Page 14 of Marrying the Pakhan

His hand finds the side of my jaw, his other arm curving around my waist, pulling me in instead of leaving space between us, and I forget for several full seconds that this was ever supposed to be a business arrangement.

I kiss him back before I decide to, which is somehow worse than if I’d meant to.

When I finally pull back, my breath’s uneven and my hands are braced against his chest, so they need to stay there to keep me upright, and I can’t read what’s happening on his face, only that it isn’t nothing.

He doesn’t say anything right away. Neither do I. The porch light hums overhead, and somewhere down the street a car door slams, ordinary sounds from an ordinary night that don’t match what just happened between us at all.

“Goodnight, Viktor,” I manage, and I’m inside with the door shut and locked before he can answer, back pressed against the wood, heart going too fast for a kiss that was supposed to mean absolutely nothing.

I stand there long enough to hear his car pull away, and even then I don’t move, still catching my breath over something Denise would call excellent optics and I don’t have a name for at all.

6

VIKTOR

I still taste her on my mouth when I wake up, which is an inconvenient thing to notice before I’ve even had coffee.

I push it aside and get to the club early, before the doors open, because Dimitri texted me at seven asking for twenty minutes—and Dimitri doesn’t ask for twenty minutes unless something’s actually wrong.

He’s waiting in the office with two coffees and a face like he hasn’t slept much either, though for entirely different reasons than mine.

“Kazan’s shorting us again,” he says, no greeting, sliding a tablet across the desk. “Third delivery this month. Invoice says forty cases of the good vodka, we counted thirty-four.”

“Same six missing every time?”

“Give or take. And he raised the per-case price eight percent without telling anyone, buried it in the paperwork like we wouldn’t notice.”

I scroll through the numbers while I drink the coffee, and none of it surprises me, exactly. Kazan’s been our distributor for six years, reliable enough that I stopped watching him as closely as I should have somewhere around year three. That’s precisely the mistake that gets exploited eventually.

“He’s testing us,” I say. “Seeing how long it takes before someone notices.”

“Someone noticed. Took me two deliveries, which is embarrassing on our end too.”

I can’t disagree with that. “What do you want to do about it?”

“My instinct’s to replace him.” Dimitri leans back, arms crossed. “But switching suppliers this deep into a relationship draws attention we don’t need right now, with everything else going on.”

“So we don’t replace him. We remind him who he’s dealing with.” I set the tablet down. “Call him in ffor a meeting tomorrow. Bring the invoices. I’ll handle the conversation.”

“You want me there?”

“I want him uncomfortable, and you’re better at uncomfortable than I am.”

“He’s got a shipment coming through the port Friday too. Bigger than usual, more product moving through fewer hands than I’d like.” Dimitri scrolls to another screen. “If he’s cutting corners on vodka cases, I want eyes on that shipment specifically. Making sure nothing else gets creative.”

“Put Sergei on it. He’s good with the port crew, and Kazan doesn’t know his face yet.”

“Already planned on it.” Dimitri almost smiles at that, the first easy thing between us all morning, and for a second the office feels like it always does, business first, everything else waiting its turn.

“There’s something else,” I say, and his face shifts immediately, because he knows my voice well enough by now to hear the difference.

“The wedding.”

“The wedding.” I set my coffee down. “It’s happening Thursday morning. Courthouse downtown, ten o’clock. I need you there.”

“As what?”

“Witness.”