Page 22 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

Dmitri has the car at the curb. I sit in the back and wait for the city to start sliding past. I take out my phone, and there's a message waiting from twenty minutes ago.

Sammie: Your television has 900 channels and I found the one that's just a fireplace. I have questions about your life choices. Also I saved you dessert but the situation is deteriorating.

I read it three times. Eight blocks east, above a street the Popov crew has agreed to forget, a woman in my sweatshirt is defending a dessert from herself in front of a broadcast fire, and I've just promised a room full of dangerous men that I'd burn everything I own down to the foundations for her, and both of these facts are true at once.

Me: Guard the dessert. I'm coming home.

I look at the word after I've sent it. Home. First time I've used it for that apartment in nine years.

Sammie

The dessert does not survive.

I want it on record that I fought valiantly. I moved it to the far end of the coffee table. I put a cushion in front of it. At one point I told it, out loud, "You belong to Eduard," and the baklava said nothing, because it's baklava, and the fireplace channel crackled away judgmentally. By the time I hear the elevator at nine forty I am sitting cross-legged on the sofa with an empty box and no defense strategy.

"Before you say anything," I say, "there was a struggle."

"I can see that. Who won?"

"It was a draw. We're both gone." I watch him hang the coat, and I do my scan, the one I've apparently developed without noticing, the one that checks his hands and his knuckles and the line of his shoulders for evidence of whatever "business" meant tonight. Nothing. He looks intact. He looks, actually, lighter than when he left, some long-carried thing set down, and my chest unclenches by degrees. "How was business? Did you businessify? Were things businessed?"

"It's handled." He rounds the sofa, and instead of taking the chair, he sits beside me, close, his thigh warm along mine, and picks up the empty baklava box, examines it, sets it down. "All of it."

"All of it, meaning."

"Meaning it's over. The people responsible for what you saw have agreed to certain terms. The café is safe. Delilah is safe. You're safe." His gray eyes come to mine, steady. "You can go home, Sammie. Tomorrow, if you want. Tonight, if you want."

And here's the thing about hearts. You think you know what's in yours. And then a beautiful man says exactly the words you've been waiting to hear. Only instead of relief, the bottom drops out of you like a trapdoor, and you learn, in one horrible lurching second, what you were actually afraid of.

Not the Popov’s.

This. The end of the reason to be here.

"Oh," I say. "That's. Wow. That's great."

I am, by trade and by nature, a professionally cheerful person. I have smiled through burnt batches and health inspections and a customer who once tried to return a scone with a bite out of it. I deploy everything I have into that "great," every watt, and I watch it fail completely, because he's Eduard, and he reads me the way I read weather over the counter. His eyes narrow a fraction.

"You're upset."

"I'm not upset. I'm thrilled. My cats, my ovens, my own bed." My voice does something on bed that I'd pay money to take back. I stand up, because sitting still has stopped being possible, and I gather the baklava box and the mug like closing time, hands finding a job. "I'll text Dee tonight, she can meet me in the morning, we've probably lost half the pastry stock but honestly the walk-in was due a deep clean anyway, and, um. I should probably wash your sweatshirt before I give it back. It's had a life."

"Sammie."

I'm at the kitchen island now. I don't remember walking here. My eyes are stinging, which is ridiculous, I refuse, absolutely not. "And obviously your coffee's on the house for life. When you're passing. If you're ever, you know…passing."

"Sammie." He hasn't raised his voice. He's just suddenly there, between me and the sink. He takes the mug out of my hands and sets it down before taking my chin in one hand and tipping my face up. It's over, he's seen it, the stinging eyes and all of it. "If I'm ever passing," he repeats, quietly, but it sounds like a question. Something moves through his jaw. "You think this is me sending you away?"

"Isn't it?" And the wobble gets into my voice now, fully arrived, no stopping it. "It's fine, Eduard, truly, I get it. Crisis over, variable resolved, everything goes back where it was. You said it yourself. And your normal doesn't have a…a woman in it. You told me the switch was off for years, and maybe it just needed, I don't know, a hard reset. I was, I happened to be the nearest—" and I can't finish that sentence, I can't make myself call what happened between us a reboot, so I stop, and the fireplace channel crackles in the awful silence like it's eating popcorn watching us.

Eduard closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, there's something in them I've never seen at full strength before, only in flashes, only in the corners. He takes my face in both hands now.

"I'm going to explain something," he says, "and I need you to hear all of it, because I'll say it plainly, and I don't have your gift for saying things twice in nicer ways. Tonight I sat in a room with the most dangerous men in this city, men my father spent thirty years teaching me never to show a weakness, and I told them what you are to me. Openly. On purpose. I made your café and your staff and your ridiculous cats a protected territory in acriminal negotiation. I told them that if you're ever so much as accidentally frightened, I would spend everything my family has ever built and consider it a fair price. That's not a thing you say about the nearest woman, Sammie. That's a thing you say once in a lifetime, if you're lucky enough to have a reason, and then you spend the rest of that lifetime meaning it."

I've stopped breathing. He keeps going, thumbs stroking my cheekbones, voice low and even and completely without cover.

"I'm sending you home because I see you. You are a person who runs on light, and your light is eight blocks east of here, and I will not be the man who kept the sun in a beautiful box on the thirty-second floor. That's the only reason. The day I met you, my apartment was a place I stored myself between tasks. Tonight I called it home in a message and didn't correct it, and it isn't the apartment that changed."

"Eduard," I whisper.