Chapter 18
Lidiya
“Do me a favour?”
“Anything.”
“Fuck. Off.” I march up the stairs with my dignity in tatters as he snickers into his coffee. Infuriating fucking arsehole. I hate him.
But I don’t.
The relief I feel that I don’t owe a hundred pounds a week for a debt I didn’t accrue is making me light-headed, but at the same time, I know he is going to make me pay somehow. Of course he is. That’s what men like him do. They don’t do something for nothing. It’s not in their DNA.
“I’m not going anywhere, solnyshko. Neither are you,” he calls after me.
“Yeah?” I mutter. “Watch me.”
But a flash of fear stops me. That other man last night wasn’t fucking about.
I stand in the hallway, one hand on the bannister, and the bravado drains out of me like water through a cracked pipe.
My legs are shaking again. Not the dramatic, adrenaline-fuelled trembling from last night, but something quieter.
More insidious. The slow, creeping shake of a woman who’s just realised that the walls she’s been hiding behind her whole life were made of paper, and someone with a match has finally noticed.
I go to his bedroom to retrieve my clothes, the envelope still sticking out of the cardigan pocket, my phone and keys, and move to another room.
I need to think. Just think.
If I leave, I go back to the bedsit. The bedsit that anyone with basic investigative skills could find, because my name is on a lease.
No security. No cameras. A front door lock that a stiff breeze could compromise.
I’d be alone, in Brixton, with a target on my back that I didn’t ask for and can’t explain.
If I stay, I’m in Damien Voronov’s house.
Under his roof. Under his control. Wearing his clothes, eating his food, sleeping in his bed, and what comes next?
Sex to pay off the debt he cleared? More sex to pay off the superyacht exchange?
What else is there to give him? Blood? Tears?
A pound of flesh? All of those things are easy for Bratva to take without a second glance.
Yet none of those things is enough to work off this debt that has both simultaneously been cleared and placed on me with different terms.
I press my forehead against the cool plaster of the guest room wall and close my eyes.
The maths doesn’t work. That’s the thing.
No matter how I arrange the numbers, no matter how I shuffle the variables, the equation comes out wrong.
A hundred million pounds at auction. A debt wiped clean.
Three dead men in a hallway. An unknown bidder with eighty million and cyanide-carrying operatives.
And at the centre of it all—me. A woman whose most valuable possession is a pair of shoes that gave her blisters and a cardigan with five hundred quid in the pocket.
Five hundred quid. That’s what I came for. That’s what made sense. Everything after that belongs to a different universe, one where I apparently matter enough to start wars over, and I can’t find the bridge between the two.
I look up as Damien leans against the door frame. “You don’t owe me anything,” he says quietly. Too seriously. “This will sound smug and arrogant and probably make you want to hit me again, but your debt? It’s pocket change to me. My assets earn more than that in interest in one day.”
“How nice for you,” I say flatly.
“It is nice for me, and you have to stop trying to make me feel guilty about it.”
I scoff. “No, I don’t! I can do what I want!”
“So you want to be the victim your whole life?”
“That is unfair! How dare you?”
“We’ve been through this already. Quite easily. Accept what I’m offering you, and you will never have to worry about a single penny ever again.”
“What you’re offering me? And what is that? A life bought and kept?”
“A life of being mine. A Voronov.”
“Don’t be fucking ridiculous!” I snap, standing up. “I am not, nor will I ever be a Voronov.”
“Marry me.”
“I beg your fucking pardon?” My face has gone red hot with fury. “You are deranged!”
He gives me that half-smile that makes my pussy damp despite the rage coursing through me.
“It protects you more than you will ever be able to contemplate.”
“Protects me,” I repeat, and the words taste like battery acid. “From what? From you?”
“From everything that isn’t me.”
I stare at him. I stare at him so long that the silence develops its own weather system.
He doesn’t shift. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t do that infuriating smirk that makes me want to claw his other cheek open.
He’s serious. He’s standing in the doorway of a guest bedroom in his Belgravia mansion, proposing marriage to a woman he’s known for less than a day, and he’s dead serious.
“You’ve lost your mind,” I say. “Genuinely. Something has come loose in there, and you need medical attention.”
