"That's the read, yes."
"And the money. Where's it going. Not the loan, the six months of it."
Serik scrolls again. "Some into the business, genuinely, trying to plug holes that probably should have sunk the company a year ago. Some into things that have nothing to do with the business at all. Cars. A condo he's not living in. A woman who isn't hissister and definitely isn't on any company payroll." He glances up. "He's been spending like a man who expects someone else to cover the difference eventually."
"He expected Liv to cover the difference."
"He expected your family's name to cover the difference. Liv was just the mechanism."
I sit with that for a long moment, the cold in my chest settling into something heavier, something with edges. I think about the texts,I told them you'd be amenable,and I think about the way Liv described him last night, sweeter, before, softer, and I understand now that the boy she's still half mourning died somewhere along the way to becoming this version, the one who looks at his own sister and sees collateral instead of family.
I sit very still, listening to my own pulse in my ears, and I think about every quiet thing she said last night about late nights and parent-teacher conferences, like that was the whole of it, like that summary did any justice at all to six years of a woman quietly erasing her own future one decision at a time so her little brother could have an uninterrupted one.
She didn't tell me about the stuff Serik had told me earlier in the night. The scholarship, the night school, the job opportunity. She mentioned it like an afterthought, like it barely registered as a sacrifice worth naming, and that, somehow, makes the whole thing worse. She's so used to giving pieces of herself away that she's stopped counting them.
"He took all of that," I say, low, "and the second he needed something to leverage, he sold the rest of her without blinking."
"It certainly looks that way." Tommon drops his tablet on the glass table, the chair groaning beneath his bulk as he makes himself more comfortable.
I’m quiet for a moment, weighing up my options. Voloshenko is not an ally of ours, but he is important enough that I can’t just walk into his office and put a bullet in his head. And Liv’s brother seems mostly stupid and greedy.
Tommon sighs. "Liv's brother is the only family she's got left, whatever he's done. If you handle this the way you handle your actual enemies, you'll lose her the second she finds out, even if everything you did, you did for her."
I hate that he's right. I hate it specifically because it means the fury sitting in my chest, hot and certain and entirely justified, has to get rerouted into something slower, more careful, less satisfying.
"Then tell me what I can do," I say. "Because sitting here doing nothing while he sends her deadlines about her own future isn't an option I'm willing to live with."
"Buy the debt." Tommon says it simply, like it's obvious, which, once he says it, it is. "Voloshenko's a businessman before he's anything else. He doesn't care who pays as long as someone does, with interest, on schedule. Buy Cole's debt out from under him, and Voloshenko stops being a threat to either of them overnight. Then Cole's leverage disappears too. He's got nothing left to bargain with, no urgency to push, no one breathing down his neck."
"And Liv?"
"Liv gets her brother back without anyone collecting a debt off her body to do it." Tommon closes the tablet. "You get to be the reason the threat disappeared without ever having to tell her exactly how dangerous it was in the first place."
I look out at the skyline, turning it over, and something settles into place.
"Buy it," I say. "All of it. Quietly. I don't want Cole knowing where the money came from, not yet. Let him think Voloshenko got bored or got paid off through some other channel. I want him scared and confused, not grateful and emboldened."
"You've fallen hard," he says.
"I've fallen completely," I correct, and the admission costs me nothing at all. If anything, it surprises me with how easily it comes. "I watched a woman walk into that house last night believing the worst thing that could happen to her already had. Then I find out her own brother spent six years taking everything she had to give and called it love the whole time he did it." Something rough moves through my voice. "I'm not interested in being one more person in her life who takes from her and calls it affection. I want to be the first one who hands something back."
He leaves, and I sit alone on the balcony a while longer, coffee gone fully cold beside me, turning over everything I just learned, every quiet erasure she's never once described as a wound. I think about walking back inside, finding her curled up in my sheets, and saying nothing about any of it yet, because some truths need handling before they need confessing.
I think about Cole Beckett sitting somewhere right now, smug and impatient, waiting for a Monday deadline he has no idea is about to become entirely irrelevant.
And I think, with a certainty that should probably alarm me more than it does, that whatever this thing between Liv and me started out as last night, a transaction, a rescue, an accident of timing in a room full of bad intentions, it stopped being any of those things somewhere around the moment I found out exactly what she's spent the last six years quietly giving away.
I'm not letting another person take a single piece of her again. Not her brother. Not Voloshenko. Not anyone.
Liv
Rovin's house looks the way I imagined a fortress would look if a fortress got an interior designer.
Stone everywhere, high ceilings, security cameras tucked into corners like they're trying not to be noticed and failing completely. Volody parks around the back instead of the front, says something about avoiding the gate cameras catching us looking disheveled, and steers me through a side entrance with his hand warm and steady against the small of my back.
"You're nervous," he says.
"I'm meeting four more members of your family and their…whatever we are, in one sitting. I thinknervousis appropriate."
