Page 40 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Handling it how?"

"I'm going to make sure your brother is not alone again until we understand what this is."

"Dmitri, if this is because of me, if something happens to him because he's my brother and I'm the one who..."

"I need you to trust me on this part. I will tell you everything I learn, as soon as I learn it. I am not going to manage this behind your back and hand you a summary later. That's not how I want to do this with you anymore." The words came out steadier than I felt. Some of that promise was for her. The rest of it was for an older version of myself, the one who had spent two decades assuming a promise like that could not survive real fear. "But I need thirty minutes to make calls. Can you stay where you are, with people around you, and let me do that?"

A pause, and then, quieter, "Okay. Thirty minutes. Then you call me back even if there's nothing to say yet."

"I will."

"Promise."

"I promise."

She hung up first, which she never did. The silence after was worse than her voice had been, because now there was nothing left to listen to except my own thoughts, and they were nowhere near as controlled as I'd let her hear.

I set the phone down on the desk, carefully, the way a man sets down something he's afraid he might throw otherwise, and stood there in my own suite feeling something I had not let myself feel in longer than I cared to admit. It was not anger. Anger was loud, and this was the opposite of loud. This was cold clarity, a stillness that settled into my hands and my breathing and the exact rhythm of my own pulse, the specific quiet I had once used to survive rooms other men did not walk out of. I had not needed that particular stillness in years. I found, standing there, that I had not lost the knack for it either.

I called Nik.

"Luca goes to New York tonight," I said, before Nik had finished saying my name. "Sean Walsh, Cora's brother. He's not aware of any of this yet, and it stays that way. I want a full workup on him within the hour, his building, his schedule, anyone who knew his address before today."

"Understood." A pause, the particular silence that meant Nik was already writing something down. "What am I telling Luca this is?"

"Protection detail. Nothing more than that. He doesn't need the whole picture to do his job."

"And Cora?"

"She knows there's a threat. She doesn't know the shape of it yet, because neither do I." My hand turned the empty water glass a slow quarter on the desk without asking my permission, the same motion that always showed up when the rest of me had to sit still and think. "Two men, polite, confirmed his identity by name and left. That's not a robbery. That's not random. That's someone doing due diligence before they decide what to do with the information they've collected."

"Basile?"

"I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not saying his name out loud to her until I'm sure." I made myself say the next part clearly, because it mattered that Nik heard it exactly right. "Whatever this is, it does not touch her directly tonight. Luca watches Sean, quietly. No cars sitting outside his building all night, no men in suits knocking on his roommate's door. I want this done the old way. Invisible. Before anyone in that family even has to know how close it got."

"That's the old way."

"I know exactly what it is."

"I'm not arguing with it. I'm telling you Cora might."

I did not have an answer for that immediately, which was, in itself, an answer.

After I hung up, I stood in the suite a long time without turning on another light, the city outside doing what it always did at that hour, indifferent to whatever was happening behind any one of its million lit windows. I thought about Petro, which I had not let myself do in years, not really, not past the version of the story I kept filed away for the rare occasion someone new in this life needed to understand what was actually at stake in it.

Petro had loved a woman named Yelena, once. He used to check a room without meaning to, just to be sure she was still in it. A family from the east could not touch his territory directly, so they went around him instead. They took her, and gave her back three days later. The warning was never really about her. It was about him, and he folded, because any man would have. A year afterward I stood in the doorway of a house with the lawn still cut and the gate still painted, and found a man who answered his own door because he no longer trusted anyone else to. He sat across from me for an hour in a voice with nothing left inside it. He called the place his address. Not his home. A home would have needed her in it, and she was gone.

I had built an entire life around never once giving anyone that kind of leverage over me: no wife, no children, nothing anyone could point a gun at and know it would move me faster than a gun pointed directly at my own chest. It had worked, all those years, exactly the way I designed it to work. It had also cost me every single thing Cora had described wanting from her own life on that plane to New York, and I had told myself the cost was worth paying, right up until the night I stopped believing that and never managed to talk myself back into believing it again.

Now there was a name: Sean's. It was not a hypothetical, not a story about another man's ruin filed away to frighten a younger version of myself into vigilance. It was a real man, twenty-something, terrified in his own doorway tonight because two strangers in dark coats had wanted to confirm he shared blood with the woman I could not stop thinking about, even in the middle of a crisis I had built my entire life to prevent.

I understood, standing there in the dark, exactly what it had cost Petro to become a man who still answered his own door, in a house that had stopped being home the same week that family sent her back to his front step.

I opened my phone again and typed a message to Luca, fast, the way I did everything once I had already made the decision and only needed to record it. It read: "Handle Sean Walsh personally. Full detail, invisible. Do not tell Cora the extent of it. She only needs the reassurance."

I read it twice.

The second time, I heard it the way she would hear it if she ever found out. And she would, eventually, because that was who she was: the woman who read every label on every notebook, who asked the one question nobody wanted asked, always at the exact moment they least wanted to answer it. I heard Nik's voice from twenty minutes earlier too, flat and certain. That's the old way. He had not been telling me something I didn't already know. He had been telling me something he thought I might have forgotten I knew.