“My mind is exactly where it’s always been.”
“Then it’s always been in the wrong place, because no sane person proposes to someone they barely know after buying them at an auction and paying off their debt.”
He says nothing.
“I am not marrying you, you fucking cunt!” The words come out at a volume that probably carries through the walls and into the street, where some perfectly coiffed Belgravia neighbour is no doubt clutching her pearls over her morning grapefruit.
Damien pushes off the doorframe and takes a step into the room.
Just one. Measured. Controlled. Everything about him is controlled, and it makes me want to scream because just once I’d like him to lose it.
Just once, I’d like to see the mask crack, see the man underneath who isn’t calibrating every breath, every word, every step like he’s playing chess with the universe and winning.
“You finished?” he asks.
“Not even close.”
“Good. Because I need you to hear this.” He stops two feet from me.
Close enough to fill my vision, far enough that I don’t feel caged.
He’s learning my tolerances, and that’s terrifying.
“The man who bid against me last night knows where you live. He knows where you work, who your friends are, what route you walk home. And when he comes for you—not if, when—there won’t be three men.
There’ll be ten. Or twenty. And they won’t ring the bell first to test your defences.
They will snatch and grab you off the street. ”
My throat constricts. I want to argue. I want to tell him he’s being dramatic, that he’s inflating the threat to keep me compliant, to make me need him.
But the memory of last night—the sounds of a fight tearing through the floor beneath me, the muffled pops—sits in my chest like a stone I can’t cough up.
“A Voronov wife is untouchable,” he continues. “Not because of sentiment. Because of consequence. Anyone who touches you touches the family. And anyone who touches the family answers to every Bratva ally we have across three continents. It's not romance. It’s a declaration of war. It’s insurance.”
“So you’re proposing a business arrangement,” I say, and I hate how steady my voice sounds when everything inside me is screaming. “A merger. Voronov acquires Kareva, hostile takeover, sign on the dotted line.”
“Call it whatever you need to call it.”
“I call it insanity. I call it a man who’s so used to getting everything he wants that he’s forgotten other people have autonomy.”
“I haven’t forgotten. I’m asking.”
“You’re not asking. You’re presenting it as the only option and dressing it up as a choice.”
His jaw tightens. Just a fraction. The first real crack I’ve seen in the composure, and I latch onto it like a lifeline because it proves he’s not made of stone.
He’s not a machine calculating outcomes.
He’s a man standing in front of me, asking me to marry him, and my refusal is costing him something.
I don’t know what. I don’t care what. But it’s something, and that matters more than it should.
“There are other options,” he says. “You go back to Brixton, and you take your chances. You spend the rest of your life flinching at every knock, checking over your shoulder, waiting for the moment luck runs out.” A beat. “Or you stay here. With me.”
“With you,” I repeat, and the laugh that escapes me is hollow enough to echo.
“With the man whose family bled my parents dry. With the man who showed up at my café every Friday like clockwork to collect money I’d scraped together by skipping meals.
You want me to marry you. You. The man I’ve fantasised about poisoning for months. ”
“You’ve fantasised about me?” His mouth curves.
“About poisoning you. There’s a distinction.”
“There’s a fine line between passion and murder, solnyshko.”
“Stop.” I hold up my hand. “Stop being charming. Stop making jokes. Stop acting like this is normal, because it isn’t.
None of this is normal. Twenty-four hours ago, I was worrying about whether I could afford a tin of beans, and now I’m in a guest bedroom in Belgravia being proposed to by a Bratva heir to billions who thinks marriage is a security system. ”
“It’s a very effective security system, and I’m not the heir.”
“I said stop!”
He stops. The silence is immediate and total, and the absence of his voice is somehow louder than his words. He stands there, hands at his sides, and waits. Patient. Infuriatingly, devastatingly patient, like a man who knows the tide will come in regardless of whether the shore wants it to.
I press my back against the wall and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor, knees drawn up and pulling the t-shirt over them so I’m not flashing him. It’s like I’ve been hit by a truck.
“Marry me,” he says again, quieter this time. “Let me show you how far I will go to protect you. Not just from this stranger who wants you, but from my father as well.”