Page 29 of Auctioned to the Russian Pakhan
The accusation stung because it was partially true. Not the part about being scared, she’d proven to herself and everyone else that she could handle fear, but the part about choice. Because what choice had she really made? To stay with a man who’d bought her at an auction? To play along with whatever game he was orchestrating? To convince herself that the way he looked at her sometimes meant something more than strategic calculation?
“I want,” she said, her voice gaining strength with each word, “to not be treated like a prize to be won or lost. I want to make my own decisions about my own life. And I want all of you to remember that I’m a grown woman, not a child who needs constant protection.”
The silence that followed was deafening. Even the ambient noise of the restaurant seemed to fade away, leaving only the sound of her own heartbeat thundering in her ears.
Then Matvei spoke, his voice carrying that same cold authority that was beginning to make her skin crawl.
“As touching as this family reunion is,” he said, “the reality remains unchanged. Irina is my wife. She bears my name and lives under my protection. Any attempt to remove her from my custody will be considered an act of war.”
Custody. The word hit her like a physical blow, draining all the fight out of her in an instant. Not a partnership. Not marriage between equals. Custody, as if she were a possession to be owned and protected and kept in line.
“You son of a bitch,” Kostya snarled, half-rising from his chair before Ilya’s hand on his arm stopped him.
“Careful,” Matvei warned, and for the first time that evening, there was real menace in his voice. “We’re in public, and despite what you might think, I have no desire to explain to the authorities why there are bullet holes in one of Boston’s finest establishments.”
“Neither do we,” Ilya said, his voice tight with controlled rage. “But this isn’t over, Volkov. Not by a long shot.”
“I didn’t expect it to be.”
The rest of the dinner passed in tense silence, broken only by the careful consumption of food that no one seemed to taste and the occasional exchange of veiled threats disguised as polite conversation. Irina pushed her food around her plate and tried to ignore the way her chest felt like it was slowly collapsing in on itself.
This was what she was to them. All of them. A commodity to be traded, protected, fought over, but never actually consulted. Even Matvei, who had listened to her ideas about his operations with such apparent respect, who had made herfeel valuable and intelligent and worthy of consideration, even he saw her as something he owned rather than someone he’d chosen to share his life with.
The realization shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. She’d known the terms of their arrangement from the beginning, known that whatever was growing between them was complicated by the circumstances that had brought them together. But she’d allowed herself to hope, to believe that maybe things could be different.
She’d been an idiot.
When they finally left the restaurant, she managed to maintain her composure until they were in the privacy of the town car. But as soon as the door closed behind them, cutting them off from the outside world, the careful control she’d been maintaining began to crack.
“Well,” she said, her voice bright with false cheer, “that went about as well as expected.”
Matvei glanced at her, and she could see him trying to read her mood in the dim light of the car’s interior. “You’re angry.”
“Am I?” She turned to look out the window, watching the city lights blur past in streaks of gold and white. “Why would I be angry? Just because I spent the evening listening to the men in my life discuss my future like I was a particularly valuable racehorse?”
“Irina—”
“No.” The word came out sharper than she’d intended, carrying all her pent-up frustration and disappointment. “Don’t. Just... don’t.”
They rode the rest of the way home in silence, the space between them crackling with tension that had nothing to do with physical attraction and everything to do with the fundamental disconnect in how they saw their relationship.
The moment they walked through the front door of the mansion, Irina headed straight for the stairs, her heels clicking against the marble with staccato precision. She needed space, needed time to process what had just happened, needed to figure out how to reconcile the man who had made her laugh over dinner three nights ago with the cold stranger who had referred to her as being in his “custody.”
She was halfway up the stairs when Matvei’s voice stopped her.
“We need to talk about this.”
“No, we don’t.” She didn’t turn around, didn’t trust herself to look at him without saying something she might regret. “We need to go to bed and pretend that dinner never happened.”
“Running away won’t solve anything.”
The accusation made her spin around, her hand gripping the banister so hard her knuckles went white. “Running away? Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“Aren’t you?”
Something inside her snapped like a rubber band stretched too far. She turned and stalked back down the stairs, her anger giving her a kind of reckless courage that she’d never felt before.
“You want to talk?” she said, getting close enough to see the flecks of gold in his eyes. “Fine. Let’s talk about how you sat there tonight and discussed me like I was a business transaction.Let’s talk about how you used the word ‘custody’ to describe our marriage. Let’s talk about how you’ve managed to make me feel like even more of a possession than my brothers ever did.”
