Page 43 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

It was Kirill who slipped, not Basile, on our way out through the narrow hallway that led back to the street.

"I told them to hold the corner table, not the one by the window," he said to me, low, the kind of thing a man says when he assumes he is simply confirming something rather than revealing it. "Figured you'd want your back to the wall, given everything."

I had not told Kirill which table I wanted. I had not told Kirill I was coming to this lunch until that morning, and Nik had handled every detail of the arrangement personally, down to the exact room, because I did not let logistics for a meeting like this one pass through more hands than absolutely necessary. Kirill should not have known there was a corner table to request, or a window table to avoid, or that a preference between them had ever existed for anyone to act on.

"Good instinct," I said, and kept walking, and did not let my face do anything with what I had just heard, though something in my chest had gone very still, the particular stillness that used to mean a problem in a warehouse rather than a problem at a lunch table.

I filed it where I filed everything that was not yet proof, a drawer in the back of my mind I had built specifically for facts that could still turn out to mean nothing, the same drawer that held Nik's account of a camera gap and a phone that was not the one we had issued him. One detail was a coincidence. Two were a pattern I did not yet have the shape of, and a man who acted on a pattern before he understood its shape was a man who ended up apologizing to the wrong person eventually. I had built my whole life on that discipline. It had never once failed me before, and I saw no reason yet to assume today was the exception.

Nik caught my eye once we were outside, brief, unreadable to anyone who had not spent twenty years learning exactly what his face did when he noticed the same thing I did. He said nothing about it in front of Kirill. Neither did I.

At the cars, Kirill lingered by my door instead of walking to his own, casual about it, almost an afterthought, the kind of pause a man allows himself when he has already decided the answer does not matter to him either way. He talked for a moment about New York, about not wanting to delegate anything given what was happening with Cora's brother, about trusting his own eyes on that door more than a team working off a schedule. He said it plainly, no performance in it that I could locate on the surface, which was exactly what made it difficult to argue with.

"You've never asked to run security personally before," I said. "Not once, in however many years you've worked for me."

"There's a first time for everything. This felt like the right one." He shrugged, easy, unbothered, a man offering his own time and expecting nothing in return except the satisfaction of having offered it. "You've had my back longer than most people in this life bother keeping count. Let me have yours, for once, on something that actually matters to you."

I looked at him for a moment longer than the offer strictly required, searching his face for whatever Nik had seen in mine a minute earlier, and found nothing I could point to, no tell, no seam, nothing but a man volunteering for extra work out of what looked, from every visible angle, like loyalty.

"I'll run gala security myself," Kirill offered. "Least I can do."

I said thank you.

I wondered, later, why saying it had felt like swallowing glass.

23

CORA

A week had passed since the lunch with Basile that Dmitri still refused to describe as anything more dramatic than fine, and he had announced, out of nowhere, that we were disappearing for a weekend, no phones, no folders, no clients, which from a man who treated silence like a personality trait counted as an actual vacation itinerary. The signal bar on my phone dropped to nothing somewhere around the second turn off the county road, and I watched it happen the way you'd watch a countdown, one bar, then none, then just a small SOS icon mocking me from the corner of the screen like a dare. I held the phone up toward the windshield anyway, some old reflex insisting there had to be a better angle for it, a magic spot in the passenger seat where the universe still let me check my email.

"It won't work," Dmitri said, not even glancing over. "I already tried that angle in the spring."

"You've timed the exact spot where cell service fails on this specific road?"

"I've had this house fifteen years. You learn things."

I set the phone face down in the cupholder, and something about the gesture, small and deliberate, felt bigger than it should have for a woman putting down a piece of glass and metal. Twenty-six years of always being reachable, since middle school, through every college final and three straight years of wedding season, and here I was, willingly driving toward a house with no bars and, apparently, strong opinions about pancakes I hadn't heard yet.

"You look nervous," he said.

"I look like a woman who hasn't gone twelve consecutive hours without checking a screen since the Obama administration, possibly either one."

"You'll survive."

"I know I'll survive. I'm just not sure who I am without a notifications badge."

He reached over without taking his eyes off the road and laced his fingers through mine, easy, like it was nothing, like we did this all the time, when really it was the first unscheduled day either of us had claimed for ourselves in longer than either of us wanted to admit out loud. The house, when we finally pulled up the long gravel drive, was smaller than I'd pictured and better for it, wood gone silver with age, a dock leaning out over water so still it looked painted on, no other roofline visible in any direction. No security detail idling in a black car by the tree line. No phone charger stationed by his side of the bed like a loaded weapon. Just water, and trees, and a man rolling his sleeves up like he had nowhere else in the world to be, because for one entire day, he didn't.

"Rule one," he said, setting our bags down inside the door. "No business. Not mine, not yours. If either of us mentions Walsh Events or the word Bratva before tomorrow, the other one gets to pick the punishment."

"That's a terrifying amount of power to hand me."

"I'm aware."

"What if I just start narrating everything in a menacing voice for fun? Does that count as business?"

"Only if you're menacing me specifically."