Page 4 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Since when do you speak the language normal people use."

"Since it amuses me to watch you pretend you don't." A pause, the particular kind Nik used when he already knew the answer and wanted to hear me say it out loud anyway. "Did you correct her."

"No."

"At all."

"No."

Silence filled the line, the kind that had cost other men their composure over the years and had never managed to cost me mine. Standing at the window with a glass I still had not touched, I felt it land differently than it usually did.

"That is new," Nik said finally.

"It is one afternoon."

"You have had exactly one afternoon like it in all the years I have known you, back when you were younger and considerably more reckless than you are now." I could hear him shift, the creak of the chair he refused to replace even though I had offered three times. "What do you want me to do with the vendor contracts. I was going to sign off on the final round tonight."

"Hold them."

"Hold them."

"I'll review them myself."

Another silence followed, shorter this time, but denser. Nik had been reading my contracts for twenty years without needing my signature on anything smaller than a territory line, and we both understood exactly what it meant that I wanted my hands on paperwork that concerned a florist's invoice and a string quartet's parking arrangements.

"You have never reviewed a vendor contract personally," he said. "Not for the last four summits. Not for your own birthday, which I planned entirely without you noticing, a fact you are welcome to sit with."

"There's a first for everything."

"There is a first for some things. This is not usually one of them." I heard the smile in it before he let it reach his voice, which was its own kind of insult, coming from him. "Does this have a name."

"Yes."

"Are you going to tell me the name, or am I meant to enjoy the mystery."

"Cora Walsh," I said, and did not enjoy how easily it came out, how little effort the two words required compared to everything else I had said all day.

"The event planner."

"The event planner."

"The one who does not yet know who hired her."

"That's the one."

Nik exhaled, a long and deliberate sound I recognized from twenty years of watching him decide whether a problem was worth arguing about or simply worth watching unfold. "I am not going to tell you this is a bad idea."

"Good."

"I am going to tell you that you have spent fifteen years building a life specifically so that nothing in it could be used against you, and you are currently describing, to me, on an open line, the exact shape of the first thing that could."

He was not wrong. He was rarely wrong, which was the whole reason I kept him closer than anyone else who worked for me, and for a moment I just let that sit, the way I let every uncomfortable truth sit before I decided what to do with it.

"Hold the contracts," I said again. "I'll have them back to you by morning."

"You're going to read a florist's invoice tonight."

"I'm going to read all of it."