Page 51 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"She has run that business from this kitchen table before. I have watched her do it, on that laptop, with her feet in your lap like she owned the chair." Rosa did not look up from the bread. "Try again."

"It's complicated."

"Everything with you is complicated. That is not an answer. That is a door closing." She dropped two slices into the toaster and pressed the lever down harder than it needed, a small woman doing violence to small appliances as a kind of punctuation. "I have known you since you were shorter than this counter. I know what it looks like when you decide something is dangerous and stop discussing it. Your father did the same thing, God keep him, right up until the year it killed him."

That landed somewhere I had not expected it to, and I set my fork down and did not pick it back up.

"That's not fair, Rosa."

"I did not say it was fair. I said it was true. Those are different words for a reason." She reached for the butter and began working it across the toast in slow, even strokes, entirely absorbed in the task, as if the conversation we were having and the breakfast she was making existed in two separate rooms that happened to share her hands. "You found out something ugly this week. I do not need to know what. I have known you long enough to read the shape of it on your face without needing the details, and the shape of it says someone close to you is not who you thought they were."

I did not confirm it. I did not need to. She kept buttering the toast, unbothered, the way she might have discussed the weather if this life had ever let either of us discuss the weather without it meaning something worse underneath.

"So now you are protecting her," Rosa said. "By disappearing a little further every day. By calling less. By making the calls shorter, so that if something happens to you, it will hurt her less, because she will have already been practicing losing you a piece at a time."

"That's not what I'm doing."

"No? Then tell me what you are doing, because from where I am standing it looks exactly like a man building a wall one polite phone call at a time, and telling himself it is concern."

"I found out someone close to me may have been selling secrets for money, Rosa. I am not going to hand that person, or anyone connected to him, a map of every place Cora matters to me."

"Then keep the map to yourself. I am not asking you to tell a stranger her address. I am asking why keeping a secret from your enemies has to mean starving the one person you actually love." She did not raise her voice, which was somehow worse than if she had. "It is exactly what you are doing. I watched you do it to Yuri. I watched you do it to that girl, the one from your thirties, the one whose name you still will not say out loud in this kitchen even though I have asked twice." She set the toast on a plate and slid it toward me, gently, the way you hand something breakable to a person you are not entirely sure will catch it. "You did not learn this from strangers. You learned it from a man who decided the safest thing he could do for the people he loved was to need nothing from them, so that nothing could be taken from him through them. I watched him live that way for fifteen years before that warehouse took him. I have watched you live the same way for twenty-three since."

"He was murdered because he trusted the wrong man in a room, Rosa. That's not a story about loving people too much."

"No. It is a story about deciding, afterward, that the correct lesson was to never again let anyone stand close enough to matter." She pulled out the chair across from me, the one that had been empty all week, and sat in it herself instead, a chair she had left empty in fifteen years of feeding me in this kitchen. "You took the wrong lesson from a true thing, and you have spent twenty-three years calling it wisdom because it worked. It is efficient. I will grant you that. Alone men do not get taken hostage by love. But you did not choose that because it was wise. You chose it because it was easier than finding out whether you could survive the other version."

"You don't know that."

"I watched you eat breakfast alone in this kitchen for fifteen years before her, Dmitri. I know exactly what I know." She folded her hands on the table, plain and steady, a woman who had clearly decided she was finishing this conversation whether or not I wanted her to. "That girl spent three years building a company so nobody could ever again make her feel the way her father did, the day he stopped coming home. You spent twenty-three years building an empire for the same reason, so nothing could ever reach you the way that warehouse floor did. You found each other, and you both called it love. It is love. I am not arguing that part. But you are both still doing the same thing you have always done. You are both still protecting yourselves from needing anyone. You have simply agreed to call it something softer now that it points at each other instead of away."

I did not answer that right away. I have negotiated territory lines with men who would have killed me for the wrong word, and nothing in any of those rooms ever pressed on me the way that morning did, sitting in my own kitchen with a piece of buttered toast going cold in front of me, unable to find a single true thing to say back to her that was not simply agreeing.

"You didn't choose safety," Rosa said, not unkindly. "You chose alone, and you called it the same thing for twenty-three years because nobody was rude enough to tell you different. I'm being rude."

I sat with that longer than I generally allowed myself to sit with anything. Rosa let it sit too, entirely at ease with the size of what she had just said, the same patience she must have used on a serious little boy carrying a bowl of borscht across a room full of important men, waiting to see what I did with the wreckage.

My phone rang before I found anything worth saying.

I almost let it go. For exactly one second, sitting there with Rosa's sentence still settling into the room, I considered simply not answering, just as I had once watched Cora do with her own phone in a kitchen very much like this one. Then twenty-three years of habit picked it up for me before the rest of me had finished deciding.

"Talk to me," I said.

"You should sit down," Nik said, which was how I knew before he said another word that whatever came next was going to cost me something.

"I'm sitting."

"The last three payments from Basile's side didn't go where we thought they went," Nik said. "We had them landing on the accountant's books, but that was just the route, not the destination. I had someone run it against employment records instead of banking records this time. That's how we missed it twice already." His voice stayed level in the specific way it did when he had rehearsed the next sentence more than once before dialing. "It's not the accountants, Dmitri. It was never the accountants. The account is Kirill's."

The kitchen did not change. The toast sat where I had left it, cooling, and Rosa did not move from the chair across from me, and somewhere below us the city went on exactly as it had a minute earlier, indifferent to the fact that a name I had been refusing to let myself fully believe had just stopped being a possibility and started being a fact.

"Say it again," I said, because some part of me needed to hear it a second time before I let myself finish understanding it.

"Kirill," Nik said. "It's Kirill. I'm sorry, Dima. I know what that man's father meant to you."

"Does anyone else know?"

"Just us, for now. I wanted you to hear it before it became a decision other people had opinions about."