Chapter 28
Lidiya
Damien’s gaze locks onto mine. If he is surprised by this grenade, he doesn’t show it.
“Explain,” I croak, moving closer to Madam Orlov.
“It’s not for me to share, and it’s really not my concern. I have already said more than I wanted to.”
Damien leans forward again. The air of menace is back, and I shiver, even with the heat from the fire. “Explain to Lidiya why you think Gorbachev is her grandfather.”
Orlov doesn’t speak immediately. Damien rises and casually steps forward, forcing her to look up at him. He bends down and wraps his hand around her throat, not tightly, but enough to give a warning she takes seriously.
“I don’t think, I know. You have been missing for a very long time, Anna.”
The blood drains from my face. “Anna?”
Damien lets go of Orlov and snaps his hand out to grip my elbow before I faint.
What is going on?
The room tilts. Not a gentle sway but a full, nauseating lurch, like someone’s grabbed the floor and yanked it sideways. Damien’s grip on my elbow is the only reason I’m still vertical, and I hate that, hate that my body keeps defaulting to him as the thing that stops me from hitting the ground.
“My name is Lidiya,” I say, and my voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a very long tunnel. “Lidiya Kareva.”
Orlov’s expression is infuriatingly calm for a woman who just detonated a bomb in the middle of my identity.
“Your parents,” she says. “Viktor and Nadia Kareva. They were not your parents. They were your abductors.”
The words don’t land. They hover in front of me like subtitles in a language I don’t speak, refusing to arrange themselves into meaning.
Not my parents.
My abductors?
“You’re lying,” I say, and the conviction in my voice surprises me because underneath it, something is crumbling.
Something foundational. A crack running through concrete I always assumed was solid, spreading now, branching into fissures that threaten to bring the whole structure down.
“Stanislav Gorbachev’s granddaughter was taken from a dacha outside Moscow in 1999,” Orlov continues, her voice carrying the clinical detachment of someone reciting a case file rather than dismantling a human being.
“She was ten months old. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. The family searched for years. Private investigators. Interpol. Every resource a man of his wealth could deploy. Nothing. The child had been taken by people who knew how to disappear.”
“Stop,” I whisper.
She doesn’t stop.
“The man who took you was a courier. Low-level, expendable, the kind of man organisations use and discard. He owed money to people who traded in more than debt, and when the opportunity arose to relocate a child in exchange for the erasure of what he owed, he took it. He and his wife moved to London with a forged birth certificate and a ten-month-old girl who didn’t know anything. ”
My knees buckle. Damien catches me, both hands now, one on my elbow, one on my waist, and he pulls me against him with the kind of urgency that tells me this isn’t a performance. This is reflex.
“How do you know it’s me?” I ask, chin up.
“Or do I just fit the description and age? Like those other women? And probably thousands more. Is this Stanislav just going around trying his luck? And why bid on me at an auction? Why not just try to talk to me? Explain the situation?” I fire out all these questions she probably doesn’t have the answers to.
But I don’t care. I need to ask them to someone.
“I don’t have the answers to the questions,” she says dismissively, and picks up her file. “You got your money’s worth. Now leave.”
Damien doesn’t move. His hands stay on me, steady and warm, but the rest of him has gone very still. The kind of still that precedes violence, the way silence precedes thunder.
“You’re dismissing her,” he says, and his voice is almost pleasant. Almost. “After dropping a live grenade into her lap.”
“I gave you what you asked for. A name. What you do with the collateral information is your business.” Orlov opens her folio and slides her reading glasses back on, as if we’ve already ceased to exist.
Damien releases me. Gently. Deliberately. He straightens his cuffs, and I know that gesture now. It’s the one that comes before something irreversible.
“Regina,” he says. “Look at me.”
She doesn’t.
He picks up her teacup and smashes it against the side table. Porcelain explodes across the green carpet like shrapnel, and the reading room goes absolutely silent. Every newspaper lowers. Every conversation dies. The fire keeps crackling because fire doesn’t care about etiquette.
Orlov’s hands freeze on the folio. She looks up at him over the rims of her glasses, and for the first time, I see something cold. Colder than I have ever seen.
“You will tell her everything you know,” Damien says.
The soft sound of a click makes me turn my head.
A security guard has moved silently and stepped up to Damien, gun pointed at his temple.
I gasp, my hand going over my mouth.
Damien smirks and holds his hands up halfway.
“You have overstayed your welcome,” Orlov states, her voice like ice, as Kirill levels a gun at the guard. “Leave before this gets messy.”
“It will get messy when I put a bullet in your man’s face,” Kirill growls.
She smiles. Slow. Sinister.
“Try it and see who dies first out of the three of you.”
Damien moves like lightning. He spins around, his coat flaring behind him as he takes one step towards me, pulling me into his side and shielding me from something. Someone.
