Page 10 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"On it." He gathered the chart like it had personally betrayed him and retreated toward his desk.

"They can put up a tent," Naomi said into the phone, in the flat, deadly calm voice she used right before she won an argument, "or I can call the venue's insurance carrier and ask them how they feel about four hundred people in a structural code violation, and one of those options costs you a client relationship and the other one costs you a tarp."

There was a pause. Something on the other end made her go very still, the kind of stillness that meant she was counting to five before she said something she couldn't take back.

"No. No, I don't think you understand what I'm offering you. I'm offering you a way out of this that doesn't end with my client suing your venue into a parking lot." Another pause followed, shorter this time. "Great. Glad we're on the same page. I'll have the amended contract to you by five."

She hung up, exhaled through her nose like a woman putting out a small fire with her own breath, and reached for her coffee without looking at it, muscle memory doing the work her hands were too tired to think through.

I loved her the way you love a person standing directly between you and a burning building.

The front door chimed, and I looked up expecting a vendor or a courier, and got my brother instead, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, doing his best impression of a man who had not come here to ask me for anything.

"Hey." Sean leaned against the door frame like he owned the building instead of just periodically needing money from the person who did. "You got a minute?"

"I've got ninety seconds and a seating chart apocalypse. What's up?"

"Rent's due. I'm short again. Work's been slow, I'll have it back to you by, I don't know, soon."

"How short this time?"

"Just the usual. Six hundred."

I was already reaching for my bag before he finished the sentence, the way I always did, the motion so automatic it barely registered as a decision anymore. I found my checkbook, wrote the number without asking what it needed to be because I already knew what rent on his building ran, and held it out.

"Thank you. Seriously. This is the last time."

"You said that in the spring."

"This time I mean it."

"You meant it in the spring too." I said it without heat, because there wasn't any heat left in it, just the flat familiarity of a script we'd both been running for two years.

Naomi ended her call in time to catch the tail end of it, phone still warm in her hand. "I can cover half of that. I've got it sitting right there."

"I've got it."

"I know you've got it. That's not what I said. I'm saying you don't have to be the only one who does, every single time, forever."

"It's fine, Naomi." I was already tucking the checkbook back into my bag, already three thoughts past the conversation, already mentally back in the seating chart. "It's easier if it's just me. One line item instead of two people trying to remember who covered what."

"Mom doing okay?" I asked, because I always asked, and because it was easier to ask about her than to ask him why this kept happening.

"She's fine. Same as always." He said it too fast, the answer he gave whether or not it happened to be true that week.

"That's not what I asked."

"It's what you're getting." He shifted his weight toward the door, already halfway to leaving in his head. "You should come by. It's been a while."

"I will. Once things calm down here a little."

"You always say that too."

"Things are actually insane right now, Sean, look around." I gestured at the room, at Beckett rebuilding his chart from scratch, at the general condition of a business trying to survive its third year. "I'm not making it up as an excuse."

"I know." He said it gently enough that I almost believed he meant it. "You're always the one holding it together. I just wish you'd let someone hold something for you every once in a while."

"I let people help all the time."