Page 68 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"No."

"Good." He tipped his head toward the elevator bank, already stepping aside to let me through. "He's been insufferable since sometime after midnight. Nik says he's been staring at his phone like it might apologize on his behalf if he waits long enough."

"That sounds about right."

"Fourteenth floor." He said it like a man handing over information he'd been hoping someone would ask for. "Suite 1408. Tell him I said he owes me for not calling to warn him you're coming."

The elevator ride felt longer than fourteen floors had any right to feel, the number climbing past digits I watched without really seeing, my own reflection caught in the brushed steel doors looking more certain than I currently felt entitled to. I thought about every reason to turn around before the doors opened, a full inventory of them, familiar and well organized and, this time, not nearly convincing enough to make me press the button back down.

I stood outside Suite 1408 at the Larkspur with my hand raised to knock, and thought: this is the part where I stop being the person who's always fine on my own. I knocked.

37

DMITRI

I had my hand on the door before I fully understood why, some part of me already moving toward the sound before the rest of me finished naming it as a knock. A minute earlier I had been standing at the window doing nothing useful at all, phone in one hand, still working up the nerve to do the one thing Rosa had ordered me to do hours before. I opened the door already rehearsing an apology I had built and discarded a dozen different ways since midnight, and found Cora standing in the hallway instead of my own voice on a phone line, her hand still half raised the way it would have been if the door had taken one more second to open.

Neither of us said anything for a moment. The apology died somewhere behind my teeth, and whatever she had planned to say seemed to collapse the same way, and I understood, with a clarity that arrived late and hit hard anyway, that I was the one standing still this time. She was the one who had crossed a city to stand on the wrong side of a door, working up whatever it takes to knock on it, and in every year I had known her, this was the first time I had failed to move first.

"You beat me to it," I told her. It was the only honest sentence I had ready.

"I didn't know that was a race."

"Neither did I. I think I still lost."

Something moved across her face, somewhere short of a smile, frayed at the edges, the specific exhaustion of a woman who had spent a whole night and half a morning arguing with herself and had shown up anyway. "Are you going to let me in, or are we doing this in the hallway?"

I stepped back. She came in past me, and the suite that had felt, hours earlier, like the emptiest room I had ever stood in, filled up the second she crossed the threshold in a way no light I owned had ever managed.

"I came here to say something," she said, standing in my living room like she had rehearsed the walk over but not the words waiting at the end of it. "And now that I'm here, I've forgotten most of the speech."

"Say whatever's left of it."

"You first. You clearly had something ready too. I could see it dying on your face when you opened the door."

"It was going to start with an apology."

"Then start there. We can build the rest of it from whatever survives."

I had not expected to be given the first word, and I found, once I had it, that the sentence was simpler than the version I had spent the night constructing. "I was wrong to decide, alone, what you could carry. I have been doing that since the night your brother's building had two strangers standing outside it, and I have kept doing it in smaller versions every time it mattered less, and I told myself the smaller versions did not count because nobody got hurt from them. They still counted. I understand that now. I am done making that decision without you in the room."

"Without exception?"

"Without exception. Not the venue tonight, not whatever comes after it, not some future version of this where I decide the stakes are finally high enough that the rule gets to bend one more time. I loop you in. Every piece of it, as it happens, not after." I made myself hold her gaze instead of the floor, because the old habit was to say things like this to a room instead of to a person, and I had promised myself, sometime in the small hours last night, that I would stop doing that too. "You get the seat I gave you at that table yesterday, permanently. Not because you earned it once. Because it is where you belong."

"What about when it's inconvenient?" she asked, before I could consider the promise finished. "What about the middle of something that actually matters, when stopping to tell me costs you time you don't have?"

"Then I fall behind by five minutes. I can afford five minutes. What I could not afford was losing you again." I let that sit before I kept going. "I spent twenty years treating speed as the only virtue worth having in this life, and every person I ever failed to protect properly, I failed because I was moving too fast to explain myself to anyone standing near me. I would rather be slow and honest than fast and alone with what I know."

"That's a big promise from a man who hates waiting rooms."

"I have had considerable practice waiting for you specifically, this last day. I seem to have a talent for it I did not know I owned."

A long stretch of silence followed, long enough that I started to wonder if the sentence had landed wrong, too formal, too much like a term sheet and not enough like someone who actually meant it. Then she exhaled, slow, and something in her shoulders let go that I had not realized was still held.

"Okay," she said. "My turn."

"I'm listening."