“Lay a finger on her, and you will see what a Voronov army looks like,” he states. There is no dramatics. Just a simple fact.
“Leave, and none of us has to find out how this could end,” Orlov says. “He will be coming. I have told you all I know for the price you gave me.”
“Ah, yes. The yacht. I’ll be taking that back, Regina. Don’t get too comfortable.”
Her eyes flash with danger, but she simply inclines her head as Damien turns us, keeping me firmly tucked against him.
My gaze lands on the man who was about to hurt me.
He is twice my size and looks like he breaks necks between bench presses.
I gulp and drop my gaze, not wanting to provoke him into doing something we will all regret.
“Kirill,” Damien says, stalking away. “Let’s leave the Madam to her… tea.”
The cold air hits me like a wall as we step through the black door and onto the pavement.
My legs are moving, but I’m not driving them.
Damien’s arm is locked around my waist, propelling me forward with the kind of purposeful stride that says we are leaving, not running, and the distinction matters even if my body can’t tell the difference.
Kirill moves forward to open the door before sliding into the driver’s seat and roaring the engine to life.
Damien guides me into the back seat and slides in after me. The door closes. The locks engage. Kirill pulls out without a word, and the Ashlar disappears behind us like it was never there.
I stare at my hands in my lap. They’re shaking. Not the fine, barely visible tremor from this morning. Full, visible shaking, the kind that makes your fingers useless and your jaw ache from clenching it to stop your teeth from chattering.
Not my parents.
My abductors.
“Is she lying?” I ask, even though I don’t expect an answer.
The words keep replaying, a loop I can’t pause or mute, each repetition stripping away another layer of something I thought was bedrock.
“It’s possible. But the truth costs her nothing. She has already been paid.”
“Paid,” I say bitterly. “Paid to do what, exactly? This is what I can’t figure out. Where does the eighty million come in? Why did he bid for me when he could’ve taken me for free?”
Damien sits simmering for a long moment and then breathes out.
“Because that was Orlov’s price. She found you.
She kept you a secret and Stanislav’s price for you was driven up by me.
I was warned to stay away from you. Warned to stay away from the auction.
Your grandfather was bidding on you to get you away from Orlov. ”
“I was never in Orlov’s sphere until the auction!” I exclaim. This is starting to make me feel sick.
Damien lets out a dark chuckle. “Oh, you were. The person who sent the fake bomb to my house, who called me afterwards, didn’t work for him; they worked for her. I was a potential spanner in her little game, and she didn’t want anything to fuck it up.”
“Only, she ended up with far more than she ever bargained for,” Kirill grits out from the front.
“No, shit,” Damien mutters. “She must’ve thought all her fucking birthdays had come at once.”
“Wait,” I say, shaking my head. “This makes no sense. Orlov didn’t have me. This man could’ve found me easily, surely if you’re saying she did.”
“Easily? No. Look at the number of women they have gone through already, only to find they were not the ones.”
“So you drove up the price, and he didn’t get me to… spend two hours with him while he told me my whole life was a lie?”
“Probably to DNA test you,” Kirill pipes up as Damien shoots him an annoyed glare.
“Oh, my fucking God!” I snap, smacking my palm on the tinted window. “This is beyond ridiculous.”
But something deep and dark in my soul screams at me that it’s true.
I never really felt connected to my parents.
And there were times I felt they were so dismissive of me.
“My dad, supposed dad, got money for kidnapping me and then somehow ended up in debt to your dad. How the fuck does that work?”
“Some people are bad with money.”
“No fucking shit,” I mumble, staring out of the window. “So, who is my dad? My real dad and mum? This man is my grandfather, so where are my parents?”
“Good question,” Damien says. “We will find out. But the real issue is to penetrate every single aspect of your life to find out why Orlov held that much power over this bid. She must’ve had you watched, protected, even from a distance.
They were watching your place of work. They knew I was there.
Can you recall anyone following you, or seeing the same face more than once in a day?
Anything? Apart from Alisha? Who clearly was on Orlov’s payroll. ”
“I work in a café. We had regulars all the time.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Was there anyone suspicious? Watching you too much? Coming in all the time and staying for longer than necessary? Anything like that? Think, Lidiya.”
“I am thinking!”
“No, you are spiralling. You need to focus.”
“Well, I’m sorry that I’m not Bratva and hard and able to process things and move on at the speed of light.”
He leans over and grips my chin firmly. “Lidiya,” he says, almost like a warning. “Eyes on me.”
I lock gazes with him, and I drown in those blue depths. This is all too much.
“Kirill, pull over and get out. Go for a walk.”
I blink as he pulls the car into a church car park and kills the engine. I barely register him getting out as I continue to stare into Damien’s eyes.