Page 42 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Enough is fine. Enough is not the same thing as nothing." I took a breath. "And I want updates. Not a summary once it's over. Actual updates, even the boring ones, even the ones that turn out to be nothing."

"You'll get updates."

"From you. Not from Nik summarizing you summarizing Luca. I want the version that hasn't been edited for my comfort."

"That's a lot of layers to specify distrust of."

"I've had a very educational night." I almost smiled, and it almost worked. "You almost went with nothing tonight, didn't you? Not telling me any of it, not out loud, but that was the plan for about an hour." I watched something flicker across his face, confirmation he hadn't planned on giving out loud. "I know you, Dmitri. I know what your first instinct would have been. Handle it. Manage it. Let me find out about the parts that actually mattered secondhand, months from now, if at all."

"That was the instinct. I didn't follow it."

"I know you didn't. I'm not accusing you. I'm telling you I noticed, and I need you to understand what it would have cost us if you had." I took a breath, and something in my chest settled into place, a decision I hadn't consciously made until the exact moment I heard myself say it out loud. "I have spent my entire life deciding I would rather handle everything myself than risk needing someone who might not show up. My dad taught me that lesson before I was old enough to know I was learning it. I built a company, a whole life, specifically so I would never have to test whether anyone would stay if things got hard. Every version of myself I've built since I was nine years old runs on the same rule, that needing a person is a weakness, and I've spent most of my life quietly training myself out of it, one careful decision at a time." I made myself keep looking at him instead of at my own hands. "I'm choosing to test it anyway. With you. Right now. That's not a small thing for me."

"I know what it's costing you to say that."

He reached up and wiped the last of the wetness from under my eye with one thumb, careful in a way that had nothing to do with the coat he still hadn't taken off or the calls he'd already spent most of the night making, calls I wasn't allowed to hear yet, and something about the smallness of the gesture, after everything he'd just told me, undid me more than the fear had.

"Then don't waste it." I sat forward, close enough that our knees touched, and said the thing as plainly as I knew how to say anything. "Everything," I said. "Whatever it is, however bad. You tell me. That's the deal, or there's no deal." He said yes before he'd finished deciding whether he could keep it.

22

DMITRI

Three days had passed since I stood in Cora's apartment and made her a promise I intended to keep, and I had spent most of them proving it in increments too small for her to notice yet, answering every text within the hour instead of letting silence do my talking for me, telling her about the vendor investigation before she had to ask. Chicago did not make the promise easier to keep. If anything, the distance turned the last three days into a test I had built for myself without meaning to, one I intended to pass regardless of what today required of me. Today required a lunch with a man I had spent a decade calling a rival without ever once confirming, to my own satisfaction, whether the word still fit him. Cora deserved a real answer about Basile, not a guess dressed up as one, and I had told myself that was the only reason I had agreed to sit across a table from him at all.

Basile had chosen the room, which told me something before I had even sat down in it, a private dining room on the second floor of a restaurant neither of our families owned, walls the color of weak tea and a single window overlooking an alley too narrow to be useful to anyone. Neutral ground, in this life, meant a place where nobody had the advantage of familiar exits, and everyone counted them anyway within the first thirty seconds of walking in. I counted two. I assumed Basile had counted the same, the way I assumed everything about a man I had spent a decade not quite trusting and not quite fighting either, a truce that had held mostly out of mutual exhaustion.

"Dmitri." He rose from his chair like we were old friends meeting for lunch instead of two men who had spent that decade circling each other's territory looking for an opening. "You look well. Whatever you're calling this thing with the event planner, it agrees with you."

"We're not discussing my personal life."

"Then we're going to have a very short lunch." He gestured at the table, already crowded with more wine than any of us could reasonably finish, three bottles standing in a neat row like soldiers waiting for orders. "Sit. Eat something. Nobody negotiates well on an empty stomach, and I refuse to be blamed for a bad outcome that started with poor hospitality."

