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When he puts it down, he looks at me for a long moment.

“You think I don’t know why you’re really here,” he says.

It’s not a question so I don’t treat it like one.

“You want in,” he says. “My operation, my people, my files. You want to be inside instead of standing outside throwing rocks.” He looks at me for a moment. “Didn’t expect that. Thought you’d just be pretty.”

The accuracy of it is more annoying than anything else he could have said. There’s no performance to pick apart, no angle to work, just a man who looked at my proposal and saw straight through to the bones of it in thirty seconds flat. The pretty comment I’m choosing to ignore, because acknowledging it means he got something, and he’s not getting anything from me today that isn’t written on that paper.

“I’m also genuinely offering you a solution to a real problem,” I say. “Both things can be true.”

He looks at me. Then he stands, and he’s bigger than the photographs made clear, broader, the scars on his hands more visible up close. He comes around the table, not fast, not slow, just steady. He stops a foot away from me, and crosses his arms. Up close he’s even worse. Better. Whatever the word is for something that makes your brain go briefly offline before you drag it back.

I know what he is. I know what he did. And my brain is doing something I don’t have a name for yet, something that has nothing to do with the plan I walked in with, and I need it to stop.

I don’t stand. I don’t move. I keep my eyes on his and wait.

“You know what happens if we get married?” he says.

“I outlined the terms on the paper you just read.”

“Not those terms.” He looks me over like he’s already decided what he’s having for dinner. “My terms. The ones that aren’t on paper.”

I say nothing. I keep my face exactly where it is.

“I’ll fuck you,” he says, plain as reporting the weather. “That’s what marriage means in my world. You’ll be in my bed and I’ll use it.”

I don’t know what I expected him to say but it wasn’t that. Not that directly. Not that plainly. I’ve read about men like him, studied them from the outside for three weeks, but reading about something and having it said to your face in a room with four witnesses are completely different experiences, and my body responds to the difference in a way I don’t understand and can’t control. Something happens low in my stomach, a clench I don’t understand, and I have never in my life felt that before and I don’t know what it means but I’m not examining it here.

My face stays exactly where I put it.

“I’m not a soft man. I don’t do soft. I’ll have you on your back, on your knees, bent over whatever’s closest, and I won’t ask first because you’ll have already said yes when you sign the papers.”

One of his men coughs. I don’t look away from Volkov. I don’t dare.

“I fuck hard,” he continues, and he takes one step closer, close enough now that I have to actively manage my breathing, “and I go for a long time. My dick doesn’t get soft in the middle. I don’t get tired. I don’t run out of steam. You could be there all night, and I’d still be going.”

I have read about sex. I am not a child. But there is a significant difference between understanding something academically and standing close enough to feel the heat off the man describing it, and my body is responding to that difference in ways that are completely outside my experience. I don’t know what wet means yet, not really, not from the inside, but I think I’m finding out, and I have never been more furious at myself in my life.

His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly one second, then back up. “I’ve had women beg me to stop and then beg me not to. You look like you’d rather die than beg for anything, which means this is going to be very interesting.”

My face is giving him nothing. I am certain of this because I have spent twenty-six years learning to make my face give people nothing. This is exactly the situation that skill was built for.

My body is another matter entirely. I am twenty-six years old, and I have kissed three men in my life, and none of them produced anything resembling what is currently happening to me, which is both alarming and deeply inconvenient, and I’m adding it to the list of things I’ll examine in private when I’m nowhere near him.

His words land somewhere low in my stomach and stay there. Something shifts when I move in my seat that I can’t account for, and my nipples have tightened under my jacket. I’m furious about that too, because at least the other thing was invisible, but if he looks down at the right moment this will not be.

I keep my shoulders back, and my face closed. He won’t get anything from me.

“Are you finished?” I ask. My voice is perfect. I want a medal for it.

“I’m telling you what you’re agreeing to,” he says. “So you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I appreciate the disclosure,” I say. “It’s very thorough. Almost like a terms and conditions nobody reads.” I hold his gaze. “I’m a lawyer. I read everything.”

He drags his eyes down my body, slow, not subtle, not trying to be, all the way to my heels and back up, and when his gaze gets back to my face he runs his tongue along his bottom lip and says nothing. He doesn’t need to.

He steps back, just slightly, giving me an inch of air that I take without visibly exhaling. He looks at me for another moment, and I have the uncomfortable sense that whatever reaction he was looking for, whatever crack in my composure he was trying to find, he found something. Not the thing he was looking for. Something else. Something that interests him more.