Page 31 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"I'm not trying to catch anything," I said, mostly to fill the silence, which had gotten uncomfortably heavy for a room that had started with jokes about wine lists. "I just spend my whole life staring at floor plans until they make sense. It's not a skill. It's mostly just repetition and mild obsession."

"It's a skill," Dmitri said, looking at me in a way that made the folding table and the ancient coffee maker disappear for a second. "Most people in this room have spent years learning to see exactly that kind of gap. You found it in under a minute without trying."

I did not entirely know what to do with that, so I fell back on my usual move when a compliment landed somewhere I hadn't braced for it: deflect with something lighter before it could sit too long on my chest. "Give me a few more meetings and I'll start charging a consulting fee."

"Granted," Nik said, and I could not tell if he was joking, which I was rapidly learning was true of most things he said.

We finished the rest of the agenda in the ordinary, unremarkable way meetings finish: a handful of remaining line items, a debate about valet placement that Luca won by sheer stubbornness, a final read through of the guest list that I only half listened to. I was still turning the east corridor over in my head, the particular wrongness of a rotation covering a hallway that wasn't there, when my phone buzzed against my leg somewhere in the middle of the valet debate, and I let it sit, because interrupting a room full of men discussing security to check a text felt like exactly the kind of thing that would undo whatever I'd just spent the last hour building.

"You did well in there," Dmitri said, once the door had shut behind us and the hallway had gone quiet enough that his voice didn't have to compete with anything. "Better than well. Nik doesn't hand out compliments. Whatever that was you did with the delivery window, he's still doing the math on it."

"I wasn't trying to prove anything."

"I know. That's exactly why it worked." He studied me for a second, the same quiet attention he gave everything he'd decided was worth actually looking at. "Most people who walk into that room are trying to prove something. You just answered the questions."

"Careful. I might start expecting to be invited to these regularly."

"You should expect that." He said it simply, without any of the weight I might have expected around a sentence like that, and somehow the plainness of it landed harder than ceremony would have.

It buzzed again while he walked me to the elevator, Nik and Luca already back in the conference room with their heads bent over a laptop, and I finally pulled it out while I waited for the doors to open, more out of habit than urgency.

It sat at the top of the screen, no greeting, no buildup, exactly the kind of message Beckett only sent when he'd already decided panicking wouldn't help and was trying, unsuccessfully, to talk himself out of it in real time.

Beckett's text read: "Don't panic but there's a vendor on the summit list I've never heard of and neither has anyone else."

16

DMITRI

That same evening, the jet climbed into a sky already going dark at the edges, and Chicago folded itself into a grid of lights below us that got smaller and less complicated with every thousand feet. I had made the decision to fly to New York within the hour, not because one unfamiliar name on a vendor list was necessarily anything, but because I had spent enough years in this life to know that the difference between paranoia and preparation was mostly a matter of which one found the answer first. Nik had not argued. Nik never argued with a decision that involved checking something twice. It was one of several reasons I had kept him this close for twenty years.

"Get me everything we have on the vendor by morning," I'd told Nik in the car to the airport. "Banking history, previous events, whoever put that name on the list in the first place."

"Already started," Nik said. "Beckett's version only shows a name and a contact email. Whoever added them either did it in a hurry or didn't want anyone asking questions about how it got there."

"Which is it?"

"I'll know by the time we land. Give me until morning and I'll know a great deal more than that."

Cora had listened to the exchange without inserting herself into it. I noticed, because most people filled a silence like that one with reassurance nobody had asked for. She simply nodded once, committed it to memory with the same quiet attention she gave a floor plan, and let the two of us finish the conversation on our own terms.

Luca claimed the seat facing backward before either of us could take it, on the theory that facing away from where you were headed made takeoff easier on the stomach, a theory he had defended with total conviction and no supporting evidence for as long as I had known him. He was asleep before we cleared ten thousand feet, head tipped against the leather, mouth open in a way that would have mortified him if he'd been conscious enough to witness it.

"He snores like a man winning an argument," Nik said, not looking up from the folder in his lap. "Loudly, and with total confidence nobody's going to interrupt him."

"Should we wake him?"

"Absolutely not. This is the most productive he's been all day."

Cora laughed, low enough not to actually test Luca's sleep, and turned her attention to the flight attendant setting a tray of snacks on the table between us with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had done this a thousand times and stopped finding it interesting somewhere around the two hundredth.

"Exhibit A," Cora said, lifting a small bag of pretzels like she was presenting it to a jury. "Salt, crunch, zero emotional risk. A safe, defensible choice for a stressful evening." She set it down and picked up the next item. "Exhibit B, chocolate. Delicious, but a known repeat offender when it comes to melting on important documents, of which I currently have several." She weighed both in her hands, deliberating with the exaggerated gravity of a judge who had clearly already made up her mind. "The court finds in favor of the almonds instead, on the grounds that they require no cleanup and make me look like I have my life together. No further questions."

"Does she do this every time she eats?" Nik asked me, deadpan, like he wasn't sure whether he was allowed to find it funny.

"I don't know," I said. "This is the first time I've watched her fly."

"Lucky you," Cora said, popping an almond into her mouth. "Most people don't get front-row seats to my full legal reasoning. Consider it a privilege."