Chapter 41 Lidiya
Lidiya
The knife is still in my hand.
Not because I want it there, but because my fingers won’t accept that the moment is over. They’ve locked around the handle like it’s the only solid thing left in a room where everything has become impossible.
Regina Orlov sits in the chair like an ugly punchline. Her pearls are dark with blood. The fire in the grate keeps cracking, warm and domestic, and I hate it for being so faithful to normality.
There are bodies on the floor.
Not one. More than one. Men folded into shapes that don’t look human anymore. I can see the edge of a boot, a hand turned palm-up like it’s asking a question no one is going to answer.
My throat burns.
It isn’t the worst pain I’ve ever felt, but it’s the most intimate—the reminder that a blade touched me, meant to end me, and didn’t quite get the job done.
Damien moves.
He doesn’t do frantic. He doesn’t panic. He moves like the world is a board and he’s already calculated the next five moves.
His voice slices through the hush.
He’s on the phone again.
Clean up.
I stare at Damien like I’ve never seen him before, like he’s a machine that just switched from seduction to siege.
He turns his head and looks at me, and the shift is immediate. The room becomes background. The dead become background. His eyes sharpen on my throat as he hangs up.
His jaw tightens.
“Is it bleeding?” he asks.
My hand rises to my neck. My fingertips come away bright.
“Yes,” I say, and my voice is rough with smoke and shock. “A little.”
Damien’s gaze goes colder, not at me—at the world.
Damien takes one step toward me and stops like he’s hit an invisible line.
The line is me.
He looks at my hand. The knife. The blood.
“Put it down,” he says.
I don’t move.
I can’t explain why. It isn’t stubbornness. It isn’t defiance. It’s the part of me that knows the moment I let go, I’ll have to feel everything.
Damien’s voice drops. “Lidiya. Put it down.”
My name does something to my chest. It makes space. It makes a crack in the glass.
I exhale.
My fingers loosen.
He takes it from me, and his shoulders ease a fraction, as if he was waiting for that exact proof: weapon down but not spirit broken.
He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t sweep me into his arms like a hero in a film. He stands in front of me and blocks the room with his body, his presence a wall.
“Eyes on me,” he says quietly.
I force myself to look at him.
His eyes are dark. Control under strain.
“You’re leaving,” he says. “We’re leaving.”
I glance past him despite myself, back to Orlov’s chair, the pearls, the stain spreading into the fabric.
“What about—” I swallow, and it pulls on the cut. I hiss. “What about this?”
Damien follows my gaze for a single beat. His expression doesn’t change.
“This gets cleaned,” he says. “Two minutes out.”
Two minutes out.
A timeline. A promise.
“How?” I whisper.
His eyes return to mine. “Completely.”
It should make me feel safer. Instead, it makes me feel complicit, like I’m part of the machinery now simply because I’m standing near the man who runs it.
“Come.” He reaches toward my elbow and stops.
A pause.
Then his hand closes around my elbow, steady and warm. Not gripping. Not owning. Guiding.
We move.
The room behind us feels like it’s trying to cling to my ankles, like blood has gravity. I stumble once, and Damien tightens his grip on my arm, his hold firming just enough to keep me upright.
We cross the threshold into the corridor, and the air changes. Less copper. Less heat. More polish and expensive quiet. The Ashlar swallows what happens in its private rooms and keeps serving its members brandy like nothing is wrong.
Two minutes appear to be up as Damien’s men are moving into place, bodies positioned like furniture. One at the corridor intersection, one at the stairwell. Their faces are blank. Their eyes are not.
We descend the stairs quickly.
My legs are weak and furious about it. My body wants to fold, wants to lie down somewhere dark and safe and stop being a person for a while.
Damien doesn’t hurry me, but he doesn’t slow down. “Keep moving.”
It isn’t an order. It’s a rope thrown to me, so I don’t fall into my own head.
A man waits at the front door. Not one of the men who were there when we walked in.
