Chapter Six #4
Gennady looked around the room, and the color in his face deepened when no one came to his defense.
Nadia hadn’t begged.
She hadn’t explained herself into smaller pieces.
She’d cut his claim at the root and left it bleeding in front of men who understood what chosen loyalty meant.
Gennady laughed, but it came out wrong. “Pretty speech. Did he write it for you?”
Nadia’s fingers tightened on the chair.
I moved one step.
Gennady saw it and lifted both hands. “No offense meant.”
“You meant it,” I said. “You’re simply frightened by the cost.”
The door opened behind him, and Lev brought Petya in.
Nadia’s breath caught.
Petya looked worse than the photograph in some ways and better in others.
His jaw was still bruised from trouble that had started before my men reached him.
His hair was mussed, and shame sat heavy in the rigid line of his shoulders.
But he was standing. He wasn’t bleeding. No one had bound his hands.
He saw Nadia and took one step toward her.
My man shifted.
“Let him,” I said.
Petya crossed the room and stopped two feet from Nadia as if he didn’t trust himself to touch her.
“Nadia,” he said, rough and low.
She stepped into him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.
Petya bent over her, holding on with both hands.
He was taller than she was, young and rigid and trying not to shake.
For one moment, he looked twenty instead of doomed.
A reckless young man who had nearly sold his sister to a monster without understanding the shape of the knife until it was already in her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said against her hair. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” she said.
“I didn’t know he’d—”
Nadia pulled back and looked up at him. “Don’t finish that sentence by making it about what you didn’t know. You knew enough to lie.”
Petya flinched.
He nodded, jaw tight. “I knew enough.”
Gennady made a soft, amused sound. “Touching. The little debtor confesses.”
Petya turned.
His fists closed.
Nadia caught his sleeve with one hand, just as she had at The Samovar Room.
This time, Petya didn’t try to pull away.
“You don’t get to talk about her,” Petya said.
Gennady smiled. “I talked about her before you understood what your debt was worth.”
Petya took a breath through his nose. His shoulders shook with the effort it cost him not to move.
“It was my debt,” Petya said. “My failure. Mine. You used it to get to her because you’re too weak to stand in front of a woman who told you no.”
The smile slid from Gennady’s face.
Petya looked at Nadia. “I won’t make you carry this for me again.”
Nadia’s eyes shone. “You’re going to spend a long time proving that.”
“I know.”
I looked at Lev.
Lev guided Petya and Nadia back from the center of the room without touching either of them. Nadia didn’t sit. She stood beside the chair with Petya at her shoulder and my men positioned behind them.
The older Kask witness cleared his throat. “Perhaps this can be settled financially.”
Gennady turned on him. “Be quiet.”
The older man’s eyes hardened. “You have put us in a room with Mikhail Sorin, a bribed auctioneer, an altered lot order, an inflated debt, and a demand written like a whore’s invoice. I suggest you speak less.”
Gennady’s face went red. “She was on the block.”
I hit him before the final consonant left his mouth.
The blow drove him sideways into the table. Glasses jumped. One of the Kask men reached inside his jacket and froze when three guns answered from my side of the room.
Nadia didn’t cry out.
Petya moved half a step in front of her and then stopped himself.
Gennady pushed up with blood on his teeth. “You can’t—”
I caught him by the back of the neck and drove him down against the table hard enough to make the wood crack under his cheek.
“I can,” I said. “You’re breathing because this room benefits from witnesses, not because I lack permission.”
His fingers clawed at the polished surface.
I leaned close enough for him to hear me without forcing Nadia to hear every word.
“The debt is dead. The auction claim is dead. Your demand is dead. If your family wants to contest any of that, they can begin by explaining why a Kask collector bribed an auctioneer and then demanded compensation from the Sorins after failing to keep the woman he targeted through coercion.”
Gennady spit blood. “She’ll get bored of being your pet.”
I shoved his face harder into the table.
Nadia’s voice cut across the room. “Don’t.”
I stopped.
Not because Gennady deserved the mercy.
Because she’d asked.
I turned my head.
Nadia stood with both hands at her sides. Her face was white, but her eyes were dry and fixed on mine.
“Don’t make him the center of this,” she said. “He wants the room to be about what he can make men do.”
My grip stayed in Gennady’s hair.
