Page 65 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

Naomi turned her glass slowly on her knee, thinking, which for Naomi was its own kind of rare event. "What about Sean? He's had two weeks now to be angry about being managed. Does he see it the way you do?"

"Sean forgave the managing the second he understood it kept him alive. That's easy math for him. He gets to be grateful instead of furious, because being furious was never actually his job in that equation." I pulled my knees up onto the couch, tucking them under me the way I used to when I was smaller than my own problems. "I don't get to have that math. I'm not the one being kept safe from a distance. I'm the one being asked to disappear so someone else doesn't have to feel afraid on my behalf. Those aren't the same thing, even if people keep treating them like they are."

"That's a real distinction, and a good one. I want you to know I'm not just agreeing with you because you currently look like you might throw the bottle at me."

"I would never throw a bottle with a label this genuinely good."

"See, now you finally understand my entire purchasing logic." Naomi refilled her own glass, then mine, unasked, the exact way she'd been doing since our first year of college. "Do you think he's wrong to be scared?"

"No. That's the part that makes all of this so impossible. His fear makes complete sense. He's buried people, Naomi. Actual people, in the ground, because someone decided love was a door worth kicking in. I understand exactly where the fear comes from." I set the glass down on the table, needing my hands free for whatever I was about to say, even though I didn't yet know what that was going to be. "But being scared for me isn't the same thing as trusting me. He keeps acting like those are the same instinct wearing different clothes, and they're not. One of them keeps me safe by keeping me small. The other one keeps me safe by keeping me informed and standing next to him. I want the second one. I have only ever wanted the second one."

"Have you told him that? In exactly those words?"

"No. I told him he was building a cage with a nicer coat of paint, which, I stand by, but it's not the same as telling him what I actually need instead of just what I don't want." I looked at her, and something in my chest finally settled into a shape I recognized, the specific relief of finally saying a true thing out loud after circling it for years without quite landing on it. "What I actually need is so much simpler than protection, and so much harder to hand someone. I want a seat at the table before the danger, not a phone call after it's already over. Every man I have ever loved has treated those two things like they were the same request, and they are not."

"That's the whole thing, isn't it?" Naomi said it quietly, no performance in it at all, which was rare enough for her that it landed harder than if she'd shouted it. "That's the actual fight."

"That's the actual fight." I picked my glass back up, turning it once in the lamp light before I drank again. "I don't want him to protect me from this," I said. "I want him to trust me in it. There's a difference and he can't see it yet."

Naomi didn't argue. She just refilled the glass.

35

DMITRI

The Larkspur suite closed around me the way it always did, the door settling into its frame with a heavy, expensive click, and I stood in the entryway a long moment without reaching for a single light, letting the city do its work through the window instead, that wide indifferent glitter I had watched from this exact spot more nights than I had ever bothered counting. Fifteen years in this room, and it had never asked anything of me beyond the account number on file. Tonight it asked something anyway. It asked me to notice how quiet it actually was.

I had never minded the quiet before. I kept people at a distance because a quiet room was easier to manage than a full one, and I had wanted mine still for longer than I could remember wanting anything else. Tonight the stillness sat on my chest like a hand I could not shift. I crossed to the sideboard, poured two fingers of something I did not particularly want, and did not drink it. I left it sweating a ring into the wood in the same spot it always sat, out of a habit so old it no longer felt like a choice, and stood there looking at a room that had never asked anything of me, wondering when talking to an empty room had started to feel safer than talking to her.

I had buried the last hour six different ways since I let her walk out of my office, and none of the burials had taken. She left. I let her. Four words, and I had built an entire argument on top of them, twenty years of certainty poured into the foundation, and the whole thing came down the second I stood alone in a room built for exactly this kind of collapsing. I trust you with my life. I don't trust this world with yours. Every word of it was true. It was still true, in the narrow, honest sense that I would hand her my life without a second thought and had, in every way that mattered, already done exactly that. It was the second half that would not leave me alone. That's not trust. That's a cage with a nicer coat of paint. She had not raised her voice once saying it. She had not needed to.

I sat down alone in a room built for other people's company and let myself think about Petro for the first time in more months than felt comfortable to count.

I had told that story so many times over the years, to Luca once, to a handful of men new enough to this life that they needed the shape of the warning more than they needed a name attached to it. The telling had worn smooth in places, the way any story does when a man uses it as a tool instead of a memory. I did not need to walk through the particulars again tonight. I knew every beat of it the way you know an old scar, by the shape your own hand finds without looking. I had always told it as a lesson about leverage: give an enemy nothing worth threatening, and no enemy can ever move you. That was the rule I had built out of another man's ruin, and I had worn it for two decades without stopping to ask whether armor and a life were supposed to feel the same from the inside.

They were not the same. I understood that now, sitting in a room that owed me nothing and had, in fifteen years, given me back exactly what I put into it, which was nothing. Petro had not built a wall because walls were wise. He had built one because it was the only thing left standing after he lost everything a wall was supposed to protect, and I had looked at it from a safe distance and mistaken his grief for a lesson.

My father's death sat beside Petro's the same way it always did, close enough that for years I had treated them as a single lesson, not two men who reached the same place by very different roads. He had not lost anyone to leverage. He had bled out on a warehouse floor over a shipment that stopped mattering to anyone the moment the shooting started, surrounded by men who were paid to protect him and moved half a second too slow to manage it, and I had stood over what was left of him at an age too young to understand grief as anything other than a door slammed shut with me still partway through it. Everything I shaped afterward, I shaped around that one morning, without ever fully admitting that the lesson I took from it was not caution. It was withdrawal, dressed carefully enough that I spent twenty-three years unable to tell the two apart.

Both men had taught me the same lie, that being loved by someone and being findable by someone who wanted to hurt you were the same risk, so I spent every year afterward trying to become a version of myself nobody could find. I had done it well. I would have said, a year ago, that I had done it perfectly. Untouchable was always the word I reached for. Standing in the quiet of a room I had paid to keep exactly this empty, I understood, completely and for the first time, that the rule I had built out of both of their lives had never once made me happy. It had only ever made me untouchable, and for twenty-three years nobody had loved me enough, or been foolish enough, to tell me those were not the same thing.

Cora had told me. Cora had stood in my own office and told me exactly that, in words sharp enough to still be cutting hours later, and I had answered her with the same wall Petro built, and called it love because it was wearing love's clothes.

I picked up my phone twice and put it down twice. The first time I got as far as her name before I understood I did not yet know what I would say that was not simply another, better-dressed version of the same old argument. The second time I got as far as opening a message and typing nothing at all, staring at the blank line until the screen dimmed on its own and made the decision for me.

I was still sitting with the phone dark in my hand when it rang.

Rosa's name on the screen was enough to make me sit up straighter, an old reflex from childhood that had never fully worn off, some part of me still twelve years old and bracing to be told to wash my hands before supper. She almost never called. Rosa considered the phone an instrument for emergencies and grocery deliveries, in that order, and anything else could apparently wait until I was standing in her kitchen where a conversation could be had properly, with food involved.

"You didn't eat," she said, the instant I answered, no greeting attached to it, because Rosa did not waste words on formalities she considered self-evident.

"I'm not hungry."

"I did not ask if you were hungry. I asked if you ate. Those are different questions, and you of all people should know that by now." A pause, brief, and then, in a slightly different register, the one she used when she had already stopped talking about food and started listening to something underneath my voice instead. "Where are you?"

"New York."

"Alone?"