Page 10 of Bred By the Savage Bidder
Silence. I've never spoken to him like this. I've never been on the far side of a door he couldn't open before.
"You think you're protected now," he says, low. "You think his name makes you untouchable. Let me tell you how this works,devochka. Men like that don't marry women like you for your conversation. He'll breed you and bench you, and in two years you'll be running his household and grateful for it, and you'll wish you'd kept your father as the only man who—"
"The Maréchale is at slip nine," I say.
He stops.
"They can see it from the house," I continue, pleasantly, in English now, the language of charm, because the cruelty lands softer and travels further in English. "Eleven berths from the living room window. I thought you'd want to know your traffic has an audience. Goodbye, Papa. Give Maman my love when she calls."
I hang up before he can find the next lever, because the secret my father never learned is that you win these by being the one who ends the call.
My hand is not quite steady when I set the phone down. I look at it with professional disappointment. I look up and find Serik in the kitchen doorway.
"You said you wouldn't manage me," I tell him. "Listening counts."
"I wasn't managing. I was learning." He comes in, sets a folder on the island between us, and slides it across with one finger. "Since you're clearly in the mood."
I open it. It's not a contract, which is what I expected. It's the books. His books. Three of the holding companies, the real ones, the routing agreements and the rate cards and the quarterly figures that men like him keep in rooms women like me are only ever decorative in. The numbers are current to last week.
"I don't understand," I say.
"You said if you run my numbers, you run all of them. The ones I would usually keep from a wife." He pours himself more coffee, unbothered, as though he hasn't just handed a near-stranger the keys to the thing he loves. "These are the ones I keep. Find me something I've missed. I doubt you will. But your father raised an auditor and called her an ornament, and I'd rather marry the auditor."
I look down at the pages. Real figures. Real exposure. A man's entire operation laid open on a kitchen island for a woman he met last night, because I told him I wouldn't be summarized and he is, apparently, a man who listens the first time.
"This is a test," I say.
"Everything is a test. This one's just honest about it." He picks up his coffee and heads out. At the door he stops. "When you find whatever you find, I'll be in the ops room."
He leaves me alone with his numbers. I pull out a chair. I find a pen.
By the time I look up, it's noon, I've found two things his analysts missed, and I've forgotten entirely to keep waiting for the feeling that was supposed to come.
It came. I just didn't recognize it, because nobody ever taught me the word for being seen.
Serik
It doesn’t take her long to go through the books. It takes my other guy days.
Now she is padding down the hall in an oversized wool cardigan and bare feet with my books under her arm and a pen behind her ear. The woman who mapped Pietty's reception in ten minutes looks, for one disarming second, like she belongs to this house. I keep my eyes on the screen and my face on neutral. I've spent twenty years not showing rooms what I'm thinking. I can manage one woman in a doorway.
"You found something," I say. She wouldn't have left the kitchen otherwise.
"I found two things." She comes into the ops room without waiting for the invitation, which I notice and approve of, and sets the folder down on the only clear corner of my table. "One of them you'll be annoyed about. The other one you'll be annoyed you didn't see."
"Those sound like the same thing."
"They're adjacent." She flips the folder open to a page she's marked, not with a flag but with a fold, a small precise crease. "Here. Your Gdansk routing. You're running empty backhaul on the Baltic leg three weeks out of four, and your rate card prices it like it's full. You're eating the deadhead and calling it overhead."
I look. She's right. It's not a large number, the kind of erosion that hides inside a healthy quarter, the kind three analysts signed off on because the line above it was green.
"That's a forty-thousand-a-month rounding error," I say.
"It's a forty-thousand-a-month rounding error that's been rounding for fourteen months, so it's a little over half a milliondollars you've decided not to think about." She says it without triumph, which is somehow worse. "I'm not telling you it'll sink you. I'm telling you it's there, and a man who keeps his own books by hand shouldn't have a leak this tidy sitting in his blind spot. It offended me. So I flagged it."
I lean back. The chair takes my weight. The harbor sits in the window behind her and I look at Juliette Koraleva holding my own numbers up to me like a mirror I didn't ask for, and the thing I feel isn’t annoyance, though I'd let her believe it is. It's the other thing. The thing I have a strict policy about feeling.
"And the second."
