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 contestany 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.
