Page 12 of Floodgates

I was done anyway, so I ended the call, not even having to look up to know my brother had just stormed into the room.

“What the fuck, Trace?” he snarled at me.

And, of course, because my luck was never that good, I was not only looking at Alex Brandt, my older brother, but also at his ex-partner, Cordell Nolan—Cord, for short.

I was going to have a monster of a headache, I was just certain.

Both men charged across the room, and as they were both big—my brother at six foot three, Cord two inches taller—I felt crowded and smothered, even though at five foot eleven, I wasn’t tiny myself.

“How many times have I told you that working with Dimah Mashir is gonna get you fuckin’ killed?” Alex barked at me.

I shook my head.

“Yes,” he insisted. “Yes, it will. And you can talk that fuckin’ bullshit about how Dimah’s the good brother and his brother Kirill is the monster, but so you know, there is no record of a Kirill Mashir ever even coming into this country. He died in some Russian prison when he was eighteen, and that was the end of him.”

Dimah Mashir and I had met when I was fresh out of college looking for my first job as an accountant. My degree was in management accounting, but I had no great desire to be a CPA. He’d offered me a bookkeeping position at his company, but said there would be a lot to the job.

“I’ll get bored if there’s not more to it than just crunching numbers.”

“You won’t be bored; I want you to run office as well,” he said in his gorgeous thick Russian accent that made my dick hard.

“How do you know I can do that?”

“I am looking at you, am I not?”

It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me.

Six years ago, after I’d worked for him for four years, Dimah asked me to be his partner, and I had quickly accepted. I had bought shares with my savings, we had signed paperwork, and simple as that, we went into business together. So after ten years of first employment and then friendship, I knew my partner. He was not a liar, and even if he were, he definitely wouldn’t ever lie to me. His business—our business—was completely legitimate. I set up things like 401(k)s and retirement packages, I was the bookkeeper, I paid personnel, vendors, and Dimah was in charge of logistics. He did the legwork, went to the wharf, watched goods come in, and shipped others out. Ours was an easy distribution of responsibilities. His brother, Kirill, had his own endeavors and those, from what Dimah told me, walked a thin line between clean and criminal. Being in business with Kirill might get you used for chum if loyalty was not high on your priority list. I didn’t know the whole story of why the two brothers weren’t partners, and I honestly didn’t care. They were completely separate, and since I saw our books on a daily basis, I knew where every penny came from and where it flowed out to. I could say with great certainty that if Dimah said he did, in fact, have a brother, then he did, for certain, have one. A living, breathing one, even if no one else I knew had ever seen him.

“Your partner is a criminal,” my brother told me for the billionth time.

“My partner is a businessman,” I corrected. Again.

Cord grunted and flicked his moss-green gaze to me. “What’s under the bandage?”

“Just a scratch.”

Alex growled. “We both know a scratch doesn’t get you taken to the hospital in a fuckin’ ambu—”

“That’s it,” I cut my brother off, picking up my phone. “I’m telling. I’m calling Dad right now, so you better watch out.”

He grabbed the phone out of my hand, slammed it down on the bed beside me, and then took my face in his hands, forcing me to look up at him. “You scared the fuck outta me. I lost Mom. I ain’t losing you.”

God, he had to play the mom card? “You realize I’m thirty-three years old, right?”

“I will always be older than you.”

Yes, he would. “You can see I’m fine.”

He was squinting so he wouldn’t cry, but his eyes were red-rimmed anyway.

“Really,” I said, yanking free and then putting out my arms for him. “I’m good.”

Leaning in fast, he clutched me tight, burying his face down in my shoulder. Underneath the outer persona of prickly, volatile, alpha DEA agent lay his great heart that couldn’t take losing one more member of his family. I had to be more sensitive to that fact.

Glancing over at Cord, I saw him shaking his head, the condescension just dripping off of him. He was such an asshole, and he had no right to judge me. When I flipped him off, I saw him clench his jaw in irritation.

“He’s fine, Al,” Cord growled. “Now ask him why someone would shoot up his office first thing this morning?”