The crack of it snapped through the room. Gennady staggered against the stage, blood bright on his lower lip.
The stranger leaned close enough that only the first row should have heard him, but the room had gone so silent that every word carried.
“If you speak to her again, I’ll make sure it’s the last sound you make with all your teeth.”
Air rushed into my chest.
My hand pressed hard against the coat over my ribs.
He released Gennady and came up the stage steps.
The attendant beside me moved into his path.
The stranger kept coming.
One of his men caught the attendant by the collar and dragged him sideways. The attendant hit the curtain, knocking the black fabric loose from one hook.
The stranger reached me.
Up close, he was larger than he’d looked from the doorway. Heat came off him through the cold smoke of the room. His right hand was red across the knuckles. Gennady’s blood marked the skin.
I backed up until my heel hit the edge of the brass circle.
He took in my bare feet, the pale silk, my hands twisted at my sides. His jaw tightened again.
“Don’t touch me,” I said.
“I’m getting you out of here.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” he said. “But it happens before he reaches you.”
Gennady snarled behind him, “She’s mine by contract.”
The stranger’s eyes stayed on mine. “Hold on to me, or don’t. I won’t leave you on this stage.”
I hesitated too long.
Maybe I couldn’t move. Maybe my body had spent the last of itself standing under the lights while Gennady smiled at me from his chair. My knees loosened. The gold room smeared at the edges. The chandelier split into two, then four.
The stranger’s coat came around my shoulders first, heavy and dark and warm from his body.
Then his arms came under me.
I gasped as he lifted me from the stage.
One arm locked behind my back. The other slid under my knees. The silk chemise rode high against my thighs before the coat fell over me, hiding what the room had already seen.
Men moved.
His men moved faster.
A chair went over. Someone shouted. The auctioneer disappeared behind the podium. Gennady lunged, and one of the stranger’s men hit him hard enough to send him into the front table. Glass shattered. A lamp toppled. Amber light swung wild across the walls.
The stranger carried me through all of it.
He didn’t carry me gently.
