Page 47 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"I'm a man of very broad interpretations."

We drove home the next morning in the kind of comfortable, wrung out silence that only comes after a truly good day, my hand resting on his knee, his thumb tracing slow absent circles against my wrist at every red light we hit once the world started catching up with us again. Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but I think we both felt the driveway behind us for what it actually was: the last easy hour before real life reached back out and reclaimed us both.

His phone buzzed the moment we crossed back into range, once, then again, and I watched him glance down at the screen and go very still, one second longer than a normal message should have required. His eyes moved back to the top and started over, the way you read something twice, hoping it says something different the second time.

"Everything okay?" I asked.

He looked up, and whatever had been sitting behind his eyes a moment ago smoothed itself over so completely I almost doubted I'd seen it at all. He smiled at me, easy, warm, entirely convincing.

"Nothing's wrong," he said. "Just Nik."

It wasn't a lie, not technically. I just had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that it wasn't the whole truth either, and I decided, for one more mile at least, to let myself believe it anyway.

24

DMITRI

Nik came in without knocking, which told me most of what I needed to know before he said a word. He had a folder under one arm, thin, the kind that held numbers instead of photographs, and he set it on my desk the way a man sets down something he'd rather not be carrying at all.

"You should see this before you go home tonight," he said.

"I wasn't planning on going home tonight."

"I know. That's why I waited until now to bring it."

I opened the folder. Wire transfers, four of them, spread across the last six weeks, routed through two shell accounts before landing somewhere I recognized without wanting to. The amounts were small enough to avoid most flags and large enough to matter, the exact size a careful man chooses when he wants a thing to look like nothing.

"Where did this originate?"

"One of the same corridors we traced back to the vendor account that started all of this. Basile's people, or people who work for people who work for him. I had our own accountant run it twice before I brought it to you, because I didn't want to be wrong about what I was about to tell you."

"Tell me anyway."

"Someone inside is being paid. Not for information about the New York situation specifically, not that we can prove yet, but paid, on a schedule, by an account with Basile's fingerprints on it however many layers deep." Nik's voice stayed level, the way it always did when he was handing me something that cost him to say. "I don't have a name."

The room did not get colder. Nothing about it changed at all, and that was somehow worse, the ordinary hum of the building continuing exactly as it had a minute earlier while something inside my chest reorganized itself around a fact I had been circling since a corner table in a private dining room three weeks ago.

"How many people have access to move money that quietly?"

"Fewer than you'd think. More than either of us wants."

"What about Luca?"

"In New York, watching Sean, for the entire window these transfers cover. I already checked the dates against his reports before I brought any of this to you, because I knew you'd ask." Nik's mouth tightened, the closest he ever came to something apologetic. "I ruled him out before I ruled anyone else in. I wanted to be able to tell you that much for certain."

"Good."

"Give me the list."

He gave it to me, and I made myself listen to every name on it the way I would have listened to a stranger's, stripping away years of accumulated trust one name at a time so I could weigh each one honestly instead of through the comfortable haze of having known them so long that trust had stopped feeling like a decision. Two men worked the accounting side, careful with numbers in a way that made them obvious candidates and unlikely ones in the same breath, because a man clever enough to move money invisibly was rarely clumsy enough to also be careless with it. A driver had been with the family longer than I had. I let Kirill's name sit on the list without moving it anywhere, without letting my face do anything Nik could read, and filed it instead into the same drawer that already held a corner table and a camera gap and a phone that hadn't been the one we issued him.

"Kirill volunteered for gala security," I said, quiet, almost to myself. "Personally. First time in however many years he's worked for me."

"I remember."

"That's not evidence of anything."

"No. It isn't." Nik held my gaze a beat longer than the sentence required. "But you already know I don't like it, and I know you don't either, and neither of us has said so out loud until right now."