Chapter 22
Lidiya
You don’t need to worry about your rent anymore. You own the building.
I’m not sure which emotion hits me first. Rage. Shock. Fear. Relief. Resentment. Embarrassment. The list isn’t exhaustive.
They cycle through me like a slot machine that can’t land on a jackpot, just spinning and spinning while I stand in the middle of a guest bedroom that costs more than every flat on my street combined.
I own a building.
I own a building in Brixton. The building where I rent a bedsit with a broken radiator and mould creeping up the bathroom wall like ivy with ambitions.
The building where Mrs Okafor plays gospel music on the ground floor at six in the morning, and Mr Hennessey smokes out of his window on the second floor and flicks the butts into the alley.
The building where I’ve lived for three years, terrified every month that the rent would go up and I’d be sleeping in a doorway.
That building. Mine.
The word doesn’t compute. It sits in my head like a foreign object, something swallowed by accident that the body doesn’t know how to process.
Mine. I’ve never owned anything worth more than the contents of my cardigan pocket.
The mattress in my bedsit came with the room, stained and sagging in the middle, and I’ve slept on it for three years without complaint because complaining requires the energy I spent on survival.
And now I own a building.
My legs give out, and I sit on the edge of the bed hard enough to bounce. The mattress catches me like it’s been waiting for exactly this moment—a soft, expensive catch that absorbs the impact of a woman’s entire worldview collapsing.
I press my palms flat against the duvet and stare at the wall opposite. It’s painted a shade of grey with a tasteful, small watercolour hanging on it—abstract, muted blues and greens.
My breathing is ragged. Not crying-ragged. Processing-ragged. The kind of breathing your body does when it’s trying to keep the engine running while the dashboard lights all flash at once.
He bought my building.
He bought my building the way someone buys a coffee. One phone call. Proceed. Rush it through. I don’t care about the cost. Ten words, and the axis of my entire existence tilted.
Those frantic 3 AM calculations that still added up to less than five pounds a week for food, no matter how many times I did the maths, dissolve like salt in water.
My chest hitches with a breath that comes out half-laugh, half-sob, trying to stop whatever’s rising there—this feeling like drowning in reverse.
Think, Lidiya. Think about what this means. Not the fairy tale version—the real one.
A building has tenants. Tenants pay rent. Rent is income. Income means I don’t have to scrape together pennies from a tip jar to feed myself. Income means heating. Income means I could buy shampoo that doesn’t come from the pound shop. Income means—
I drop my hands and stare at the ceiling.
Income means he’s tied me to something I can’t walk away from.
A building isn’t a gift you tuck in a drawer and forget. It’s a responsibility. It’s maintenance and insurance and council tax and a hundred other things I don’t understand because I’ve never owned anything more complex than a kettle.
He didn’t just give me security. He gave me a chain made of other people’s lives.
Fucker.
The fury returns, familiar and almost comforting after the vertigo of the last few minutes. I cling to it because fury is a language I speak fluently, and gratitude is something I’ve never been able to afford.
I stand up and cross the room, yanking the door open and marching down the stairs.
Damien is sitting in the living area, staring at a tablet like it owes him money.
“How dare you?” I snap and then raise my hand when he looks up. “If you say easily, I will claw your fucking eyes out.”
He raises an eyebrow. “What did I do this time, solnyshko?”
“You know damn well what you did! You didn’t just hand me a passive income stream; you forced me into a responsibility that I have no business being responsible for!
I don’t know the first thing about owning a building.
I do not have the funds to fix everything that needs fixing.
I do not have the funds to pay all of the bills on it.
You made everything worse!” I shove my hands into my hair, spiralling fast.
He is in front of me in under two seconds, grasping my wrists and pulling me closer to him.
“Lidiya, listen to me,” he says, and his voice drops into that register that bypasses my brain and speaks directly to something primal.
“The building is in your name. The existing management company stays in place. They handle maintenance, insurance, tenant issues, everything. You don’t have to fix a single pipe or answer a single phone call.
The income is deposited into an account that’s already been set up.
You are not expected to go around with a toolkit fixing broken radiators, nor do you need funds to pay for the upkeep and bills. All you have to do is exist.”
“All I have to do is exist,” I repeat, and the hysteria bubbles up again.
My focus diverts to the scratch I left on his cheek earlier, which has dried into a thin, dark line, and I feel a spike of something that isn’t quite guilt but isn’t quite satisfaction either.
“The management company,” I say slowly, forcing my brain to engage instead of combust. “Who pays them?”
“The rental income covers it. It’s already structured. The building turns a profit after management fees, maintenance reserves, and building insurance. You net roughly ten thousand a month without lifting a finger.”
Ten thousand a month.
The number doesn’t land. It bounces off whatever part of my brain is responsible for processing reality and ricochets around my skull like a pinball.
“You’re hyperventilating,” Damien says.
“I’m not hyperventilating. I’m having a perfectly reasonable physiological response to having my entire financial existence rewritten in the time it takes to boil a kettle without my permission.”
“You want to give your permission to earn ten thousand pounds a month without lifting a finger?”
“That isn’t how my world works,” I grit out.
“It is now.” His grip on my wrists loosens, but he doesn’t let go.
“It is now,” I repeat. “Because you said so.”
