Page 79 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

For one full second I could not make my mouth work at all. I had spent four days preparing for this exact sentence, rehearsing it in my head at two in the morning until I believed I had already absorbed the worst of it, and none of that preparation did a single thing for me now that the words were actually in the room.

The admission landed harder than I expected, even having half known it for days. Twenty years of family dinners and shared holidays and a hundred small kindnesses I had never once questioned rearranged themselves in an instant into something I no longer recognized.

"You sat in my study once and told me you would never sell me out to Basile for any amount of money. You said I was the reason you had anything at all."

"I meant every word of it, Dima. I still do." He would not look at me while he said it. "That does not change what happened after."

"Say it again. All of it. I want to hear the whole thing from your mouth before I decide what happens next."

"You already know the shape of it. Basile's men, the badge nobody pulled, the breaker room. I assume Luca found most of that days ago, and you let me keep walking around thinking I was clever." He said it without shame, and the steadiness of it was more devastating than begging would have been. "I wanted this building dark long enough to move something out through the loading dock, a matter that never touched you, tied to a debt I have carried alone for three years."

"A debt to Basile."

"A debt to men who stopped being patient with me a long time ago. Men who do not care whose cousin I am." His voice cracked on the word cousin, the closest he had come to breaking all night. "I came to you eight months ago, Dima. Quietly, the way family is supposed to handle things. I told you I needed help, and you gave me a number that would have covered maybe a third of it, and a lecture about discipline I did not ask for."

"I gave you what the organization could spare without putting a hundred other people at risk for your mistake."

"Your organization. Always yours. That is the whole problem, isn't it?" He laughed, short and without any humor in it at all. "I have run crews for you for fifteen years. I have bled for this family in rooms you never had to walk into yourself, because you had people like me to walk into them first. And when I finally needed something back, you handed me a number and a lecture, because the moment it stopped being convenient to remember I was blood, I became just another soldier standing in line."

"You are not just another soldier. You know that."

"Do I?" He stepped closer, near enough now that I could finally see how tired he actually was underneath the composure he had been wearing all evening like a second jacket. "My father built half of what your father built, Dima. Half of it, with less than half the help, because your father was born first and mine was born second, and that was the entire difference between them. And when it came time to hand the whole thing to the next generation, nobody asked whether I had earned it more than you had. Nobody asked whether I had earned it at all. You got the throne because your father sat in it first. I got told, very kindly, that I would always have a place at the table."

"Do you remember the summer I turned sixteen?" He did not wait for me to answer. "Your father took you to Miami for two weeks to meet men who mattered. Mine kept me here running numbers in the back office because someone had to, and when you came home tanned and full of stories about yachts, I smiled and asked you to tell me everything. I meant it, Dima. I was happy for you. I did not understand yet that I was watching the shape of the rest of my life get decided without anyone bothering to ask me a single question about it."

"I did not choose that trip, Kirill. I did not choose any of it."

"No. You never had to choose anything. That was always the whole point of being you."

"That is not why I run this family."

"It is exactly why. You have never had to wonder if you deserved what you have, because nobody has ever made you ask the question. I have asked it every single day for twenty years." His jaw worked, and for a moment I saw the boy I had grown up with underneath the man standing in front of me now, the one who had taught me to drive on an empty stretch of road outside the city before either of us had a license, the one who had stood beside me at both of our fathers' funerals and not said a single word he did not mean. "I did not want to hate you, Dima. I want you to understand that, whatever happens after tonight. I did not choose this because I hate you. I chose it because I ran out of other doors to knock on."

"You could have come back. You could have told me the number was not enough and asked me again."

"I did ask again. You told me family does not mean special treatment, and you meant it as a kindness, and it was the cruelest thing anyone has said to me in ten years." His voice finally broke all the way, no performance left in it at all. "So I found men who did not care about my last name, and I told myself it would stay small enough that no one close to me would ever have to know what it cost."

"And Cora? Was she ever going to know what it cost?"

He did not answer that one right away, and the silence told me more than any sentence could have.

"Tell me she is safe, Kirill. Tell me that much and I will listen to every other word you have for me tonight."

"I told the men I brought in that Cora was off limits. That was the one condition I gave them, the only one I actually cared about enforcing." He rubbed a hand over his face, and just then he seemed older than my father had looked the year he died. "I do not know where she is right now. I want you to believe that, even if you believe nothing else I say tonight."

My earpiece crackled, Luca's voice cutting through low and urgent, pitched for exactly one listener the way I had trained every one of them to speak in a crisis. "Dima. Headcount from the west lawn is short. Beckett confirms, Naomi confirms. Cora is not with the evacuated group."

The words did not fully land at first, the way a blow sometimes does not register until a full second after it has already changed everything. Then they did, all at once, and something in my chest that had held steady through twenty-three years of exactly this kind of pressure simply stopped holding.

"Say that again."

"She's not out, Dima. Nobody has eyes on her since the blackout started."

I do not remember deciding to move. I remember the sound that came out of me, low and involuntary, nothing like any sound I had ever allowed another person to hear me make, and I remember Kirill's face changing as he registered it, some old instinct in him recognizing exactly how far past careful I had just gone.

"Dima," Kirill started, and I did not let him finish.

"Where." My voice did not sound like mine. "Where is she, Kirill? If any part of this touches her, if one man you brought into my building so much as looked in her direction, I will burn down everything you have ever loved and I will not lose a single hour of sleep doing it."