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His eyes flick from my face to the guards flanking me to my bare feet on the stone floor, and something passes through his expression—too fast for me to identify, but I catch the edge of it. Irritation, maybe. I’ve lost my everloving mind.

He says something to the men. The tenor of his command is low, clipped, in a language I don’t understand. They disperse. All of them. Without hesitation, without question, without so much as a backward glance. Five enormous, armed men, moved by a single sentence from a man in a henley.

Then he looks at me, his scowl condemning.

“You made it farther than I expected,” he says in a voice so even, gooseflesh prickles all over my body.

I’m shaking. My knees are bleeding from the fall. And I’m standing in a church being addressed by a man who just commanded a small army with the casual authority of someone asking the waiter for the check.

Words fail me. There is no framework for this. There is no observable phenomenon I can attach it to. There is no chapter in any textbook I’ve ever read that covers what it feels like to realize you’ve stumbled into a world that operates on entirely different rules than the one you’ve spent the past thirty years of your completely average life navigating.

“Who are you?” I whisper. When I really mean what is this? What have I fallen into? How deep does this go? Why are you doing this to me?

He holds my gaze. The stained glass paints a stripe of cobalt across his jaw. “Get dressed, Meera,” he sighs. “We’ve got company coming.”

Chapter 7 - Leonid

I had to call them in, because she’d left me with no real choice in the matter. I can’t trust myself with this woman. It would be stupid of me to ignore that, and we can’t afford any more stupidity.

Gone is the version of events where I trust myself implicitly. Where I hold fast to the fact that I have trusted myself implicitly for the better part of four decades. I know that if I can’t back my own judgment, nobody else is obliged to do it for me.

After all, I’m not Trifon, whose word carries the weight of law he lays down like a fucking gauntlet. I’m not Valentin, whose presence alone can command the pulse of a room. And I’m not Iosif, whose instincts have been sharpened by year after year of being the reckless one who survives no matter what. I’m the one who watches, processes, and delivers the right answer. That’s my function, isn’t it? It’s why I am an advisor to my Pakhan. That’s where my value lies.

Right now, my value has been compromised by the enchanting, intriguing woman tied to a chair in the bedroom because she is so fucking beautiful it’s making me fucking stupid.

So, it’s time to bring the cavalry in.

If I can’t trust myself, I can still, forever trust them. That is what being a Yuri is, at its heart.

Trifon shows up first, as is par for the course. He strides in with that characteristic authority, exuding command even in the nave of this old church, converted into a floor-to-ceiling cathedral of shelves stuffed with volumes I’ve spent years collecting. My Slavic mythology section alone borders on scholarly. It is, without exaggeration, the only space in my life that I’ve curated with genuine love rather than calculated aesthetics. It’s more personal than the penthouse that’s technically my place of residence. This was meant to just be a safehouse. It’s a little more than that to me.

Trifon surveys it with overt appreciation, before he relents to the need to focus on the matter at hand. We’ve got no more time to waste. There isn’t one of us who isn’t aware of this.

Valentin isn’t far behind. “Hey, killer,” he says, as he walks right in and just drops heavily into the leather chair by the window with a groan. His light blue eyes land on me and burrow into my skull. There are so many questions in his eyes that I can’t answer yet. I can’t look away either.

Iosif arrives last, predictably, fashionably late. “All right,” he hollers, arms splayed out on either side. “What’s going on? What’re we doing? You look like shit, by the way.”

“Thank you, Iosif,” I snort. “Fuck you too.”

“I’m serious, bratan. You’ve been being cagey. Miron said we had to ask you directly.”

I relent with a sigh, because he isn’t wrong. This is bad. I rise to my feet, and consider how best to fully brief them.

In the end, I just dive in. I tell them about the anonymous text messages, the fucked-up auction, the pod system and shady anonymity, the ruthless bidding war, the photograph, the hundred and eighty thousand dollars I spent on a woman whose name is Meera Gallagher and whose father is a Boston PD detective—all facts Miron’s fed dug up before I ever sat down to play Meera’s little game. I tell them about the untraceable numbers, the rival bidder Miron can’t identify, the black box of the auction’s guest list. I tell them she tried to run and my guards brought her back at gunpoint. I tell them she’s been incapacitated and waiting for interrogation in my bedroom.

I don’t tell them she’s the most magnetic woman I’ve ever spent time with. That this isn’t why I want to take her to my fucking bedroom. I don’t tell them that when my guard aimed a gun at her, something inside me twisted so feverishly, a red haze across my vision, that I nearly put my fist through the wall.

I don’t tell them any of that, because it’s not going to become a problem. I won’t let it. The fact that I called them in and am handing her over is proof enough.

“Is there a reason you think she’s connected to the mole?” Trifon questions, his expression detached.

“Someone sent me to her, making sure to do it from two separate sources, two separate burner phones, breadcrumbing me to her. I don’t know yet, what the fuck she has to do with any of this. But I know she isn’t unrelated. I honestly can’t tell if she knows why.”

“Well, the obvious red flag is the cop father,” Valentin notes, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “What do we know about him?”

“Miron’s looking into him now. That’s why he isn’t here,” I say.

“A cop’s daughter sold at a trafficking auction.” Trifon’s sounds thoughtful. “What’re the chances?”