Page 82 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Kirill," he said, quiet, into my hair.

"Later. Tell me later. Right now I just need you to keep doing this for another minute."

He laughed, a short, wrecked sound with almost no humor in it, and did exactly that, one hand cradling the back of my head with a carefulness that felt entirely at odds with the man who had just put another man through a wall of adrenaline and two seconds of violence.

"For what it is worth," Mrs. Alvarez said, easing herself up off the bottom step with a small groan, "I would very much like someone to help me down these final steps before the two of you get any more emotional. My hip has had enough excitement for one evening, and I would still like to see how this story ends."

"Right. Yes." I pulled back just far enough to see Dmitri's face properly, still wet at the edges in a way I doubted he would ever fully admit to later, and reached for Mrs. Alvarez's arm with my free hand. "We've got you. Small steps."

"You keep saying that phrase like it is doing more work than it actually does."

"It got us this far, didn't it?"

Outside, sirens, real ones, on cue, exactly on schedule. Agent Reyes's voice came through the splintered door frame, sharp and official and entirely welcome. "FBI. We're coming in."

"We're already out," I called back, and found, to my own surprise, that I was laughing too.

45

DMITRI

The ballroom did not look like anything I had built. Round tables lay tipped on their sides. White linens had been dragged through broken glass. A single silver candelabra still burned on its side near the stage, as though nobody had told the flame the night was over. A shoe sat alone near the dance floor, its owner long gone, and somewhere above us a chandelier hung crooked on its chain, one string of crystal swaying slightly every time a boot passed too close beneath it. Federal agents moved through the wreckage in windbreakers with letters too bright for a room this dark, and every few feet another one of Basile's men went past me in cuffs, head down, finished. Nobody looked at me twice. That alone told me how completely this room had already changed hands.

Reyes found me near the collapsed dessert table, a radio in one hand and an expression that had not shifted once since she walked in behind her own people.

"Eleven," she said, without a greeting attached to it, in the same clipped tone she used for everything. "Eleven of Basile's men in custody inside the building, four more on the loading dock, and a financial trail that ties every shell company we flagged straight back to him personally. He does not walk away from this."

"And the badge company."

"Gone. We pulled the incorporation records an hour ago. Whoever built that shell did careful work covering it, right up until your event planner's spreadsheet handed my people the one thread that unraveled the rest." Something close to a smile crossed her face, which for Reyes counted as another woman laughing out loud. "Tell her the Bureau owes her a drink it will never be able to explain the real reason for."

"Basile."

"In a car by now, on his way to a federal holding cell that will be the nicest accommodation he sees for a very long time. He asked for a lawyer twice and my name once, in that order, which tells you everything about how he ranks his priorities, even now." She said it without satisfaction, the way a woman reports a fact she has been waiting years to report and finds oddly weightless now that it has finally arrived.

"She already knows the reason."

"Then tell her twice." Her radio crackled, and whatever came through it pulled her back into the wreckage before either of us said anything else worth remembering.

Near the entrance, wrapped in a blanket somebody had produced from nowhere, Cora was arguing with a paramedic in a voice I could hear clearly from across the room, insisting she was fine, better than fine, and did not need whatever he was currently writing on his clipboard. I let her have that fight. She needed it more than she needed me hovering over her shoulder, and I needed the time it would buy me to finish what still had to be finished without her standing beside me for it.

Nik crossed to me a minute later, stepping over an overturned chair without breaking stride, the particular economy of a man who had used the last twenty minutes cataloguing damage instead of feeling any of it.

"He's in the east hallway with Luca. Not fighting it. Hasn't said a word since they took the gun off him."

"Good."

"Dima." His voice dropped into the register he used when he wanted a private answer instead of an order. "What do you want done with him?"

I looked at what was left of tables Cora had spent three months arranging into something people were supposed to remember for the right reasons, and I understood exactly how easily I could give Nik one word and have this finished before Reyes's people thought to ask a single question about it. It would not have been the first time in this family's history. It would not even have been difficult.

"Bring him to me."

Luca walked him in through the service entrance with one hand loose on his shoulder, more escort than restraint at this point. Kirill's wrists were bound in front of him, his jacket missing entirely, his shirt torn at the collar. He did not look like a man who had built the worst night of my life. He looked like someone who had stopped hoping for a different outcome somewhere between the service office and this room.

"Dima." No polish left in his voice, none of the practiced ease from earlier in the evening. "Say it. Whatever it is, say it and get it over with."

"You think I brought you here to kill you."