Kir's face cycles through several colors. He grips his paddle and opens his mouth.
I look at him. I don't speak. I don't threaten. I don't reach for the gun against my ribs. I let him see what's behind my eyes, the thing I usually keep locked behind politeness and tailored suits and the careful performance of civilized behavior.
What's behind my eyes is very simple: I will kill everyone in this room before I let you have her.
Kir closes his mouth with a gulp.
"One million going once," Morozov says, his voice cracking. "Going twice."
The room holds its breath.
"Sold. To Mr. Voronov."
The gavel comes down, and I am looking at the girl on the stage. This trembling stranger in her paper-thin dress with her chin up and her fists clenched and her dark eyes full of a terror and think:You have no idea what just happened to you. You have no idea what just happened to me.
Ilya is at my shoulder. I can feel his frustration radiating off him like heat. Three weeks of planning. Men in position. A clean kill, thrown away for a girl neither of us has ever seen before.
"The Kir situation," he says carefully.
"Will be handled differently now."
"Differently how?"
I watch the girl being led off the stage by one of Morozov's handlers. She looks back over her shoulder, once, at the room full of men, and her expression is the expression of someone who has just been told the date of their own execution.
"I don't know yet," I tell Ilya, and it's the first honest thing I've said in years. "But I'm not leaving this building without her."
Ilya stares at me. He's known me since we were fourteen, since we were running cigarettes and stolen electronics through the docks for my father's men. He has seen me shoot a man in the face over a five-percent discrepancy in a shipment. He has never once seen me act without a plan.
Until tonight.
"Get the car," I say.
Morozov's people are efficient. Papers are signed. Money is wired. They bring her to me in a side room off the main floor, a windowless space with leather couches and a mini bar, like this is a backstage lounge and not a holding pen for human beings.
She stands in front of me, she's smaller than she looked on stage. The heels add four inches, but without them she'd barely reach my chin. Up close, her makeup is flawless but I can see where her mascara has feathered at the corners, where tears were wiped away and painted over, and her fingernails have left half-moon indentations in her own palms from clenching so hard.
She doesn't look at me. She looks at the floor, at the wall, at the door behind me, anywhere but my face.
I take off my jacket.
She flinches. A recoil so visceral that it punches through every layer of control I've spent the last twenty minutes maintaining, and for one white-hot second I want to go back out to the auction floor and put a bullet in every man who made her learn that reflex.
Instead, I step forward and drape my jacket over her shoulders.
I'm not doing it out of kindness or chivalry or some noble impulse that I don't possess and have never pretended to.
I'm doing it because I can see every man in the hallway looking at her body through that dress, and something ancient and vicious in my blood says: no. Mine. All of it. Every inch.
The jacket swallows her. She pulls it around herself instinctively, burrowing into it, her fingers brushing the lapel. I watch her breathe in the scent of my cologne and I think, yes. That's right. Get used to it.
"Come," I say.
She follows me because she has no choice. I know that. I'm not deluding myself into thinking there's anything voluntary about the way she falls into step behind me as we walk through the corridor and out to the service entrance where Ilya has the car waiting. She's following me the way a prisoner follows a guard to a new cell.
The car is a black Escalade with tinted windows and bulletproof panels. I open the back door.
"Get in."