“You didn’t want my name. You still get what I can give you. Protection.”
“How does this protect me?”
“It gives you a place where your name is in the legal system. If you go missing or end up dead, there will be investigations. The building is leverage.”
“Leverage for the police wanting to find my dead body in a ditch?”
“Leverage for legal bodies requiring answers.”
“So this is protection? Not a favour that I will end up owing at some point further down the line?”
“It’s protection,” he says. “Not a tab I’ll call in later.”
“You’re touching me.” I stare at his hands on my wrists. “First condition.”
He lets go immediately. “Noted.” No flinch. No argument. He steps back just enough that my lungs remember their job.
“How does this not bind me to you?” I ask, quieter now, because the numbers he threw at me are still ricocheting through my skull. “In a way I can’t get out of.”
“The freehold is in your name,” he says.
“No debt on it. There’s a trust instrument that prevents anyone—including me—from placing a charge against it without your written consent.
Management stays as-is. You get statements.
If you hate the company, we sack them and hire another.
The account is yours. A card will arrive this afternoon.
You can change every password. I don’t have access. ”
He’s so calm, I want to scream. “And when you change your mind?”
“I can’t. It’s not up to me.”
“But you paid for it. Exchange another yacht?” I snarl, hating that I’m being so bitchy, but fuck me. How is this my life now?
He snorts. “No. Only had the one.”
I can’t help my smile, but it vanishes quickly. “I’m sorry you had to give it away.”
“I’ll get it back.”
I frown. “How?”
“Madam Orlov and I need to have a conversation. One where she is going to cough up information and give me Babushka Voronova’s yacht back.”
“Babushka?” I croak. “You gave away your granny’s yacht?” For me.
“How else was I going to pay up a hundred million for two hours of your time?”
I ignore that question as rhetorical and latch onto the information part. “What information? On the other bidder? Does she even know?”
“Oh, she knows all right,” he growls, and I step back slightly as he has switched from charming to violent in a heartbeat, and the air of menace sends a skitter of fear over my forearms.
“What makes you say that?” I think back to the elegant old woman with a spine of steel who let me stand there while two men bid on me in amounts of money I can’t even fathom. “You think she’s in on it?”
“More than that. I think she is it.”
My brows knit together as goosebumps rise along my arms, a chill spreading from my chest outward. “How? She didn’t know I was going to join the auction. I didn’t even know until the last minute.”
But then it hits me like a bolt of lightning.
“Alisha,” I gulp. “She convinced me. She was furious that the bids went so high. I thought she was going to attack me. Is she involved in this?”
“We will find out. Last name?”
“I don’t know,” I say, panic hitting my chest. “I can’t think… we aren’t close. She works at the café.”
“Not a problem. Kirill?” he calls out, and the assistant, who looks more like a byk than a PA, saunters into the room.
“There is a woman who works at Lucy’s café, goes by Alisha. Find out everything you can about her,” Damien instructs.
Kirill nods once, and then he glances at me, his gaze dropping to my bare legs for half a second before Damien makes a noise that sounds like a feral animal about to attack and pulls me behind him.
“Eyes up,” he spits out. “Look at her again, and you will have two empty sockets where your eyeballs used to be.”
I gasp at the violent threat, but Kirill takes it seriously.
“Yes, sir,” he murmurs and slinks back out, with less arrogance than his entry.
Damien’s body is a wall in front of me as he turns around, radiating heat and fury, and it hits me that he didn’t even look to check if Kirill obeyed. He just assumed it. Because people obey him.
“You can’t threaten to scoop his eyes out because he glanced at my legs,” I say, voice thin with leftover adrenaline. “That’s… medieval.”
“He looked at what belongs to me,” he says without a blink.
“I don’t belong to you,” I bite out.
His gaze drops to my mouth and then back to my eyes, slow as sin. “Then I’m very territorial about public assets.”
A small, treacherous part of me melts at that, which disgusts me enough that I wrench the conversation back where I can breathe. “Alisha,” I say. “You think she set me up?”
“I think everyone in your orbit is a variable until they’re ruled out.” His tone is clinical now, the cut of it clean. “She pushed you towards the auction. That earns her a closer look.”
I wrap my arms around myself and feel the soft drag of his t-shirt against my skin.
“On Thursday, before you showed up, she asked if I had signed up. Said the deadline was at noon. I thought at first maybe she wanted a friendly face there, but she practically abandoned me the second we walked into the building. Why would she care so much if she wasn’t that bothered if I was there or not?
” I don’t want to think the worst of her, but at the same time, I don’t owe her anything.
She was someone to exchange words with at work, so I had a bit of normal conversation with another human being.
“Did she start working there before or after you?”
“After,” I croak.
“She is suspect number one until we learn more. Do you have her number?”
I shake my head.
“Kirill will learn everything about her in under an hour. We will figure this out, I promise you.”
If anything was going to soften me towards him, it’s that. He is caring for me, looking out for me.
Without conscious thought, I step closer and wrap my arms around him, enjoying the feel of his hard body pressed against mine.
He hesitates for a second and then crushes me to him, his hand going into my hair as I just stand there, wondering what I did to piss Madam Orlov off so much that she set me up to be sold to some unknown man for God knows what reason.