Page 1 of Bred By the Savage Bidder
Juliette
My father doesn't ask me to sit down.
That's the first thing I notice when I walk into his office. The second is that he's speaking Russian, which means whatever this is, it's business. My father has two languages the way other men have two faces. English is for charm, for customs officials and bankers and the school administrators he used to dazzle at parent evenings he attended twice a decade. Russian is for decisions.
"Close the door," he says.
I close the door.
The office smells like cold coffee and the cigarettes he claims he quit. Behind his desk, the wall is papered with framed photographs of ships. TheOdesa Star. TheMaréchale, named for my mother in a sentimental mood that lasted exactly as long as her dowry did. Container vessels lined up like a man's life arranged by tonnage. There are no photographs of people anywhere in this room. There never have been.
"Your mother called," he says, not looking up from the folder in front of him. "Your grandmother is worse. She'll be staying in Lyon another month at least."
"I know. I spoke to her Tuesday."
His eyes narrow briefly, searching for disrespect. "Then you know I need you here."
I do know that. I've known it since I was sixteen and he discovered that his daughter could move between French and Russian and English without a seam showing, and that the Marseille brokers softened by ten percent when the pretty girl handled the call. I've beenneededever since. Needed at dinners.Needed on calls. Needed to read the room in three languages and report back which men were lying, which is almost always all of them.
What I have never once been, is asked.
"There's a dinner," he says. "Friday. Outside the city."
"Whose?"
"It's a private event." He closes the folder and finally looks at me, and there's something in his face I don't like. A carefulness. My father is never careful with me. "Hosted by a man named Pietty. There will be significant families in attendance. The Mostovoi’s among them."
The name lands in my stomach and just sits there.
Everyone in our world knows the Mostovoi’s. Five brothers and a port presence on the East Coast that my father has been circling for three years the way a starving man circles a locked kitchen. Our ships wait days for berths that Mostovoi freight glides into overnight. I've translated the emails. I've smoothed the calls. I've watched my father pour money into intermediaries and brokers and one extremely expensive man named Mikhailov, all to get within shouting distance of an alliance that never comes.
"You finally got a meeting," I say.
"I got an invitation." He slides a cream envelope across the desk. Heavy stock. A wax seal, broken. "For you."
I don't pick it up.
There's a particular kind of silence that exists only in my father's office. I've heard it before, when a captain lost a container in rough water, when a customs man got greedy. It's the silence of a number being weighed. I stand in the middle of it and I understand, slowly and then all at once, that the number being weighed is me.
"What is the dinner, Papa?"
"A networking event," he lies.
"What is the dinner?"
He leans back in his chair. He has the decency, I'll give him this much, not to dress it up once he sees that I've already understood. He never wastes effort on a sale that's lost.
"The families call them auction dinners," he says. "Eligible women attend. Serious men attend. Arrangements are made. Marriages, Juliette. Good ones, to men who can't be touched." He taps the envelope once. "Mikhailov secured your placement and I paid the table fee. I’ve also placed appropriate pressure on Pietty to push your name to the Mostovoi brothers. They will all be there, and the eldest is selecting a wife this time. If a Koraleva is at that table, we're not chasing the alliance anymore. Wearethe alliance."
"You're selling me for berth access."
"I'm investing you," he says, in the same tone he'd use to correct a clerk's arithmetic. "If you were a son, I'd be handing you a fleet. You're a daughter. This is what a daughter inherits. The chance to be useful in the way the world actually pays for."
I look at the envelope. The seal is dark red, pressed with a crest I don't recognize, and the wax has the wet shine of something expensive.By invitation only,the card inside will say. I already know it will. I've spent enough years reading my father's correspondence. I know what an offer sheet looks like.
I allow myself one argument. Just one, because I learned a long time ago that with Vladim Koralev, the second argument costs you the dignity of the first.
"And if I say no?"
