Page 56 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Take as long as you need."

"You seriously thought I was selling secrets to a man trying to kill you. Me. The woman who color codes her spice rack and cries at dog food commercials."

"For five seconds."

"You keep saying five seconds like it's a legal defense."

"It's the only defense I have. I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen, and I'm not going to pretend it was longer than it was either." He reached across the space between us, slow, giving me every chance to pull back, and when I didn't, he took my hand in both of his. "I have spent twenty-three years deciding that the safest thing I could do for anyone I loved was give them less of myself, not more. Silence when it should have been honesty. Distance when it should have been you, in this room, knowing exactly what I know the moment I know it. I am done doing that to you. I would rather you hate me for the truth than love a version of me that isn't real."

"I don't hate you." My voice cracked around the edges of it, quieter than I meant it to sound. "I'm terrified, and I'm angry that you carried this alone for two weeks like it was your job to bleed quietly so I wouldn't have to watch, and I don't hate you."

"I know I don't deserve the second part yet."

"You're getting it anyway. That's sort of the problem with loving someone, Dmitri. The deserving part comes later, if it comes at all. I'm not waiting for a permission slip." I turned my hand over in his, lacing our fingers together properly instead of just letting him hold it. "Tell me the rest. All of it. Don't ration it out to protect me from feelings you've already decided I can't handle."

So he did, slowly, in a voice that lost its careful edges somewhere around the tenth minute, laying out the wire transfers and the warehouse and the four weeks between now and the one night that mattered more than any other on either of our calendars. I made myself take in every word of it the same way I read a contract before I sign it, missing nothing, circling back twice. When he finally ran out of things to confess, he looked more wrung out than I had ever seen him, not after negotiations, not after threats, not after anything.

"There's something I should have told you already." My pulse was doing something complicated, but my voice held. "A woman came into my office weeks ago, before you'd ever said Kirill's name to me. Booked a consultation under a fake name, asked one question too many. She came back a few days later at the venue and told me the truth. Federal agent. She wouldn't say whose account she was investigating, only that this event was about to sit in the middle of something a lot bigger than a seating chart, and that I should walk away from it while I still could."

Dmitri went very still in the specific way that meant he was taking in far more than his face let on.

"Her name?"

"Reyes."

"Then she already had enough to come to you directly without needing anything from me." Something moved through his jaw, grim rather than surprised. "That confirms more than I wanted confirmed tonight."

"I should have told you the same afternoon instead of sitting on it for weeks."

"You did exactly what I did. You decided you could carry it alone so I wouldn't have to." He said it without any heat in it at all, just a tired kind of recognition. "We are apparently both very bad, so far, at the thing we just promised each other we would get better at."

"I owe you a second apology, then," I said. "I've been telling myself your distance was about me. That I did something. I spent two weeks composing increasingly unhinged theories instead of just asking you directly, because apparently we're both allergic to the same disease."

"What disease is that?"

"Deciding the other person can't handle the truth, and then acting wounded when they find out we decided that for them." I studied him without saying anything right away. "We're going to be terrible at this part for a while. The honesty part. We should probably keep score."

"Keep score of what?"

"Who apologizes better. I'm extremely competitive, and I have a feeling I'm about to have a lot of practice."

That surprised a laugh out of him, low and real, some of the tension finally leaving his shoulders. "You'd win. You already have more range than I do. I only have one register."

"Grim and devastatingly handsome?"

"I was going to say sorry and sorrier, but I'll accept your version."

"I accept your apology, for the record. The five second one. I'm filing it as insufficient evidence and moving on." I leaned forward and kissed him, soft, no urgency behind it, just the simple fact of wanting to be close to him after two weeks of feeling like he'd been standing on the other side of glass. "Stay tonight. Not because you need permission to leave in a hurry. Because I want you here in the morning."

He kissed me back like he'd been waiting the whole conversation for exactly that invitation, unhurried in a way that felt entirely new between us, nothing like the first frantic night in this same apartment, nothing like the laughing, teasing hours at the lake house. This was quieter than both, a patience that came from two people finally done performing certainty they didn't feel, not from restraint at all. He undressed me slowly, one button at a time, like he was memorizing an apology with his hands instead of his mouth, and I let him, matching his pace instead of rushing past it the way I usually rushed past anything that asked me to sit still inside a feeling.

His mouth traced a line down my throat while his fingers worked the last button free, and every place his lips touched afterward felt deliberate, chosen, like he was rebuilding a map of me from memory and refusing to skip a single landmark. My blouse slid off my shoulders and pooled somewhere near my elbows, forgotten, because I had stopped tracking anything that wasn't the drag of his mouth along my collarbone or the low sound he made against my skin when I arched into it. I reached for the buttons of his shirt in return, slower than I wanted to go, forcing my hands to match the patient rhythm he'd set, and felt him shiver, just slightly, when my palms finally flattened against his bare chest.

"You're allowed to go faster," I said, breath already unsteady.

"I know." He caught my wrist and pressed a kiss to the inside of it instead, exactly where my pulse was giving me away. "I don't want to."

We moved to the bedroom without either of us announcing it, and there was no laughter tangled through it this time, no stumbling over shoes left in the wrong place, just his mouth finding mine again and again like he was relearning the shape of it, his hands moving over me with a reverence that had nothing performative in it at all. He laid me back against the sheets and followed me down, his weight settling over me by degrees, and I felt every inch of him arrive, patient and sure, nothing withheld. His mouth moved lower, tracing the curve of my breast, then my ribs, then the soft plane of my stomach, pausing there long enough that I threaded my fingers into his hair just to have something to hold onto.