"It's a little funny," Serik says with a grin.
I let it pass. We have work. A shipment coming through that needs oversight. A meeting with a property developer who owes us a favor he's been slow to repay. The ordinary machinery of an empire that runs on discipline and the careful application of pressure.
But underneath the work, underneath the routine, something has been building for months. A restlessness I don't entirely understand. I have money. I have power. I have the respect, or at least the fear, of every significant player in the Bratva.
And I have an empty house, save for my annoying brothers coming and going as they please. I have three guest bedrooms that have never been slept in. I have a dining table that seats twelve and is used by one.
I am thirty-five years old, and the legacy I have spent my entire adult life building has no one to inherit it.
My mother died in a house that should have felt like home but never did. She died without ever hearing the words she needed from my father, and she left behind five sons who learned, from her absence, that love is not a feeling. It is a structure. It is a decision made daily, reinforced by action, built from the accumulated weight of showing up and staying.
I will not repeat my father's failures. The woman I choose will not endure. She will thrive. She will stand in the rooms I've built and fill them with the kind of life that I can hear, and see, and protect.
I finish my coffee and set the cup in the sink.
"Nine days," I say to Akyl. "Confirm our attendance."
My brothers groan.
Claudia
Grace meets me in the back room of a wine bar in Fitzrovia. She is late twenties, with hazlenut-streaked hair pulled into a low knot and the kind of careful posture that comes from years of navigating dangerous people. She was a fixer once, for my father. Now she operates independently, connecting people who need connections and charging handsomely for the service.
"You want into the auction dinner," she says. It isn't a question. She's studying me, checking for weaknesses.
"Yes."
"You know what they are."
"Private marriage negotiations. Criminal aristocracy. Women attend seeking security or alliances. Men attend seeking wives and heirs."
Grace tilts her head. "Most women who come to me are running from something. Debt. Danger. Bad men." She pauses. "You don't look like you're running."
"I'm not."
"Then what are you doing?"
I set my hands flat on the table. My nails are clean, unpainted. I stopped getting manicures when the money dried up. "You know what’s going on with my father, Grace. I didn’t know...but that doesn’t matter. I didn’t know about what he did to you either, and I’m sorry for it."
Something shifts behind her eyes. I hope it’s acceptance. "I know, he was subtle about it."
I nod. “You were the one who brought him down, weren’t you?” It all clicks into place, and she doesn’t even try to deny it.
“I never meant for it to reach you like it did, or your mother, even though she definitely knew what he was doing to the women in that office. I’m truly sorry you got caught up in it, but I’m not sorry I did it.” She offers a half shrug, punctuating her lack of remorse.
“What happened to you? After, I mean.”
"I received an invite for a party. A masquerade ball that held an actual auction, not one of these fancy dinners. Liam bid on me, and the rest is history." She says this with a smile that looks like it holds the best kind of secrets.
I want that smile.
"So you must know that the attendees at these sorts of things… They are Bratva. And if they bid on you and win…there’s no coming back from that." She looks at me more intently now, searching for any sign I’m not sure.
She won’t find it.
"I want to attend the dinner and I want to be considered for auction."
Grace leans back. The wine bar hums around us, low music, quiet laughter, glasses clinking. All of it feels very far away.
