Chapter 27
Damien
“Move,” I say to Kirill before I’ve even closed the door behind me.
He peels away from the kerb as Lidiya stares at me. “I’m more confused than ever.”
“This visit didn’t go how I expected, but that is on me. I didn’t realise how vapid this woman was.”
She giggles. “Well, I could’ve told you that.”
She sighs and relaxes, staring out of the bulletproof window. “What do you really think about Madam Orlov? Is she really behind all of this? Whatever this is?”
“Orlov is a spider,” I say, keeping my voice level.
“She doesn’t move. She builds. She sits at the centre and waits for things to walk into the web.
The auctions. They have been operating for years, in some form or another.
Legitimate on paper. Tax-deductible, even.
But Kirill pulled records on other women purchased through her events in the last six months.
All blonde. All unattached. All vanished. ”
Lidiya’s head turns from the window. Her face has gone pale beneath the flush the cold air put there. “Vanished?” she repeats.
“Gone. No police reports filed. No family making noise. Clean disappearances that no one noticed because no one was looking.”
“And you think I was supposed to be next.”
I don’t answer that. I don’t need to. She’s smart enough to draw the line between the dots without me holding the pen.
“Hence the building,” she mutters.
The Mercedes slides through Mayfair traffic with the kind of quiet authority that comes from Kirill driving like the road owes him a personal debt. My attention focuses on Sarkov. Assuming it’s one and the same, which experience tells me it is.
Dmitri Sarkov. Forty-one. Born in Volgograd, raised in Cyprus, educated nowhere that matters.
A fixer in the truest sense—he doesn’t build empires.
He services them. Procurement, logistics, the quiet architecture of making problems disappear and assets appear.
He’s the man you call when you need something done without fingerprints, and he charges enough to ensure his silence is part of the package.
I know the name because it’s crossed my desk before.
Two years ago, Sarkov brokered a weapons shipment that skirted Voronov territory without paying tribute.
Baron let it slide because the buyer was an ally and the margin was thin.
But the principle stood: Sarkov operates in our ecosystem without being part of it.
He’s a parasite with good manners and better contacts.
The fact that he’s involved tells me something important. Whoever is behind this isn’t Bratva. Bratva would use their own people. Sarkov is a freelancer, which means the money is coming from outside the structure. Outside the rules.
That makes it worse.
Rules I understand. Rules I can exploit, bend, break on my terms. But someone operating outside the structure has no ceiling on what they’ll do and no floor on how low they’ll go.
“Sarkov works for the highest bidder. He doesn’t have loyalties. He has invoices. He is a tool,” I say, thinking out loud. “Expensive, reliable, but still a tool. He doesn’t pick targets. He acquires them.”
“So who picks them?” Lidiya asks.
“That’s what Orlov is going to tell me.”
The Ashlar materialises on our left. From the outside, it’s nothing. A Georgian front with a black door and a discreet brass plaque so small you’d walk past it unless you already knew it was there. No queue. No bouncer visible from the street. Just money pretending to be invisible.
Kirill pulls into a space on a side street and kills the engine. He catches my eye in the rear-view mirror. “How do we do this?”
“Through the front door,” I say with a slow smile.
He chuckles and checks his weapon.
Lidiya’s eyes widen.
“This might get ugly. If I say duck, you fucking duck, no questions asked. If I say run, you go out of the front door and turn left. Always left. Most people will go right. It’s instinct. Got it?”
“Left. Then what? Keep running?”
“Head towards Claridges.”
“The hotel?”
I nod. “Enter the foyer and sit where everyone can see you. Make a scene if you must. Get as many eyes on you as possible. Make them remember you.”
She gulps. “Okay. Eyes.”
I hesitate and then break the rules again. I can’t help myself. I place my hand on the back of her neck and lean in close. “It’s a last resort. Most people know not to go up against a Voronov; more people know not to go up against me.”
“What do I do in the meantime?”
“Walk in there like you aren’t Lidiya Kareva, but Lidiya Voronova,” I say, my lips curving up at one side.
She gives me a death stare, but I can see the humour behind it. “Not sure I know how that goes.”
“Chin up, no emotion. Don’t say a word. Silence will be your weapon.”
“The silent little woman.”
“The silent woman who has a killer who will spill blood to protect her.” Without waiting for permission, I lean closer and brush my lips over hers.
