Chapter 19
Damien
Ishould have let her go.
That’s the clean play. The rational one.
Put a tail on her, move her to a safe house, keep her off grid until Kirill digs up a name.
Keep my hands off. Keep my mouth shut. Keep Baron out of it until I have something concrete to put on his desk besides, I bought a waitress for a hundred million, and now my hallway needs new marble.
Instead, I stood in a guest room doorway and asked her to marry me like I was offering her a coat.
Because I watched three men try to breach my home within hours of her stepping into it, and I understood something I didn’t want to understand.
This isn’t about the auction anymore.
It’s about flags.
Downstairs, everything is normal. Somewhere beyond these walls, Belgravia is waking up to soft mornings and expensive dogs, and my hallway still smells faintly of bleach that no amount of money can make innocent.
I can hear movement in the distance. Not footsteps.
Not the heavy tread of guards. The subtle shift of a man posted outside a door, changing weight from one foot to the other because he’s been told by Kirill to stand still, and he’s fighting the instinct to pace.
There’s a murmur—Kirill giving short orders, voice clipped because he’s trying not to be heard.
Everything is contained.
Everything is not contained.
There are only a few things in my world that make men pause.
Not money—money makes them lean in. Not threats—threats make them test you.
But a name? A family name claimed out loud?
That makes the reckless step back, and the ambitious hesitate long enough for you to put a bullet through the space they would’ve occupied.
Wife is a shield in my world. Not a promise. Not flowers. Not lace and a church and a kiss that means anything other than paperwork signed in blood.
It’s a consequence.
It’s also a signal that travels faster than any of my men can.
If I put Lidiya in a safe house, only my people know she’s protected. If I give her my name, the entire ecosystem knows. The parasites. The allies. The men who pretend they’re neutral until they smell weakness. A ring is not jewellery to them. It’s a perimeter.
Lidiya thinks I’m proposing because I want to own her.
She’s wrong.
I already own the room. I already own the street. I already own the man who thinks he can buy leverage with a countdown toy and a phone call.
But what I don’t own—what I can’t buy cleanly—is time. And time is what he’s stealing from us. Every hour she is back in Brixton is an hour he can take her and vanish before my people even realise the board has changed.
And he won’t take her like some petty criminal.
Men who throw eighty million at an auction don’t improvise.
They don’t lurk in alleyways. They outsource.
They plan. They have contingency routes, medical kits, and a driver who doesn’t ask questions.
They have a police contact who files the missing person report into a drawer and forgets it.
They have a private clinic that will sedate her without logging a name.
They have a passport mill. They have ports. They have time.
I keep circling back to the number because it keeps circling back to me.
Eighty million is not lust. It’s not an impulse. It’s an investment.
I can put guards on her door. I can put cameras on her street. I can put her in a safe house so anonymous that even she won’t know the address.
And it still won’t be enough if the man behind last night has the reach I suspect he does. Eighty million pounds worth of reach.
Safe houses are quiet. Quiet is easy to cut through if you’re willing to leave bodies behind.
And they were willing last night.
They came into my home. Not to steal. Not to send a message. To retrieve, and if cyanide is part of their standard kit, then “questions later” was never on the table.
I run the options anyway, because that’s what I do when I’m angry, and I can’t hit the source of it.
Option one: I send her home with a tail and pretend normality is armour. Failure point: she walks into a routine she’s lived for years, and routine is the easiest thing in the world to map.
Option two: safe house, full isolation. Failure point: she panics, runs, calls a friend, makes one desperate choice out of claustrophobia and pride—because she is stubborn as sin—and one desperate choice is all they need.
Option three: I keep her here, under my roof, without changing her status. Failure point: she becomes a hostage without the word hostage ever being spoken, and my father gets to define the terms because the terms are undefined.
Option four: I give her my name.
Ugly. Effective. Loud.
War is something my family understands.
Baron will hate it.
He will hate it because it takes a variable out of his control and puts it in mine. It makes Lidiya a Voronov asset in public, not a debtor in private. It forces his hand. Forces everyone’s.
He will also hate it because he knows exactly what a wife is in our structure: a line drawn in ink no one can pretend not to see. It changes who can touch her, who can speak to her, who can order her moved. It changes which councils get a vote. It changes which men think they can bargain with me.
