Page 80 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

He flinched backward, both hands raised, and something in his face finally cracked into real fear, not the practiced kind he wore at galas but something rawer, something that finally understood exactly what he had put into motion.

"I don't know where she is. I swear to you, Dima, this was never about her. I would never have let it touch her."

"You do not get to decide what it touches anymore. You lost that the moment you killed the lights in a room she was standing in."

Something in my hands was shaking, and I could not remember the last time that had happened, could not remember a version of myself that let his hands shake in front of anyone, let alone in front of the one man in this family who had spent twenty years learning exactly where all my weaknesses lived. I did not care. I could feel every careful, controlled piece of the man I had built myself into over two decades coming apart at once, and underneath the panic there was something almost like relief in finally letting it. Twenty years of keeping my voice level in this building meant nothing now, not with her name still sitting unanswered in the dark somewhere on the other side of that door.

"Dima, listen to me."

"I am done listening to you." My hand was already on the door. "You are going to stay in this building until someone comes to collect you, and you are going to tell them everything, every name, every man you brought in, every door you left open for them. And if she is hurt, Kirill, if she is hurt in any way at all, family will not save you from what happens next. Nothing will."

"Dima, please."

I did not look back to see what was left of his face when I pulled the door open, whether it was grief or relief or something with no clean name at all. I only knew the hallway ahead of me was dark, and somewhere past it, past the ruined ballroom and the smoke and every guest I had promised a beautiful, uneventful evening, was a woman who had never asked me to choose between her safety and this family, because she had never needed to. I was already choosing. I had been choosing since the moment Luca's voice cracked over my earpiece, and nothing about the next hour was going to unfold any other way.

I left Kirill standing mid-sentence and ran, and for the first time in twenty-three years, the organization was the last thing on my mind.

44

CORA

The door thudded shut behind us with a sound that had no business being that final, metal on metal, followed by the unmistakable click of a bolt sliding home from a side of the door neither of us could reach.

"That's not good," Mrs. Alvarez said, from somewhere around my elbow, in the tone of a woman commenting on slightly overdone salmon.

"No. It is not." I rattled the handle twice, uselessly, and shoved my whole shoulder against the door as though sheer will might convince the bolt to reconsider its life choices. Nothing happened. The stairwell held its silence around us, close and airless, the particular quiet of a space that had just decided nobody was leaving it soon.

"Can you get it open?" Mrs. Alvarez asked, already sounding like she suspected the answer.

"Not without a crowbar and roughly ten more minutes than I think we have."

"Then I suppose we wait."

"We wait," I agreed, already cataloguing the shape of the problem the way I catalogued everything else under pressure: one door locked from the outside, one elderly chef with a bad hip, one stairwell narrow and dark except for my phone's flashlight. Then I turned to check the landing above us for another way out and found one very large problem standing four steps up, white powder still dusted across his shoulders like unseasonal snow.

It was him, the same vest, the same eight-day-old badge nobody had pulled from the list.

"Oh, this again," Mrs. Alvarez said, unbothered, as though she were commenting on a delivery truck that had shown up early. "I catered a wedding in a hailstorm once. This is not worse than that wedding."

"That is genuinely impressive context, but I need you to get behind me."

"I have been getting behind people for forty years, dear. I am extremely good at it." She shuffled backward with more speed than her hip had shown any interest in five minutes ago, putting the stairwell's turn between herself and the man now descending toward us one slow, deliberate step at a time.

"You sprayed the wrong man the wrong amount," he said, his voice still rough from several minutes of coughing up fire suppressant. "I intend to return the favor."

"You're welcome to try."

I did not feel as calm as that sentence sounded. My hands were already moving, though, faster than my nerve was, patting along the shelf bolted to the wall beside me where some enterprising catering manager had stashed backup supplies for exactly this kind of stairwell, a case of sparkling wine still in its cardboard sleeve, unopened, heavy enough to matter, and beside it a chafing dish lid, wide and shallow and made of something that rang like a bell when I grabbed it and swung it experimentally through the air.

"That's my good silver lid," Mrs. Alvarez said. "Use it well."

He closed the last few feet fast, faster than his size should have allowed in a space this narrow, and I brought the lid up between us on pure instinct half a second before his hand would have closed around my wrist. Metal met knuckles with a crack that hurt my arm all the way to the shoulder and clearly hurt his hand a great deal more, because he swore and pulled back, shaking his fingers.

"Nice," Mrs. Alvarez said. "Again."

I did not need the encouragement, but I appreciated it anyway. He came again, lower this time, trying to duck under the lid instead of through it, and I did the only other thing within reach, hauling the case of sparkling wine up by its cardboard handle and swinging the entire thing into his shoulder with everything my arms had left to give. Glass clinked against glass, one bottle cracking somewhere inside the box, and the impact staggered him sideways into the railing hard enough that the whole stairwell shuddered.

"Good form," Mrs. Alvarez said. "Bend your knees next time."