She freezes, but then her fingers grip the lapel of my coat, and she deepens it, swirling her tongue around mine.
The taste of her is a detonation. Sweet, warm, and underneath all of it—hunger.
Not the kind that food fixes. The kind that’s been starving for something it couldn’t name, and just found it in the worst possible place.
Her fingers tighten on my lapel, pulling me closer, and the sound she makes is small, involuntary, and buried in the back of her throat, rewiring something fundamental in my brain.
Every strategic thought I’ve spent the morning constructing dissolves like sugar in acid.
There is no Orlov. No Sarkov. No Ashlar.
There is only her mouth, her grip, the way her body arches toward mine like it’s forgotten every rule she set.
I want to devour her. I want to drag her across this back seat and find out what other sounds she makes when she stops fighting herself.
I want to feel her come apart under my hands in the back of a car on a Mayfair side street at eleven in the morning with Kirill watching, and I don’t give a single fuck about the optics.
But I don’t.
I pull back. Slowly. Deliberately. Enough to break the seal of her mouth against mine, but not enough to lose the heat between us. Her eyes open, dazed, pupils blown wide, lips swollen and parted. She looks wrecked. She looks like she wants to do it again and kill me for making her want it.
“Rule one,” she whispers. “Forget what I said.”
I run my thumb across her lower lip. “Already have.”
Her hand releases my lapel like it’s burned her, and she sits back against the leather, breathing hard.
“Ready?”
She swallows, runs her hands over her hair to smooth it, and lifts her chin.
The transformation is instant. One second, she’s flushed and off-balance, the next, she’s ice.
Jaw set. Eyes flat. The kind of composure that doesn’t come from training—it comes from years of pretending you’re not falling apart while the world watches.
She’s a natural.
“Ready,” she says.
I step out of the car with the Glock sitting snug against the small of my back, the knuckleduster a familiar weight in my right pocket.
Kirill falls in behind us as I open Lidiya’s door and offer my hand.
She takes it, steps out onto the pavement, and drops it the second she’s steady.
Clean. Precise. Like a woman who takes what she needs and nothing more.
The black door of the Ashlar has no handle on the outside. There’s a buzzer recessed into the brass plate, so discreet it could pass for a rivet. I press it once. A camera clicks somewhere above us, the kind you hear but can’t see.
The door opens inward. A man in a charcoal suit fills the frame—mid-fifties, ex-military bearing, hands clasped in front of him like he’s guarding the gates of something holy.
“Members only,” he says. “No guests without prior arrangement.”
“Damien Voronov,” I say. “Here to see Regina Orlov.”
The man’s gaze flicks to Lidiya and then back to me. His posture firms.
“No,” he says, flat.
I smile slowly. “You misunderstand. That wasn’t a request.”
He shifts forward, shoulder squaring as he moves to shut the door again. “Mr Voronov, you’re not entering the Ashlar.”
He reaches to push me back. In the same motion, his forearm catches Lidiya—hard—clipping her shoulder as if she’s collateral in a doorway dispute. His fingers grab her upper arm for a second, trying to move her out of the way.
Lidiya gasps, stumbling half a step.
Something in my chest goes cold and quiet.
“Don’t touch her,” I say softly.
“You need to leave.”
I ignore him.
The knuckleduster is already on my hand, the silver catching the light, and I drive it into his face with a short, efficient punch.
Crack.
He reels back into the doorframe, hands flying up too late, blood blooming fast. His eyes go wide with shock before pain can even organise itself.
I step in close, just enough that he hears me over the sudden hush.
“House rules,” I murmur, “are that you keep your hands to yourself.”
Then I glance at Lidiya. A check. Unhurt.
“Inside,” I say, and guide her past the threshold like the door has never had the option of being closed to me.
Inside, the Ashlar smells like old leather, cedar, and the particular brand of discretion that costs six figures a year in membership fees.
The hallway is narrow, panelled in dark wood, lit by wall sconces that cast more shadow than light.
Designed to make you feel like you’re walking into something private.
Something that doesn’t want to be found.
Lidiya walks beside me, and she’s doing it. Chin up. No expression.
A second man appears at the end of the corridor—younger, sharper suit, earpiece. He gives Kirill a look that lasts one second too long.
“Mr Voronov,” he says, addressing me without being told who to address. “Madam Orlov is in the reading room. She’s not expecting visitors.”
“She’s expecting me,” I say. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”