a fantasy.”
“A fantasy?” I say with a humourless laugh. “For you or me?”
“Me,” she snivels loudly. “Don’t you get it? You swan around with your Belgravia mansion, your fancy car, your hideous artwork worth millions, probably. You have a charmed life, paid for with money from people like me.”
The silence that falls is enough to make me uncomfortable for the first time in my life.
She’s right. Not entirely, of course. The Voronov fortune is built on things far darker and more lucrative than shaking down waitresses for a hundred quid a week.
But the principle stands. The empire I was born into runs on the backs of people who never had a choice, and she’s one of them.
Standing here in my t-shirt with her bare feet on my marble floor, she’s the living embodiment of every uncomfortable truth I’ve spent thirty years not examining too closely.
I drop my hands from her face and step back. The distance feels wrong immediately, like removing a splint before the bone has set, but I do it anyway because what she just said deserves space. Not a rebuttal. Not a deflection. Space.
“You’re right,” I say.
Her mouth parts. She wasn’t expecting that. She was braced for the counter-argument, the justification, the smooth redirection I’ve been deploying since the moment she got in my car. The admission throws her off balance more effectively than any of those would have.
“What?” she whispers.
I move to the kitchen island and pour myself a fresh coffee from the pot, giving my hands something to do. “You are right. But it doesn’t make me wrong. That’s the system. I didn’t build it, and I’m not going to apologise for it.”
“So you just got lucky in the birth stakes,” she says so bitterly, I feel it in my bones.
“Maybe. Maybe that’s all it is. Luck. So let me pass some of that to you, Lidiya. You don’t have to fight on your own anymore. You have me.”
“I don’t have you. You are not mine, and I am definitely not yours!”
“Oh, but you are,” I say, moving closer to her again.
“You are mine, Lidiya Kareva, and not because I exchanged a superyacht for you or because I paid off your debt. You don’t owe me jackshit for any of it.
You are mine because I say you are, and because every man in that room knew it the second I stood up. ”
Her chest heaves. The fury hasn’t left her face, but something else has crept in alongside it—something she’s trying very hard to smother.
I can see it in the way her fingers curl at her sides, not into fists but into something more uncertain.
The way her gaze drops to my mouth for half a second before snapping back to my eyes.
“You don’t get to decide that,” she says, but the conviction has thinned. Not gone, she’s too stubborn for that, but stretched, like fabric pulled too tight over a frame that’s the wrong shape.
“I already did.”
“Then un-decide it.”
“Not how it works.”
She makes a noise of pure frustration and shoves past me, heading for the stairs. I turn away and take a long drink of coffee, letting the heat ground me.
“Where are you going?” I ask without turning around.
“To put on my horrible dress and my horrible shoes and go to my horrible job, because unlike you, I live in reality.”
“Reality is the place where an unknown man tried to purchase you for unknown reasons, and then sent three men to abduct you last night. Reality, Lidiya, is that the second you step outside that door without me.”
She pauses, but I have no idea which way she is going to swing.