"I'm not saying anything yet, because I don't know anything yet." He reaches over, takes my hand, presses a kiss to my knuckles like he's trying to anchor both of us at once. "But I intend to."
"Volody."
"I'm not going to do anything that hurts you, Liv. I need you to hear that clearly." His thumb traces slow circles over my hand. "But your brother just sent you a message that sounds less like a man asking his sister for a favor and more like a man under enough pressure to start spending things that don't belong to him. I'd like to understand exactly what that pressure is, and exactly who's applying it."
"Why does it matter to you? You barely know either of us."
"Because whatever this is," he says, gesturing vaguely between us, "I don't intend to let your brother's fuck-ups decide the future of it. And because the version of you I watched walk back into that room last night, chin up, after finding out what your own family did to you, that version deserves to know the whole truth, not just the parts Cole feels like handing over a text at a time."
Gratitude and grief war in my chest. Nobody has ever offered to fight for the truth on my behalf before. I've spent six years being the one who finds things out the hard way and handles them alone. Having someone volunteer to stand beside me while I do it feels almost disorienting, like learning to walk on a leg I didn't know I'd been favoring.
"What do you need from me?" I ask.
"Nothing yet. Just don't answer him today. Let him sit in his own silence for a while and see how he likes it." A faint, humorless smile flickers across his mouth. "You’ve sacrificed enough for him, Liv. Don’t let him take your peace, too. Not now.”
I nod, even though every old, well-worn instinct in me wants to text back immediately, smooth things over, make sure he's okay, the way I've done on autopilot for six straight years. Ittakes real, deliberate effort to set the phone face down on the nightstand instead and leave it there.
Volody watches me do it, something proud and careful moving behind his eyes, like he understands exactly how much that small motion cost me.
"Good girl," he says, quiet, not the teasing kind from last night, something gentler underneath it, and it warms me despite everything else churning in my mind.
He gets up not long after, pulls on a pair of sweatpants, and disappears toward the kitchen. I hear him on the phone a few minutes later, voice low and clipped in a way I haven't heard from him yet, all the warmth and humor stripped out of it, replaced by something efficient and a little frightening.
"Find out who he owes and what his motives are," he says, and I go very still in the bed, listening despite myself. "I don't care how deep you have to go. I want names by midday."
The phone clicks off. The apartment goes quiet except for the hum of the espresso machine starting up, ordinary and domestic against everything that conversation just implied.
Twelve hours ago I was an unwilling line item in an auction. This morning I'm something a man is willing to make calls about before his first coffee.
I don't know yet whether that makes me safer or more frightened. Possibly both.
But when he comes back into the bedroom a few minutes later, two mugs of coffee in hand, easy smile already sliding back into place like the call never happened, I find myself reaching for him anyway, because for the first time since I opened that folder at Pietty's front door, I'm not facing whatever comes next alone.
Volody
My best friend, Tommon, arrives forty minutes after I make the call, because some part of him clearly suspected this was urgent enough to skip his usual theatrics about being summoned.
He finds me on the balcony with my second coffee gone cold in my hand, staring out at a city that suddenly looks smaller than it did yesterday.
"You look like you're about to do something I'll have to clean up," he says, dropping into the chair across from me, tablet already balanced on his knee.
"Tell me what you found."
"Good morning to you too." He taps the screen, scrolls through something I can't see from this angle, and the easy half smile he walked in with starts fading the further down the page he goes. "Cole Beckett. Twenty-one. Took over the family company six months ago from his uncle who was only keeping the seat warm after the parents died. Since then he's restructured exactly nothing and borrowed against exactly everything."
"How much."
"Enough that I checked the number twice." He turns the tablet toward me, and the figure sitting on the screen makes something cold settle in my chest. "Most of it's owed to Voloshenko. You remember him. Charming at parties, considerably less charming when payment's late."
I know exactly who Voloshenko is. I know exactly how Voloshenko collects when payment's late, and none of those methods involve patience.
"He's been borrowing for six months," I say, working it through out loud, "and he’s already deep enough that he sent his sister to Pietty’s auction last night."
"That's the part that gets interesting." Tommon leans forward, voice dropping into the register he uses when he's about to say something he knows will matter. "He didn't just send her there because he was desperate and panicking. He's been in talks with Voloshenko's people for weeks about exactly this. There's a paper trail, sloppy, but it's there. He floated the idea of a marriage alliance as collateral before he even knew about the auction. Pietty's people confirmed his name was on a shortlist of families looking to place a relative with old money or new protection. He wasn't improvising last night. He'd already started selling her before she put her dress on."
The mug in my hand creaks under the pressure of my grip, and I have to consciously and deliberately set it down before it shatters.
"He planned this," I say, very quietly, because quiet is the only register that's safe right now. "Weeks out. Knowing exactly what she'd be walking into, and let her believe it was a charity dinner until a woman handed her a folder at the door."
