Page 6 of Keeping My Enemies Closer: Pt. 1

With his heart on his sleeve, Viktor said, “I’m not going to question how or why she’s running the auction the way that she is.”

“Besides, I think it’s fair,” I chimed in.

Both my father and brother looked over at me.“You do?”they asked in unison.

I nodded.“They deserve the additional three-thousand dollars for the loss of what they could make if someone does bid on them.If you’ll recall, the first auction brought a sixty-thousand-dollar bid, which left the woman to pocket forty-two-thousand dollars.That’s thirty-two thousand more than the base bid of ten-thousand, so...yeah, I think that’s fair if someone doesn’t get called upon.”

“I suppose,” Viktor murmured.“But I’m thinking that once every three months might be too much.I’m going to propose that we do it only twice a year, making the event more exclusive.It might bring in more money that way.”

“That’ll limit the amount of women that your wife can help,” Father pointed out.“She might not go for it.”

“Maybe,” Viktor conceded.“But once the baby comes, she’s not going to have that kind of extra time, and I think that she’ll see that once we talk about it some more.”

“Maybe we can double the number of women up for bid,” I suggested.“Right now, it’s only ten per auction, but maybe we can up it to twenty...maybe even twenty-five.”

“She might go for that,” Viktor replied.“Plus, it’ll give us more time to vet the women and the participants between auctions.”

“That’s your selling point,” I told him.“That’s what’s going to make your wife agree.”

“I think Kasimir is correct in this,” Father remarked.“While I am certain that Aurora will be a wonderful mother, you need to appeal to her Marchetti side on this.If you try to soften her with her upcoming motherhood, you may very well get a knife stuck in your chest, son.”

“Ha.Ha,” Viktor deadpanned, making me grin.

“He’s not wrong,” I said cheerfully.“You’re already getting on her nerves, so I can see her using any excuse to end you.”

Looking between me and my father, Viktor didn’t look happy.“Can we move on from my wife’s mood swings, please?”

“Mood swings?”I echoed.“Mood swings would imply that she’snotviolent at times, and I haven’t seen it.”

He flipped me off again.

“Let us move on,” my father signed, recognizing that we were straying away from business to being brothers without a care in the world.

Choosing business over getting on my brother’s nerves, I said, “The Romanians are still playing too close to our borders, but no one’s crossed the line yet.”

Father looked over at Viktor.“And the Marchettis still aren’t experiencing any of this?”

Viktor shook his head.“I speak with Santino about this matter regularly, and a year later, they’ve still no issues with either the Romanians, Chinese, or the Germans.”

“Perhaps it’s just the Romanians being stupid,” my father suggested.

“Maybe,” I replied.“But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to still keep an eye out.”

“Of course,” he automatically said.

After that, the meeting really did turn into a legitimate discussion about Korolev business, and we’d actually gotten a lot done.Granted, that was going to leave Viktor with some extra time on his hands, but if Aurora ended up really killing him, then it was probably because he deserved it.