Page 16 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Of course. I'm Cora. Come on back."

She sat across from me in the small consultation corner we kept for exactly this purpose, crossed her legs, and studied the room with the clinical attention of someone doing inventory rather than making conversation. Her rings caught the light when she folded her hands: three of them, none matching, all clearly expensive in the understated way that only comes from money old enough to stop needing to prove itself. She did not glance at the mood boards taped to the walls, or the half-finished seating chart still propped against Beckett's desk. She looked at me instead, the way you'd study a door before deciding whether it was worth trying the handle.

"So," I said, pulling a fresh intake sheet toward me, "tell me what kind of event you're planning."

"Something private. Small, but the kind of small that costs more than large usually does." She smiled, the expression not quite reaching the rest of her face. "I understand you're the one everyone's been talking about."

My pen stopped moving. "I'm sorry?"

"The photo. It's been everywhere this morning." She said it lightly, like weather. "You handle the Zolotov account personally, I hear."

"A handful of my clients get that kind of attention. It's how I run my business."

"Of course." She tilted her head, and something in the gesture felt less like curiosity and more like measurement, the way you might check a room for exits without looking like that was what you were doing. "I'm only asking because I find it interesting. A boutique firm, three years old, one very large, very specific client. How exactly did that happen? How does a woman like you end up introduced to a man like that?"

I felt the question land somewhere it should not have been able to reach, a small cold pressure behind my sternum that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. It was a strange question to ask an event planner about a corporate summit client, phrased with a precision that had nothing to do with curiosity about my business model and everything to do with something else I could not yet name.

"He hired my company through a standard vendor process," I said, keeping my voice as even as I could make it. "The same way anyone else does."

"Mm." She did not write that down. She had not written anything down. "That is what I would say too, if I were you."

I opened my mouth to ask what exactly that was supposed to mean, and she was already rising, smoothing her coat with one gloved hand, thanking me for my time in a voice that had not needed my answer to begin with.

A woman in a very good coat booked a "consultation" under the name Reyes and asked exactly one question too many.

8

DMITRI

The photo had been circulating for six hours by the time I got Nik alone. The office was dark except for the desk lamp and the low light over the bar, and he had been sitting across from me for the better part of that hour with his tie loosened and his jacket over the back of a chair, the way he only ever let himself sit when the day had gone on long enough that pretending otherwise stopped being worth the effort.

"Walk me through it again," I said.

"There's nothing new to walk through. The photo is real. It is timestamped, it is already on three sites that matter and a dozen that don't, and by tomorrow it will be on more. Whoever took it wasn't trying to catch you doing anything specific. They just wanted proof you were somewhere, with someone, looking like a man who had somewhere he wanted to be." Nik rubbed a hand over his jaw, the gesture of a man who had said the same sentence in his head several times before deciding to say it out loud. "That is the part that should worry you more than the exposure. Not that people saw you. That you looked like that while they were watching."

"I heard you the first time."

"I don't think you did, or we wouldn't be having this conversation twice." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and for once there was nothing performative in it, no dry line waiting behind his eyes. "Twenty years, Dima. I have watched you build a life with exactly one door in it and a hundred locks on that door, and I don't think I have ever seen you leave it open on purpose. You left it open on purpose."

I did not answer right away, because there was nothing in me that wanted to argue with the accuracy of it.

"Say something," Nik said. "Tell me I'm wrong. I would genuinely like to be wrong about this one."

"You're not wrong."

"I know I'm not wrong. I want to hear you say it, because I have watched you talk yourself out of worse ideas than this one, and I need to know the part of you that does that is still in there somewhere."

"Her name is already attached to this," Nik said. "It will not come off. You understand that? Whatever this is, whatever you're telling yourself it is, the day it becomes useful to someone to hurt you through her, that photograph is the map. It tells them exactly where to look."

"You think I don't know that?"

"I think you know it the way a man knows a fact he has decided not to feel yet."

I got up and crossed to the window, the city laid out flat and orange below the glass, and stood there long enough that Nik let the silence hold instead of filling it, which was its own kind of respect between us, earned over two decades of knowing when a man needed the room to find his own way to a sentence.

"You remember Petro?" I said, finally, without turning around.

Nik went very still. "I remember Petro."