It changes me from a useful son to a man with a household.
Laszlo will call it idiotic. He’ll do it with that lazy cruelty of his, like the words cost him nothing.
But it also gives me something I didn’t have before: permission.
Not my permission. Hers.
If I’m going to keep her under my roof, with my guards at the gates and my locks on the doors and my name stamped across her life like a brand, I need one thing to be true when she looks at me with those furious, frightened eyes.
I need to be able to say she chose it.
Even if she chooses it with her teeth clenched and her pride bleeding out on my expensive piece of shit floor.
Even if she chooses it because the alternative is worse.
She is pressed against the wall, her knees to her chest, my t-shirt pulled over them like it can make her invisible. Bare feet. White knuckles. The angle of her chin is set like she can hold the ceiling up by spite alone.
She looks so small that something in me goes tight and violent.
Not towards her.
Towards the world that made her this way. Towards the man who looked at her and saw a weakness to exploit. Towards anyone who thinks they can reach into my life, tug a string, and watch me dance.
I’ve been the spare my whole life—useful, dangerous, disposable if it suits the heir’s narrative. I’ve taken hits meant for other people and smiled as if it were a privilege. I’ve built my own power in the cracks where Baron isn’t looking.
You learn early, as the spare, that you can do what the fuck you want with little consequences. But not this. This is… family.
She walked onto a stage in a taped-up dress and lifted her chin like she’d rather die than beg.
I should not be feeling anything about her beyond strategy.
But when she looked at me from that stage—when she asked me not to leave without saying a word—I felt the switch flip. The same one that flips when someone threatens my home. My name. My blood.
Mine.
That’s the problem. That’s why Laszlo will look at me like I’m infected with stupidity. That’s why Baron will go very, very still when I tell him.
It’s not just the threat making me do this.
It’s the idea of her in someone else’s hands.
Not because I think she’s fragile. She isn’t. She’s the kind of woman who will bite through pain if it gets her out.
Because I know what men do when they can’t buy compliance.
I know what they do when they want leverage, and they’ve already tried to spend eighty million proving they don’t care about the cost.
I crouch in front of her so I’m not towering. So she can see my eyes and decide whether I’m lying.
I don’t touch her. Touch is the fastest way to turn fear into panic, and I’m not here to win by panic. I’m here to win by consent—however furious.
“I’m not asking because I want a wife,” I say, voice controlled, even as my jaw aches with it. “I’m asking because I want you breathing next week.”
Her gaze snaps to mine, wet with fury.
Good. Fury means she’s still here. Still fighting. Still alive.
“I can lock you in this house without a ring,” I continue, cutting through the thing she’s thinking before she can spit it at me. “I can keep you under guard, move you, hide you, keep you fed and warm and furious until you hate me enough to stab me in my sleep.”
A tremor runs through her, and I don’t know if it’s fear or the fact that I just gave her an image with a blade in it.
She looks away for half a second, and in that fraction, I see it: the calculation, the panic dressed up as contempt, the part of her that wants to survive even as it screams about pride.
“I’m not doing that,” I say. “I’m not taking your choice away and calling it protection.”
She swallows. Her throat works like it hurts.
“So, I’m giving you the ugliest offer I can think of,” I add, because honesty is the only thing that lands with a woman like this. “My name. My consequences. My war.”
I hold her gaze until my eyes burn.
“Marry me,” I say again, quieter. “Not because I deserve you, but because the man who wants you will understand what it costs to touch you if you’re irrevocably mine.”
That’s it. My truth, stripped of softness.
I don’t tell her the other part.
That once she has my name, once the world recognises her as Voronov, I won’t be able to pretend she isn’t mine in private too.
That I don’t know how to want something like her without ruining it.
That if she says yes, I will become the very thing she’s afraid of—only pointed outward, at everyone else.
I wait.
I will wait as long as it takes because, for the first time in a long time, I need an answer I can’t take by force.
And because somewhere beneath all the strategy, beneath the flags and consequences and wars, there is one simple, brutal fact I can’t unlearn now that I’ve seen it:
If she walks out of this house without my name, the world will think she’s available.
And she’s not.