Yuri included a financial summary. In the last three years, Wren Calloway earned a combined total of approximately $94,000. Of that, she kept roughly $11,000 for rent, food, and basic survival. The rest went to Dennis.
$83,000 in three years. Scraped together in twelve-hour days and overnight shifts and weekend gigs, and handed over to a man who put it all on a table and lost it.
I stand up. Sit down. Stand up again. Pace to the window and back.
There's more.
The debt that brought her to the auction wasn't gambling debt in the traditional sense. Dennis Calloway borrowed $200,000 from a man named Viktor Morozov. The same Morozov who ran the auction. The same Morozov who smiled behind his microphone and called her to the stage. The loan was taken eighteen months ago, used to cover previous gambling debts to other, less patient creditors, and when Dennis couldn't repay it, Morozov offered him an alternative arrangement.
His daughter.
There's a document. Yuri found it in Morozov's files, which means Morozov is either careless with his digital security or Yuri is better than I give him credit for. Probably both. The document is a transfer of debt agreement. It states that the outstanding balance of $200,000 plus $47,000 in accumulated interest will be considered settled in full upon the transfer of one asset, described in the document as "Female, age 23, good health, no prior claims."
No prior claims. A virgin, then. Morozov’s specialty.
Dennis Calloway signed the document. His signature is shaky but legible. He signed away his daughter for $247,000, and based on the auction results, Morozov turned a profit of $753,000 on the transaction.
I read the section about her mother one more time. Sarah Calloway, dead at twenty-nine from an infection that any competent medical professional could have treated with a course of antibiotics if she'd been brought in within the first few days.
Wren was four.
Four years old, and the first person who would have been her whole world died because the second person who would have been her whole world couldn't be bothered to care.
I close the file again and stand at the window watching the sun come up over the city, and something is happening to me that I should probably be alarmed by but can't bring myself to resist. It's a feeling.
I don't traffic in feelings, as a rule. Feelings are inefficient. They cloud judgment, compromise strategy, introduce variables that can't be controlled or predicted. I've spent fifteen years engineering my emotional landscape into something flat and functional, a terrain where anger is a tool and grief is a memory and desire is a transaction, and it has served me well.
But this woman.
This woman who has been disposable her entire life. Disposed of by her father. Disposed of by every system that should have caught her. Disposed of by a world that looked at a fourteen-year-old working two jobs and said, well, at least she's not on the street.
Nobody has ever kept her. Nobody has ever looked at her and said, this one matters. This one I will hold onto. This one I will burn the world to ashes before I let anyone touch.
I go to my closet. In the back, behind the suits, there's a shelf with things I don't wear often. Older pieces. Broken in. A cashmere sweater I've owned for years that's been washed so many times it's soft as skin. A flannel shirt from a trip to Vermont that Ilya still gives me grief about. A henley that I wear when I'm home alone and no one needs me to look like the head of a criminal empire.
I pull them out. Hold the cashmere to my face and breathe in and confirm what I already know: they smell like me. Not cologne, exactly. Cologne fades. This is the other thing. The underneath smell. Skin and soap and whatever chemical signature my body has been pressing into these fabrics for years.
I fold them and carry them down the hall and set them outside her door.
Then I go to the kitchen and I start making breakfast.
Eggs. Toast. Coffee. Fresh fruit, because I looked at her last night and saw the dull skin and the brittle nails of a girl who hasn't had proper nutrition in months, maybe years, and the part of me that operates on pure, mechanical logic says: she needs vitamins, she needs protein, she needs fat. Build her up. Make her strong. Make her glow from the inside out so that every time she looks in the mirror she sees the woman you're turning her into instead of the ghost her father made.
The part of me that isn't mechanical, the part that clicked into place at the auction and hasn't unclicked since, that part says something simpler.
Feed her. She's yours. Feed her until she stops flinching when you enter a room. Feed her until she looks at you and sees something other than a monster. Feed her until her body understands, at the cellular level, that it will never be hungry again.
Wren
I wake up and for three seconds I don't know where I am.
The sheets are too soft. The pillow is too thick. The light coming through the windows is too clean, too golden, filtered through glass that has never been smudged by desperate fingers trying to open a window that doesn't open. My body knows before my brain does that something is wrong, and I sit up fast, heart slamming, hands fisting the sheets.
Then I remember.
The van. The spa. The auction. The car. His eyes in the rearview mirror. My fingers between my legs. His mouth between my legs.
His mouth.