He opens it before Damien reaches him.
Cold rain hits my face, and I inhale. The air tastes clean compared to the room upstairs. Like the world outside is trying to pretend it isn’t attached to what people do inside.
Damien guides me to the Aston and opens the passenger door. I get in and relax as soon as he slams the door. Out of sight, out of mind.
For now.
Damien gets in beside me and closes his door. He fires up the engine and pulls away from the kerb. The Range Rover has already vanished.
For a few seconds, neither of us speaks.
The rain drums on the roof. The city beyond the tinted glass is blurred, softened, forgiving in a way people aren’t.
My throat pulses. I touch it lightly. The sting is there, dull and persistent.
I look down at my hands.
They are smeared with blood. I clench them and swallow back the horror. My grandfather just killed someone in front of me. That is a sentence I never thought I would say. I’ve never had a grandparent before. I still might not. But something niggles at the back of my mind, telling me that now I do.
“What happened to my parents, do you think?”
“If your mother was Stanislav’s daughter, she was killed…”
He trails off and grips the steering wheel tighter.
“When?” I croak.
“Twenty-eight years ago. She was unmarried.”
My mouth opens and closes.
The anger I was ready to throw has nowhere to land.
“Unmarried. So three dead parents and one unknown. How much more fucked up can this get?”
“Well—”
“It was rhetorical,” I snap. Then I close my eyes and breathe before opening them again and fixing him with an apologetic stare. “I’m sorry. This has been a lot.”
“Don’t ever apologise for feeling. We’re going home,” he says. “You’ll shower. You’ll eat. You’ll give DNA. You’ll sleep. Tomorrow we get an answer.”
I stare at him. “The DNA.”
“Yes.”
“Marek can administer the test.”
“Do you trust him?”
“With my life. Literally.”
“Okay.” I accept it. I’m beginning to learn that in this life, in the life that he leads, trust isn’t something that is handed out to just anyone. Far from it.
I close my eyes briefly again and see Stanislav’s face from earlier, the way he looked at me when he handed me the knife. He was giving me something I’d already earned with my blood.
I didn’t ask him for it.
I didn’t want it.
Yet it’s part of me now: the idea that my body might belong to a story I didn’t live.
A story with his name written in the margins.
I open my eyes.
Damien is watching the windows, not me—tracking reflections, scanning for tails. He doesn’t relax. He’s never relaxed a day in his life, not really.
“How many people are dead?” I ask, quietly.
Damien’s eyes flick to mine. “Enough.”
“That’s not an answer.”
His mouth tightens. “Too many.”
The car turns, and we pass through the gates of Damien’s home.
My body is starting to crash. The adrenaline that held me upright is draining away, leaving behind a cold hollowness. My limbs feel too heavy. My head feels too light.
The car stops.
Damien gets out first, then opens my door and offers his hand.
An offer, not a grab.
I take it because my legs wobble when I stand, and pride is not worth a fall.
He guides me inside, his hand on my back as he leads me through, away from windows, away from doors.
Men move in the periphery—his men resetting the house the way he resets everything after violence. Quiet checks, murmured confirmations, footsteps that stop whenever Damien’s voice cuts through.
“Full perimeter sweep,” he says to someone I don’t see. “Two inside, two outside. Rotation.”
Damien turns to me. “Sit.”
It isn’t a command that expects obedience for obedience’s sake. It’s an instruction, the way you tell a person in shock to sit, because standing is optional and falling is not.
I sit on the sofa, and my hands grip my knees.
Damien stays standing. He looks at me like he’s trying to decide which version of himself will do the least damage right now—the man who holds, or the man who controls, or the man who kills.
“Water?” he asks.
I nod.
He twists the lid on a bottle and hands it to me.
“Thanks,” I say and blow out a breath. Safe here, inside his home, I feel like the world isn’t ending.
“You did good today,” he says, sitting next to me. “But you never, ever, do that again.”