Nik took the chair to my left without being asked, and Kirill settled across from him, close enough to the door that I noticed it and then made myself stop noticing it, an old habit from men who had trained me before Kirill was old enough to hold a gun properly. Basile's own men filled out the rest of the table, quiet, watchful, hands never far from the edge of it.

Basile lifted the first bottle before anyone had asked for it, turning the label toward me with the reverence of a man presenting a relic. "This one came out of a cellar outside Barolo that survived two wars and one extremely determined flood. I had six bottles shipped here specifically for today, which should tell you how seriously I take this conversation, or how much I enjoy watching a man try to stay focused while drinking something this good." He poured without waiting for permission, filled my glass to a level no restaurant would have considered proper, and set the bottle down with the satisfaction of a man who had just won a point in an argument nobody else at the table realized was happening. "Drink. Then ask me your question again. I promise it will feel less urgent."

"I don't need the wine to remember the question."

"No, but I need you to have the wine, so humor me." He smiled, warm and entirely unbothered, and I understood, watching him do it, that generosity from Basile was never simply generosity. It was armor, poured a glass at a time. Refuse it and you looked rude for turning down a gift, when what you were actually turning down was a tactic.

"The shell company traces to an address your people have used before," I said, once the first course had been cleared and the pretense of a social lunch had thinned enough to see through it. "I want to know why."

Basile's smile didn't move, which was its own kind of answer, the practiced stillness of a man who had either rehearsed this exact moment or lived through enough versions of it that rehearsal was no longer necessary. "An address is not a signature. I have used dozens of them over the years, the same as you have. Some get reused by people who have nothing to do with me anymore, employees who left, associates who fell out of the business, a cousin with worse judgment than the rest of the family combined." He refilled my glass without asking, an easy, automatic motion, the kind of hospitality that functioned less as generosity and more as a way to keep a man's hands occupied with something other than a question. "If you're asking whether I sent two men to stand outside a stranger's building in New York, the answer is no. If you're asking whether I can prove that to your satisfaction in the next hour, also no, because that is not how proof works in this life, and you know it better than most men I could name."

"I know how proof works. I also know how convenient it is when the trail stops at exactly the address that lets you say that."

"Convenient for whom, Dmitri?" He spread his hands, loose and open, a man entirely comfortable being doubted. "If I wanted your event planner's brother frightened, I would not have used an address my own people have touched before. I am careful, not sentimental, and certainly not careless enough to leave my own fingerprints on a thing I actually did." He topped off Nik's glass next, though Nik had barely touched it. "Someone wants you looking at me. That should interest you considerably more than it interests me."

"And who benefits from that, in your opinion?"

"A great many people, most of them men you already trust, which is exactly why the question is uncomfortable and exactly why you should keep asking it." He lifted his own glass at last, finally drinking from it himself, as though proving the wine had never been the point. "I have no answer for you today. I have a guess, and I am not in the habit of handing a rival a name I cannot prove, because if I am wrong, you remember it forever, and if I am right, I have just told you something worth more than an afternoon of good wine."

I let that sit without answering it, because it was either the smartest lie I had heard in years or the plainest truth, and I did not yet know which, and admitting that out loud to Basile would have cost me more than the silence did.

"Eat," Basile said again, pouring a third glass nobody had asked for. "You came here suspicious. Leave here well fed. It costs me nothing and it might improve your mood."

We talked business after that, the ordinary kind, a supply route through Milwaukee neither of us wanted to keep fighting over and a territory line that had shifted twice in the last decade without either family formally admitting it. Basile handled all of it the way he handled the wine, generous, in no rush, offering more than was strictly necessary so that no single concession he made looked like it mattered on its own. He gave up the Milwaukee route entirely by the time the plates were cleared, a genuine concession, the kind that cost him real money, and I found myself trusting the gesture and distrusting the timing of it in the exact same breath. It was, I thought, watching him refill a glass for the fourth time, an entirely reasonable strategy for a man with nothing to hide, and an even better one for a man with everything to hide, which was precisely the problem with a strategy that worked either way.