Page 66 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Yes."

"In that hotel you like better than any home you have ever owned." She said it flat, already certain, and I didn't bother correcting the shape of it into a question it clearly wasn't. I heard something shift on her end of the line, a chair, a settling, the sound of a woman deciding a conversation was going to take longer than she had originally planned for it. "Tell me what happened."

"I don't know where to start."

"Start anywhere. I have made worse sense out of less."

I told her, though not the whole thing, not at first, just the bare shape of it: the venue moved up, the argument, the four words that would not leave me alone. She let me talk without interrupting, and the silence unsettled me more than her usual running commentary ever did, because Rosa interrupting me was the sound of a normal conversation, and Rosa listening in complete silence meant she was building toward something she intended to say exactly once.

"So," she said, when I finally ran out of words, "you did to her tonight what your father did to himself twenty-three years before that, and what I imagine that poor man Petro did to somebody once, though you have never told me his last name, which tells me something about how much of that story is actually about him and how much of it is about you."

"That's not fair."

"I did not call to be fair. I called to see if you ate." Something in her voice eased, not softened so much as loosened, the sound of a woman setting down a weapon she had not needed after all. "I am not going to remind you that I warned you. You already know I warned you. Saying it again would only be for my own satisfaction, and I am too old to waste good satisfaction on a man who is already halfway to understanding his mistake without my help."

"I'm not halfway to anything. I'm sitting in a hotel room I've kept for fifteen years, and for once in all of them, I can't stand how quiet it is."

"Good."

"Good?"

"A man who is comfortable in an empty room has stopped expecting anyone to fill it. You are uncomfortable. That means some part of you is still expecting her, which means some part of you has not actually given up, no matter how convincingly you are currently performing despair down a telephone line at an old woman who has better things to do." I heard her move again, the scrape of a chair against tile, a sound I could have found blindfolded in three different kitchens across two decades. "You have spent your whole life protecting people by deciding, alone, what they could survive knowing. Tonight you decided, alone, what she could survive knowing about a building. That is the same crime in a smaller coat. You know this. I am not telling you anything you have not already told yourself in the last hour, sitting in that room, hating the quiet of this."

"I don't know how to undo tonight."

"You do not fix a person, Dmitri. You are not a man with a wrench, and she is not a pipe." A short, sharp exhale that might have been a laugh in a different conversation. "You call her. You say the true thing instead of the careful thing. You let her decide what she can carry instead of deciding it for her one more time, because you have already tried the deciding, for twenty-three years, and I would like you to notice, out loud, that it has not made either of us happy, watching you do it."

I did not answer that immediately, because there was nothing underneath it worth arguing with.

"She's going to be at that venue tomorrow no matter what I say," I said finally. "She told me that herself. I could hear her deciding it in real time, and I still tried to talk her out of it instead of asking what she needed to do it safely."

"Then ask her that instead. It is a much better question than the one you asked her earlier tonight." Rosa's voice had gone brisk again, all business now, a woman who had said what she called to say and had no patience left for lingering over it. "You are a smart man, Dima. You have built an empire out of being smarter than every man who ever tried to take something from you. Do not make me believe, at my age, that the one skill you never learned was how to be smart about the person you actually love."

"I'm calling her."

"I know you are. I called to make sure you started tonight and not next week, once you had built yourself a very convincing argument for waiting." A pause, and I could picture her exactly, standing in that kitchen with one hand on the counter, already three steps ahead of whatever I planned to say next, the same way she had been three steps ahead of me since I was a boy carrying soup across a room too big for him. "You do not have fifteen years left to figure this out slowly. You have tomorrow. Use it better than you used tonight."

"Rosa."

"Call the girl, Dima," Rosa said, and hung up before I could argue.

36

CORA

I had texted Sean sometime after Naomi finally went home, something short and probably incoherent that I only half remembered sending, and he must have taken it more seriously than my fourteen careless characters deserved, because he showed up at my door before nine carrying a paper bag that smelled like a bakery had surrendered to him personally. Two wine glasses still sat on the coffee table where Naomi had left them, one lipstick-stamped, one not, and my bag for the venue sat packed and zipped by the door, ready to go, waiting on a version of me that hadn't managed to stand up and join it yet. Somewhere across the city a security team I only partially trusted was walking the same floor plans I had helped build, checking exits against a threat that finally had a name and an address, and I still had to be there myself by early afternoon whether or not I had figured out what to do about the man running that security team first.

"You look like garbage," Sean said, setting the bag down on the counter with the easy confidence of a man who considered croissants a valid emergency response. "The good kind of garbage. Emotionally expensive garbage."

"Thank you. That's exactly the compliment I needed this morning."

"I aim to please." He pulled two mugs down from the cabinet without asking where I kept them, which told me, yet again, that my brother had spent more time in this kitchen than either of us usually admitted out loud. "You want to tell me why you texted me at one in the morning with something that looked like it got autocorrected by a person actively crying, or should I just start guessing?"

"I don't remember what I sent."

"You sent 'I'm fine' followed immediately by three question marks you definitely did not intend to send, followed by nothing else for six hours." He handed me a mug of coffee I hadn't asked for and hadn't realized I wanted until it was in my hands. "For the record, that is not what fine looks like. That is what fine looks like when it's lying under oath."

I wrapped both hands around the mug and let the silence sit a moment before answering, because I still hadn't decided how much of last night I was ready to say out loud in daylight, to my own brother, in a kitchen that still smelled faintly of a bottle of wine with an aggressively ugly label.