“Do what? Come to your rescue?”
“Exactly. I had it under control.” He smirks, letting me know that is his way of thanking me for helping out, in whatever way I did. I can’t even really remember. It’s hazy. “Are you ready to do the test?”
I pull out the bag I must’ve stuffed back in my pocket at some point. “Yes. Let’s get it done.”
He calls Marek.
Marek answers on the first ring and appears thirty seconds later with a kit and the kind of focus that makes my chest ease.
“Kirill?” Damien asks.
“Good. Sitting up. Being a pain in the arse.”
Damien smiles. “Good.”
“Sit still,” Marek says to me, snapping gloves on. He tilts my chin and swabs the cut. The antiseptic bites. “Superficial. You’ll have a line for a day, then it fades.”
Damien hovers next to me, vibrating containment. I feel him like a heat signature.
“Open,” Marek says, holding the sterile swab.
I part my lips. He sweeps the inside of my cheek, twice, drops the swab into a tube and seals it.
“Blood sample,” I say, and hand him the little bag with Stanislav’s knife. The plastic crinkles.
“Chain of custody,” he murmurs, logging the details on his phone before he cracks the bag, slides the blade out, and scrapes the dried blood into a vial. He caps everything, labels it, then takes another swab of the knife hilt for redundancy. Efficient. Quiet.
“How long?” I ask.
“Fast lane. I can bully six hours. Eight at worst.” His eyes flick to Damien. “If no one tries to set my car on fire en route.”
“No one will touch you,” Damien says, voice flat. “You’ll have an escort.”
Marek nods, packs the kit, then pauses in front of me with a strip of steri-tape. He places it gently over the nick at my throat.
He leaves with the samples. I exhale again when the door closes behind him.
“I smell like fear and marble dust,” I say.
“Shower and then food. I’ll have something sent over. What do you feel like?” He pulls out his phone, ready to call.
“Anything that can get here by the time I’m out of the shower,” I reply, standing up. For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel the heavy drag of my life hanging over me. The terror of being evicted, or losing my job, of starving or freezing to death, is all gone.
It’s all gone because of Damien Voronov.
“What happens tomorrow?” I ask, suddenly.
He pauses from scrolling through his phone. “About what?”
“Me. You. Do I go back to my bedsit?”
“Do you want to go back to your bedsit?” he asks carefully.
“Do you want me to?”
“For fuck’s sake, Lidiya,” he says, rubbing his face. “For once, just be amenable.”
“Answer the question.”
“You are so stubborn. I want you to stay here for the rest of your life. Okay? Does that make you happy?”
Happy isn’t the word I’d pick when my throat stings and the image of Regina is scorched behind my eyes, but something unwinds in my chest anyway. It feels like a lock clicking.
“For the rest of my life is a big ask,” I say, heartbeat stumbling over the scale of it. “You don’t do small, do you?”
“No.”
We stare at each other.
He rises and takes a step forward. “I have a question as well.”
“What is it?”
“Do you forgive me? For what I did? You can still be angry about it, and make me pay in ways I’m sure will be creative, but do you forgive me?”
I stare at him. He is practically begging me in his own way. It matters to him.
“Yes, I forgive you,” I say. “Yes, I’m still sore about it. But I’m not angry. I’ve made my peace with it because you know what? It doesn’t fucking matter anymore. Nothing before that auction matters. It was all a lie, and the sooner I can forget and move on, the better.”
He frowns, a look of concern etched onto his handsome features. “You shouldn’t—”
“Don’t tell me that I should remember. I don’t want to. I want to move on. Starting with a shower and some food.”
He looks like he wants to press the issue, but he doesn’t. Instead, he holds up the phone. “Food will be here soon.”
“Thanks.” I turn away and head for the stairs, but stop when he asks.
“So does this mean you’re staying?”
I let out a soft laugh, and without turning, I take the first step. “Yes, it means I’m staying.”