Page 24 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

"Jasper behave?"

"Jasper was fine."

"Natan?"

He gives me the look that means Natan was also fine and I am asking questions as a warmup activity. "The Marchetti situation is handled," he says. "Jasper will explain the rest. He's coming by later."

"He always comes by later. Delilah made the apple cake."

Eduard looks at me.

"For the customers," I say. "It just happens to be his favorite. That's a coincidence."

It is not a coincidence. Delilah has been making Jasper's favorite things since July with the dedication of a woman conducting a very focused campaign, and Jasper has been arriving to collect them with the punctuality of a man who absolutely knows what's happening and has no intention of disrupting the process. Eduard and I have reached a silent bilateral agreement not to discuss this directly. Valeria has no such agreement and has been openly delighted since August.

Lilah makes a small sound against his chest, the complaint of a person waking up and identifying that she is not being looked at. Eduard tips his chin down and says something too quiet for me to catch, and she quiets. I watch this happen and feel something I have stopped trying to name because it's too large and too specific simultaneously. It just lives in my chest and seems to have no plans to vacate.

"She slept?" I ask.

"Four hours straight."

"Eduard. That's incredible."

"Yes," he says, with the calm satisfaction of a man who does not emote publicly but is, right now, very privately thrilled. I can tell because I have been studying this man's face for the better part of over a year and I know all the footnotes now. Every margin note. Everything that happens in the space between his expressions that most people miss.

Old Bill has looked up from his newspaper. He raises his eyebrows at me with enormous meaning. I give him a small nod that meansI know,and he gives me one back that meansI toldyou so from the very beginning. Then goes back to his paper with the satisfied air of a man whose theory was correct.

Bill has been dining out on "the scary ones are always lonely" for months. I have stopped pretending he was wrong.

I duck under the counter pass-through and come around to them. Lilah hears my voice change distance and turns her head, which she has recently discovered she can do, and her dark eyes find my face with the focused intensity of someone conducting a very serious audit.

She has Eduard's eyes exactly. The same grey, the same quality of attention. The first time she looked at me like that I laughed for a full minute and Eduard stood there with his expression doing seventeen things at once.

"Hi, baby," I say.

She considers me. Then she releases her grip on Eduard's jacket lapel and reaches for me instead, which is not a new development but has also never once stopped being the best thing that happens to me on any given day.

Eduard lets me take her. He always does, this immediate, uncalculated transfer. Like he already knows before the reach is finished that she's going to me and his whole posture adjusts to allow it. The first time he did it, Valeria, who was standing behind him, put a hand over her mouth and looked at the ceiling for a moment. I pretended not to notice. So did Eduard. Valeria texted me about it that night in approximately two hundred words.

I settle Lilah against my hip. She grabs the collar of my cardigan in both fists and looks around the café with the expansive interest of someone surveying new territory.

"She's going to want to see the cats," I say.

"She always wants to see the cats."

"She has good taste."

Lucifer has already appeared from somewhere. He has a specific relationship with Lilah that I don’t entirely understand but have chosen to accept, some kind of truce arrangement arrived at early and upheld without negotiation. He winds around Eduard's ankles first, which is a formality, and then sits two feet from me and looks up at Lilah with the patient gravity of a creature who has decided this small person is acceptable.

Lilah reaches for him, babbling incoherently.

Lucifer allows one hand to make contact with the top of his head. This is a concession he has made for exactly one person in the seven years I've had him.

"She's going to grow up thinking Lucifer is the friendly one," I tell Eduard.

"He is friendly. With her."

"With you too."