The elevator groans as it descends. Ilya checks his weapon. I don't check mine. The Glock sits against my ribs like a second heartbeat, so familiar I forget it's there most days. Tonight it's loaded with hollow points, because when I shoot Kir Belov in his smug, overfed face, I want to make sure there's nothing left for an open casket.
The doors open to noise and heat and the sour tang of too many bodies in a room with bad ventilation. The auction floor is set up like a theater, rows of chairs facing a raised platform with a runway extending down the center. Crystal chandeliers hang from the low ceiling. The light catches in them and throws fractured rainbows across the walls, and I think about how strange it is that something beautiful can exist in a room built for transactions this ugly.
But I'm not here for the auction. I don't buy people. Not because I have some bleeding-heart moral objection to the practice, but because ownership is a liability. People are unpredictable. They break. They talk. They develop inconvenient emotions and make demands and complicate the power I've spent a decade building. I prefer leverage to possession. A man who owes you is more useful than a man you own.
I'm here because Kir is here, and Kir thinks the crowd will protect him.
It won't.
"Drink?" Ilya asks, nodding toward the bar in the corner. There’s an actual bartender, with actual top-shelf liquor. Morozov really rolls out the red carpet for his buyers.
"Vodka. Neat."
I take a position at the back of the room where I can see every entrance and exit. Old habit. My father taught me that. Amongthe many things he taught me before he was gutted like a fish on the floor of his own study, he said: never sit with your back to a door, Dominik. The man who doesn't see the knife coming deserves to bleed.
The room is filling up. I recognize most of them. Mid-level bosses, arms dealers, a few tech money types who think rubbing shoulders with the bratva makes them interesting at dinner parties. They'll buy a girl tonight, use her for a month, and send her back broken and barely alive, and they'll tell themselves it was consensual because they put her in a nice apartment and bought her a designer bag.
I scan the crowd for Kir. Northwest corner, Ilya said. I find him. He's sitting in the third row with his legs spread wide, taking up space with an arrogance he hasn’t earned. He's got a drink in one hand and he's laughing at something one of his guards said, head thrown back, throat exposed.
Careless. Sloppy. A man who laughs with his throat exposed in a room full of predators is a man who has forgotten what he is.
Prey.
I sip my vodka and wait.
The lights dim. A spot hits the stage. Morozov himself walks and he gives a little speech about discretion and quality and satisfaction guaranteed. Like he's selling timeshares instead of human beings. The crowd applauds politely. Someone whistles.
The first girl comes out. Blonde. Tall. Moving on autopilot with glassy eyes that say she's been given something to take the edge off. She walks the runway in a white dress that leaves nothing to the imagination. The bidding starts at fifty thousand and climbs to one-eighty before a man in the second row wins her with a lazy wave of his paddle.
I don't watch. I'm watching Kir.
The second girl. Dark hair, dark skin, moving like she's underwater. Bidding goes to two-twenty. Kir doesn't bid on this one either. He's waiting for something specific, apparently.
Third girl. Fourth. The room gets louder as the alcohol flows and the men get comfortable with what they're doing. I notice a pattern: the prices go up as the night progresses. Morozov is smart. He puts the lesser products first, builds momentum, gets the wallets loose and the egos engaged, and then he brings out the ones he knows will make a killing.
I check my watch. I want this done before midnight. Clean. Quiet. Two in the chest during the intermission, when the lights are low and the men are drunk and distracted, one in the face to wipe him out completely. Ilya will handle the guards. We'll be in the elevator before anyone realizes what happened, and by the time Morozov's people figure out it was me, I'll be back in my penthouse with a glass of Macallan, and Kir will be cooling on the concrete.
Morozov takes the microphone again. "Gentlemen," he says, and his voice drops to that salesman hush, that tone that says, this next one is special. "This one is something else..."
I check my watch. Intermission should be after this one.
The lights shift. The spot narrows to a single column of white at the end of the runway. The music changes to something low and pulsing, and I can feel it in my molars, that bass, vibrating through the floor.
And then she walks out.
I don't know what I expected. Another glazed-over girl in a see-through dress, stumbling through her own nightmare on platform heels. Another body being paraded for men who want to feel powerful without doing the work of earning it.
That's not what I see.
What I see is a girl in a champagne-colored dress that's more air than fabric, and she's shaking. Not the drug tremor of the others. She's shaking because she's genuinely terrified, and she hasn't been sedated enough to not feel it. Her hands are clenched into fists at her sides and her chin is up, and there's something in that refusal to let it drop that hits me cold water on a hot day.
She's not beautiful. That's not the right word. Beautiful is a girl on a magazine cover, symmetrical and safe and forgettable. This girl looks like she was assembled from spare parts that shouldn't work together but do. Wide mouth. Sharp jaw. Eyes that are too big for her face and so dark they swallow the spotlight whole. She's all angles and tension and barely contained panic. She moves like a deer that knows the rifle is aimed but won't give the hunter the satisfaction of running.
I set my vodka down.
I don't realize I've done it until Ilya glances at me.
"Boss?"