Page 53 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"What does a swan want to say?"

"Elegance. Longing. Not aggression." He shook his head slowly, a man burdened by a vision nobody else could fully appreciate. "I am asking you to let me pose them in profile instead. Necks curved toward the center, not the beaks. It reads as romantic instead of territorial. It is the difference between a wedding and a nature documentary."

I looked at the block of ice, already melting faster than the schedule technically allowed for, and made an executive decision I would have found genuinely absurd a year earlier. "Profile. Necks toward the center. No confrontational swans."

"Thank you." He said it with the sincerity of a man who had just been spared a great injustice, and turned back to his ice with the focus of a surgeon.

I was laughing about it, actually laughing, alone for a second by the loading dock doors, when my phone buzzed with a text that made the laugh land somewhere warmer.

Sean: outside, brought food, your bodyguard says hi

I found him leaning against the building with two paper bags and Luca standing a discreet but entirely visible ten feet away, arms crossed, scanning the street with the relaxed vigilance of a man who had clearly stopped hating this assignment somewhere in the last month.

"You brought Luca lunch too?" I asked, taking one of the bags.

"He said he doesn't eat on duty. I told him that sounded like a personal problem and bought him a sandwich anyway." Sean fell into step beside me as we walked back toward the loading dock, Luca trailing at a distance that had gone from suspicious to almost domestic. "He's actually not terrible company. Knows an alarming amount about my building's water pressure issues for a man whose job is apparently just standing near me. Also beat my roommate at chess twice last week without looking especially interested in doing it."

"That's one word for it."

"He's something. I've stopped asking questions about most of it. Seemed easier for everyone." Sean shrugged, the kind of shrug that belonged to a man who had decided a certain amount of unexplained competence in his life was simply how things worked now, then glanced sideways at me, chewing, in the way he always did right before he asked something he'd been working up to. "You look tired."

"I'm planning a four-hundred-person event in a building that had exposed wiring nine months ago. Tired is the baseline."

"That's not what I meant, and you know it." He said it gently, no real challenge in it, just the practiced patience of a younger brother who had spent his whole life watching me solve everyone's problems except my own. "You've been doing the thing. Where you disappear into logistics so nobody has to watch you be sad about something real."

"I'm not sad. I'm behind on linens."

"Cora."

"I have a cake situation, Sean. An actual, structural cake situation."

"Fine." He let it go, which I appreciated more than I let on, and bumped my shoulder with his in the wordless way we'd been doing since we were kids, before either of us had learned better ways to say the things that mattered. "For what it's worth, whatever's going on with him, I hope it works out. You seem happier when it's working."

I did not have an answer for that fast enough, so I ate my sandwich instead and let the silence do what silence usually did between us, which was more honest work than either of us managed with words.

We were most of the way through lunch when a woman in a very good coat crossed the ballroom floor toward us, and something in the shape of her walk registered before her face did, a familiarity I placed a half second too late to prepare for it.

"Ms. Walsh." Reyes did not extend her hand this time, which told me before she said another word that whatever this was, it was not a consultation. "I'm glad you're here. I wasn't sure you would be, given the hour."

"I'm always here. It's sort of the job." I set the sandwich down, feeling the last of the morning's good mood drain out through the soles of my shoes. "You're not booking a second consultation."

"No." She reached into her coat and produced credentials I had a bad feeling I already knew the shape of before she fully opened them. "Special Agent Reyes. I apologize for the name I gave you in your office. It seemed like the more efficient way to get a look at your books without alarming anyone prematurely."

Sean went very still beside me. Luca, a few feet away, had stopped pretending to look at his phone.

"You've been investigating me."

"I've been investigating the account you do business with. You happened to be standing in the middle of it." She glanced once at Sean, then back at me, and something in her face softened by a fraction that did not make the rest of it any less unsettling. "I want to be clear about something. Nothing I've seen puts you at the center of this. That's not what brought me looking for you."

"Then what did?"

"Not an arrest, if that's what you're bracing for. This event, on this date, in this building, is about to sit in the middle of something considerably larger than a seating chart, and I would be doing you a disservice if I let you walk into it without knowing that much."

"What am I walking into?"

"That's the part I genuinely cannot tell you." She said it plainly, no theater in it, and the plainness of it settled into me heavier than any dressed-up warning would have. "I can't tell you everything," Reyes said. "I can tell you to walk away from this event. I won't ask twice."

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