I sold myself to nikolai volkov on a tuesday which felt like an appropriate day to ruin my life.
Or his. Depending how things went.
Every part of my sale was planned carefully by me. Every single detail of it. The leak to his contacts, the staged collapse of the vasques empire. Everything.
All that was left was one thing.
And if im right, and im always right, that wont be a problem.
All i needed was for nikolai to be the highest bidder.
The room was exactly what I expected. Dark wood, low lighting, the kind of quiet that only exists when everyone in it has something to lose.
I stood still and let them look because stillness was a weapon I'd spent years sharpening.
My dress was white.
My expression was empty.
My heartbeat was slow and controlled and had been since I walked through the door.
I was not afraid.
I was working.
The bids started low and climbed fast and I tracked the room without moving my eyes too much, cataloguing faces, reading body language, doing the mental math I'd been doing since I was sixteen and my father first put me in a room like this and told me the most dangerous person is always the one nobody's watching.
Nobody was watching Nikolai.
They never did. That was his trick. He sat near the back in a dark suit with no tie and the kind of stillness that didn't come from calm, that came from certainty. He didn't fidget. Didn't lean forward. Didn't raise his paddle once while the number climbed.
He just watched me.
I pretended to be watching the exit behind him hoping he wouldnt notice.
The room thinned. The bids slowed. And then, in the particular silence that falls right before something becomes irreversible, Nikolai said one number to the man beside him.
Step one was done.
A woman in gray appeared at the edge of the platform and gestured for me to follow. I stepped down and walked toward her and toward the door and toward Nikolai Volkov's world with my chin level and my hands loose at my sides.
He was waiting in the hallway.
Of course he was.
"Ms. Vasquez," he said.
I let my jaw tighten just slightly. Let my eyes go a little too bright. The portrait of a proud woman swallowing something bitter.
"Mr. Volkov."
He studied me for a long moment and I held myself very still under it. This was the part I'd been most careful about. Nikolai Volkov had not built an empire by being fooled easily. He would look for cracks. He would press on anything that felt soft.
I had made sure everything soft was hidden.
"You don't look like a woman who just lost everything," he said.
My stomach tightened. I didn't show it.
"And what does that look like?" I asked.
Something moved in his expression.
"Not like you," he said.
He turned and walked.
I followed.
The hallway was long and quiet and I used every second of it to study him the way I'd been studying him for two years. The way he moved. The way his guards positioned themselves around him without being told. The way he never once checked to see if I was keeping up.
He didn't need to check.
He already knew I wouldn't run.
That was the thing about Nikolai Volkov. He understood people the way other men understood money, instinctively, without having to think too hard about it. It was what made him so good at what he did.
It was also going to make this harder than I'd planned.
The hallway opened into a foyer that was all marble and high ceilings.
A second man fell into step behind me.
Not an escort. A guard. I could tell by the way he never looked at me directly.
Nikolai stopped at the base of a wide staircase.
"You'll stay in the east wing," he said without turning around. "Anything you need will be provided."
"And what do you need?" I asked. "From me."
He turned then. Slowly. Like the question had mildly interested him.
"Nothing yet," he said.
It should have been a relief. It wasn't. Nothing yet from a man like Nikolai was not reassurance. It was a countdown.
He looked at me one more time and I looked back and somewhere in the space between us something shifted very slightly, like the first small movement of something that hasn't decided what it is yet.
Then he walked away.
I stood at the bottom of his staircase in my white dress with my plan intact and my pulse steady and I told myself that look meant nothing.
I told myself that twice.
The woman in gray reappeared at my elbow like she'd been waiting just outside my peripheral vision the whole time.
Maybe she had.
"This way," she said.
I followed her up the staircase and down the hallway.
She stopped at the last door on the right and opened it.
The room was large. A bed that could fit four people, a window that looked out over a garden that was too manicured to feel natural, a bathroom through a door on the left. Everything was expensive and impersonal in the way that hotels are impersonal, like it had been designed for human beings without being designed for any specific one.
"Dinner is at eight," the woman said. "Mr. Volkov expects you to attend."
"Of course he does," I said.
She looked at me for just a moment longer than necessary. Then she left and pulled the door shut behind her and I listened to her footsteps fade down the hall.
I waited another thirty seconds.
Then I crossed to the window.
The garden below was lit softly and empty and beyond the far wall I could see the outline of the city, my city, the one I'd built and then very carefully pretended to lose. Out there were twelve people who thought I was gone. Broken. Finished.
They were my twelve best.
They were also waiting for my signal.
I had a plan. The plan was good. I had walked into harder rooms than this one and walked back out again and the man downstairs was dangerous but so was I and the difference between us was that he didn't know it yet.
I stepped back from the window.
Dinner was at eight.
I had four hours to figure out exactly how Nikolai Volkov liked to be lied to.