Nadia looked at him then. “I’m done being in rooms built around what you want.”
I heard the truth in it before the anger in me wanted to.
She was right.
I released him and stepped back.
Gennady sagged against the table, coughing blood onto the polished wood.
Mikhail’s cane tapped again.
The sound was small. It still took the room.
“Gennady Kask acted outside acceptable bounds,” my father said. “The Yelchin debt is void under Sorin authority. The auctioneer’s settlement is void. Any Kask attempt to reach Petya Yelchin, Nadia Yelchin, or any person under Vadim Sorin’s roof will be treated as a move against our family.”
The older Kask witness inclined his head. “I’ll carry that back.”
Gennady lifted his bloodied face. “You don’t speak for us.”
“I do today,” the older man said. “You made sure of that.”
Gennady lurched toward Nadia.
It was stupid, desperate, and perfect.
He didn’t get three feet.
I caught him by the throat and drove him backward into the wall. The impact cracked plaster behind his skull. My forearm pinned his chest. My other hand closed around his wrist before he could reach inside his jacket.
A small knife hit the floor.
Petya cursed.
Lev had the blade under his shoe before it stopped spinning.
Gennady’s eyes bulged. His hands scrabbled at my sleeve.
I heard Nadia breathe in behind me.
I didn’t look away from Gennady.
“You reached for her in my room,” I said.
He dragged in a thin breath. No words came with it.
“You reached after she told you no. You reached after every witness here heard you warned. You reached because men like you never learn from words.”
I eased pressure from his throat just enough to let him drag air.
He wheezed, “She isn’t worth this.”
I looked at him and felt nothing hot left in me.
“No,” I said. “You were never worth her fear.”
I stepped back.
My men took him before he could fall. One twisted his arms behind his back. Another stripped the rings from his fingers and dropped them into a glass dish on the sideboard with small, bright clinks.
The older Kask witness looked at the knife, then at Gennady. Disgust pulled at his mouth.
“We won’t defend this,” he said.
“No,” Mikhail said. “You won’t.”
Gennady thrashed once. “You Sorin bastards think this ends me?”
I turned to the older Kask man. “Does it?”
The man glanced at Mikhail, then at me, then at Nadia.
“It ends him in any room where my family still expects to breathe easily,” he said. “What remains will be handled.”
Gennady shouted, “She’ll always know what she cost!”
Nadia stepped forward before my hand could close again.
Her voice stayed steady. “I know exactly what I cost. More than you could afford.”
Gennady’s face twisted.
I nodded to my men.
They took him out through the side door.
His voice faded down the hall.
Then the hallway went quiet.
No one in the room moved for several seconds.
Nadia’s breath shook once.
I turned to her.
Petya stood beside her, face pale, fists open now.
He looked from the empty doorway to me with the blunt understanding of a young man realizing danger hadn’t ended because someone shouted louder.
The Sorins had protected his sister. Now he would have to become the kind of man who didn’t make her protection necessary.
“Petya,” I said.
He straightened. “Yes.”
He didn’t call me sir. He didn’t call me Vadim. He had no idea what to call me, and for once, he’d had the sense not to guess.
“You’ll stay under my protection until I say the risk has passed. You’ll work where Lev places you. You’ll repay your sister with every honest choice you make from this day forward, because there is no amount of money large enough to repay what she was willing to lose for you.”
Petya’s throat moved. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t. You’ll understand after time has cost you enough pride to make room for sense.”
Nadia looked down.
Her mouth curved for half a second.
Petya saw it and nearly broke.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Whatever job. Whatever rules. I’ll do it.”
Nadia reached for his hand.
He took it.
Mikhail watched them, his expression unreadable. Then he looked at me. “You’ll marry her quickly.”
Nadia’s head lifted.
I met my father’s gaze. “Yes.”
“Not because scandal requires it.”
“No.”
“Say why.”
The old bastard.
Even half-ill, he couldn’t resist making a room into a test.
I turned to Nadia instead of answering him.
She stood between her brother and my table, in the coat I’d ordered for movement, with her dark hair loose around her shoulders and her eyes still bright from refusing the man who had tried to own her.
She was pale from fear and exhaustion, but her chin stayed lifted.
She’d stopped my hand when violence began serving Gennady’s hunger for attention instead of her safety.
I walked to her and stopped close enough that only she could decide whether to touch me.