Page 3 of Bred By the Savage Bidder
I roll my eyes at the window, because someone has to and Dayan's face doesn't move enough to register protest. Volody is grinning like the whole evening is a party someone is throwing specifically for him, which is how Volody experiences most evenings, including funerals.
Here's what my brothers don't understand about these dinners. Rovin attends them like an obligation. Akyl attends them like a punishment. Dayan stands in a corner and waits for them to end, and Volody treats them like an open bar with a marriage problem attached.
I attend them like a port inspection.
Sixty of the most connected people on the East Coast, gathered in one borrowed house, drinking and negotiating and lying, and every one of them brings their secrets in with their coats. I've closed three deals and killed two others based on things I learned standing near the right conversation at one of Pietty'sdinners. The wife market is the stage show. The information is the business. So while Rovin scans the room for a future and Akyl scans it for exits, I do what I always do.
I work it.
The house is the same one as last time. Heavy drapes, a fire burning in the marble fireplace against the drizzle, careful candlelight arranged to make commerce look like romance. Rita meets us at the doors with her stack of portfolios and herprofessional smile. Rovin takes one and goes to find the most antisocial seat in the building, which, for a man determined to select a wife tonight, is a fascinating strategy.
Rita turns to me, portfolio extended.
"No, thank you," I say. I read everything she has in that folder four days ago, plus the things Pietty's office redacted, which were considerably more interesting.
Lionel Pietty himself finds me before I've finished my first circuit of the reception room. This is unusual. Pietty allocates his attention by net worth, which means Rovin first, Akyl second, and the rest of us when he's done flattering the Novolin’s.
"Mr. Mostovoi." His handshake is exactly as damp as I remember. "May I say how pleased we are to have all five of you here this evening. There's a candidate I'd particularly encourage you to meet. The Koraleva girl. Exceptional pedigree, very polished. Her family is in shipping."
"I know what her family is in."
I know more than that. I know Vladim Koralev has been trying to get a Mostovoi on the phone for three years. I know his margins are hemorrhaging through demurrage at berths we control, that he's been rolling loans like a man pushing food around a plate, and that theMaréchaleis mortgaged to a New Jersey holding entity whose paperwork is deliberately boring. I know he paid Mikhailov a placement fee that he can’t afford, and I know, because I make it my business to know what Pietty's office does under pressure, that the polite shove I'm currently receiving was bought and paid for in advance.
Vladim Koralev has shipped his daughter to this dinner the way he ships everything else. Insured, documented, and aimed at our docks.
"I'll keep her in mind," I tell Pietty, and he glides away to push her at Akyl next, and I file the whole thing where I file every clumsy approach: useful, because clumsy approaches tell you exactly how desperate a man is.
What happens next happens entirely without my permission.
I'm near the bar, positioned where I can watch Volody charm two women simultaneously while a man from the Sidorov side watches our family with an expression worth remembering, when the variables change. A current moves through it. Heads turn by degrees.
And I see her.
Pale cream silk that’s almost the color of moonlight, long sleeves, blonde hair pinned in a way designed to look effortless. She's beautiful, but every woman in this room is beautiful. Beauty is the basic standard. That isn't what stops me with a glass halfway to my mouth.
What stops me is that she's doing what I'm doing.
She moves through the reception like she's been issued a route. A smile here, two sentences to the Belov widow there, a laugh at the correct volume for a man whose joke didn't earn it. Polished. Compliant. Exactly the product her father paid to position. Any other man in this room sees a well-trained daughter performing good breeding.
I see the eyes.
They're working. Every handshake, every introduction, every cluster of dark suits she drifts past, she sees it all. Who defers to whom. Which men check their phones and which men have other men to check phones for them. She clocks the security at the terrace door without looking at it directly. She registers Rovin across the room, reads the way space bends around him, and adjusts her assessment of everyone else accordingly. It takesher under ten minutes to map the entire room's hierarchy, and she does it while appearing to discuss, as far as I can tell, flower arrangements.
She is taking inventory.
I've spent my life as the brother nothing gets past. I know exactly what it looks like, because I've only ever seen it in a mirror.
"Interesting," I say into my vodka.
I move closer but don't approach her. Approaching is what Pietty was paid to engineer, and I make a point of never doing anything a man has been paid to make me do. I take up a position by the long windows instead, two conversations away, where the acoustics are good and the sightlines are better, and I watch Mikhailov's man earn his fee.
His name is Repin. Mid-forties, a fixer with a gambling problem, and he's steering her through the room with a hand that hovers near her elbow without touching it. He brings her to a cluster of men near the fireplace, makes the introductions, and then does the thing that fixers always do when the merchandise is present.
He switches to Russian.
"The father is motivated," Repin says, smiling, holding his drink. "The terms are flexible. Routing, port access, a minority stake if the right family wants it. He'll dress the rest of it as dowry."
The man beside him looks her over the way men look at vessels in dry dock. "And the girl comes with the paper?"
