Page 4 of Bred By the Savage Bidder
"The girl is the paper."
I'm not watching them. I'm watching her.
She's holding her champagne and gazing at the fire with the mild, pleasant vacancy of a woman waiting out a conversation ina language she doesn't speak. It's good. It's genuinely good. The face gives nothing, the posture gives nothing, the breathing stays even.
The glass gives her away.
When Repin saysthe girl is the paper, her fingers tighten on the stem. A few millimeters of pressure, there and gone.
She understood every word.
And the next moment is the one that finishes me, because she feels the observation. Not the conversation. Thewatching. Her chin comes up a degree and her eyes travel, unhurried, across the room until they find mine, the only pair of eyes that were pointed at her hands.
I expect her to look away. Women at these dinners look away from us.
She doesn't look away. She looks at me with irritation and interest in equal measure, and then she does something I will be thinking about at three in the morning for the rest of my life.
She raises her glass to me, a centimeter, maybe two. A toast a camera couldn't catch.
I see you seeing me,it says.
Then she turns back to Repin and asks him, in English bright and empty as the chandelier, whether the paintings in the hall are originals.
I take my vodka and cross to where Dayan is holding up the far wall with his back to the corner, because I need a moment to reorganize my thinking and my youngest-but-one brother is the best place in any room to stand and be silent. There's a brown-haired woman over by the entrance taking the measure of the room with a dry look on her face, and the angle of Dayan's stillness tells me everything about where his attention has gone.
"That one's looking at you," I tell him, handing over a fresh glass.
"I know," he says.
I take up my new position and find her again without meaning to, moonlight silk by the fireplace, performing the role her father paid for while she quietly audits every man in the building. Vladim Koralev spent money he doesn't have to ship us a decoy, a pretty flag of convenience for a berth deal, and he is so blind to his own inventory that he has no idea what he actually put on the market tonight.
A woman who reads rooms the way I read manifests. A woman wearing her own asking price like armor and daring the room to think it knows what she costs.
The file on Juliette Koraleva is four pages long and wrong about everything that matters.
Rovin told me to choose someone tonight.
It appears that's not going to be a problem.
Juliette
Pietty has put me at the center of the long table, where the candlelight is best, between a Nevolin cousin who keeps refilling my wine without asking and a gray man from Mikhailov's side whose job, as far as I can tell, is to mention my father's fleet at four-minute intervals. Eye level with the money. Premium positioning. My father paid for it, Pietty delivered, and I sit in my couture dress like a bottle turned label-out.
I eat my soup and I run the numbers on the room.
The Mostovoi brothers were a column in a ledger to me until ninety minutes ago. Five names. Berth access, routing power, the alliance my father has been starving for. Now they're men at a table, and the data is not what my father's file promised.
The eldest is already gone. That's the first thing. Rovin Mostovoi, the entire reason I was shipped here, the wife-seeking king my father has been circling for three years, has a dark-haired woman seated at his left who was on nobody's seating plan. I watched her cross the reception earlier, straight to him, no broker, no escort, a clean line across the carpet like a ship cutting a harbor queue. Whoever she is, she didn't come to be sold. She came to acquire. The broker keeps glancing down the table at the wreckage of his choreography, and Rovin Mostovoi hasn't looked at another woman all night.
So the deal my father priced is dead. The flagship has been claimed by someone faster.
I should be panicking. Vladim Koralev's voice is in my head with the forecast-mild threat about Lyon, and the math is simple: if no Mostovoi bids, I go home as failed cargo, and failed cargo gets stripped and repriced. There are other men here.Older ones. The kind with damp eyes and dry hands, the kind my father would accept a check from without asking a single question about the rest of my life.
I'm not panicking. Because the eldest brother was never the only Mostovoi at this table, and one of the others has spent the entire dinnernotlooking at me.
He's seated down the table and across, the one with the unhurried fork and the face that gives off mild, pleasant attention the way a bank vault gives off mild, pleasant steel. The one who watched my hands. Everyone else who's looked at me tonight has looked at the dress, the hair, the figure. That one looked at my fingers at the exact moment Repin called me paper, and I've spent all the time since trying to decide whether that makes him the most dangerous man in the room or the only one worth talking to.
The Nevolin cousin refills my wine again. The gray man mentions the fleet. Down the table, the loudest Mostovoi brother says something that makes three women laugh at once, and the sharp-faced second brother has stopped pretending to eat and keeps glancing at the doorway like it owes him something.
