Page 71 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

The phone buzzed again, insistent, and then a third time, and Dmitri went still above me with the specific stillness of a man calculating whether three consecutive buzzes at two in the morning constituted an emergency he was contractually obligated to address.

"It's probably Beckett," I said. "It's always Beckett."

"At two in the morning?"

"His imagination apparently peaks well past midnight, same as some people's best ideas surface in the shower." I reached over without fully sitting up, more curious than alarmed, and read the first line glowing up at both of us in the dark. "He's texting me that the Hendricks wedding sat the groom's ex-business partner directly across from his current one, and I quote, 'this is a bloodbath waiting to happen and somebody needs to promise me it's fine before I have an aneurysm.'"

Dmitri read it over my shoulder. Something about the absurd, over-caffeinated urgency of it, table assignments treated as a matter of literal life and death, delivered at two in the morning by a man who brought the same operatic panic to every crisis, romantic or logistical, broke something loose in both of us at once. I started laughing first, helpless and a little unhinged, the kind of laugh that had been building under twenty-four hours of genuine danger and finally found somewhere safe to go. Dmitri's shoulders shook against mine a second later, quiet at first and then not even close to quiet, his forehead dropping to my collarbone while he laughed in a way I had maybe heard from him twice in the entire time I'd known him.

"Your event coordinator," he said, when he could talk again, "thinks two feuding groomsmen constitute the worst crisis currently unfolding in this city."

"To be fair, he doesn't know about the other one."

"Small mercies."

"I should probably answer him."

"You should probably not." He took the phone gently out of my hand, set it face down on the nightstand with a decisiveness that made me laugh again, and turned back to me, whatever amusement had been on his face a moment earlier already sliding into something far more focused. "Beckett survives until morning. I have been extremely patient tonight, all things considered."

"You've been very patient. I noticed. I'm documenting it."

"Document quietly."

I did not, in fact, manage to be quiet about it, and neither did he, and whatever momentum Beckett's crisis had briefly interrupted came back twice as sure of itself, both of us laughing again at some point for no reason we could have named except the sheer, ridiculous relief of being here at all, together, undamaged, with five whole days between us and the thing that had nearly cost us this. By the time we were finally done there was no held breath left in either of us, no bracing for an exit, just his hand finding mine on the pillow, same as it had the very first time, except now it felt less like discovery and more like habit, the good kind, the kind two people build on purpose because they've decided they intend to keep it.

Afterward we lay tangled in sheets neither of us had bothered to straighten, his fingers moving slowly through my hair, my ear pressed to his chest listening to his heartbeat finally slow all the way down.

"I keep thinking about the door," I said into the quiet.

"Which door?"

"Yours. Tonight. Every version of that moment where I could have stayed frozen in that hallway instead of finally knocking, and every version of it where you could have let the silence sit instead of answering." I rested my hand flat against his chest, thinking about how close we'd both come to choosing the easier, lonelier version of tonight. "We almost didn't get this. Either of us."

"We got it anyway."

"We got it anyway," I agreed, and let myself believe it all the way through, finally, the night after walking out of his office convinced I would never get the chance to feel this again.

"Five days," I said, testing the shape of it out loud against his skin.

"Five days."

"That's not very long."

"It is long enough. Nik does not need more than that when he already has a name and a paper trail behind it." He shifted enough to look at me properly, his hand coming up to brush a strand of hair off my face, unhurried, matching the pace of everything else about him tonight. "You are not disappearing for those five days either, for the record. I already told you that once. I meant it the first time."

"I know you meant it. I intend to hold you to it daily, possibly hourly, until the habit sets in properly."

"I would expect nothing less."

"Good. I have gotten remarkably skilled lately at holding people to things." I settled back against him, listening to his heartbeat, thinking that five days sounded almost bearable when I was allowed to spend every one of them exactly like this, informed and included instead of shut out of a single piece of it. "Ask me again in four days if I still feel this brave."

"I will. Every single one of them."

He held me a long while after that, in no rush to let go, the city outside doing whatever the city did at this hour, indifferent and endless and none of our business anymore. I was half asleep, warm and thoroughly undone, more content than I could remember being in a very long time, with a countdown running somewhere underneath all of it, when the screen of my phone lit the nightstand once more.

On the nightstand, my phone read: Five days. I turned off the screen and didn't look at it again until morning.

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