Page 86 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Some men are welcome to call it whatever helps them sleep at night. I call it the only version of justice I could live with afterward, and I am the only person at this table whose opinion on that actually matters." I looked around the room slowly, giving every face there time to decide whether it wanted to argue with me out loud. Nobody did. "Nik speaks with my authority starting today. Anyone who tests that is testing me. I would rather we settle that understanding now, in this room, than later, somewhere less convenient for everyone involved."

"You have my word on it, Dima," Arkady said finally, and something in the flat certainty of it told me he meant it, even if he had not fully made his peace with the reasoning behind it. "Your father would have finished it the old way. I want you to know I noticed you did not."

"My father is not sitting at this table. I am." I held his gaze until he nodded again, slower this time, an acknowledgment rather than a concession. "I am not asking anyone here to agree with every decision I make. I am asking every one of you to trust that I make them with this family's survival in mind, the same way I always have."

Arkady gave a short, reluctant nod, the kind an old soldier gives an order he does not love, and the meeting moved on to numbers and shipments and the ordinary machinery of a family that had, against every expectation I walked in with, survived the worst month of its recent history intact.

Nik found me afterward in my office, two glasses of something dark in his hands, and set one down in front of me without asking.

"You handled Arkady well. He does not bend that easily for just anyone."

"Arkady needed to hear it from me, not from a rumor traveling faster than the truth could keep up with." I took the glass but did not drink from it yet. "How does it feel, being second officially instead of unofficially?"

"Exhausting. I have been doing the job for a decade. Now I simply get blamed for it in writing." He almost smiled, which for Nik counted as a full grin from anyone else. "Arkady folded today. Not everyone will. There are three more like him scattered through the counties who have not said a word yet, and men that age do not change their minds because you gave a good speech once in a conference room. This will take months, the way you said it would." He paused. "For what it is worth, I would have made the same call on Kirill. Not the first year I knew you. I would have told you to bury the problem and never mention his name again. I do not think that anymore."

"What changed your mind?"

"Watching you become a man capable of asking the question instead of just answering it." He set his own glass down, mostly untouched, and studied me the way he had studied rooms for twenty years, cataloguing what mattered before he said anything about it out loud. "You looked different, walking in this morning. I could not place it until Arkady started pushing back and you did not raise your voice once to answer him."

"I did not need to."

"No. You did not. I am still getting used to that." He turned his glass slowly, watching the light move through it rather than looking at me directly, the way he did when he was working up to something he had clearly been holding onto for weeks. "Go home, Dima. There is nothing left here tonight that requires you standing in this building."

He left before I could argue, sparing me a fight neither of us wanted.

I sat alone at my desk a long while after he had gone, the office settling into the hush that only comes once the day's last business has cleared out of it, and found myself looking at the one object on it I had avoided for twenty-three years. The photograph of my parents had lain face down on that desk since the week I took over this family, a small silver frame I had never once turned back over in all that time, not out of anger exactly, more because looking at their faces had always felt like a question I was not ready to answer honestly. I picked it up now: my father stood in a suit two sizes too big for the year it was taken, my mother laughing at something outside the frame, both of them young enough that neither had any idea what the next twenty years would actually cost either of them.

I set it upright.

It did not fix anything. It did not undo a single decision I had made in the years since, and it did not make the empty half of that desk feel any less like a room built for one. It simply sat there, facing out into the office the way it should have for twenty-three years, and some old, stubborn knot behind my ribs eased, just enough to notice. I looked at it a moment longer, at my mother's laugh caught mid-motion, and thought, again that week, that she would have liked the woman I was flying toward far more than she ever would have liked the man I used to be.

Rosa's kitchen smelled the way it always did, dill and butter and something baking she would have denied was baking if I had asked her directly, and she took one look at my face in the doorway before I had said a single word and nodded slowly, the particular nod of a woman confirming something she had suspected for a long time.

"You called her."

"I did."

"And?"

"And I am flying to New York this week. I do not have a reason prepared. I simply want to be there."

She did not react the way I expected: no surprise widening her eyes, no questions demanding the details I had braced myself to give her, just a small, satisfied sound as she turned back to the stove.

"Finally," she said, more to the pot than to me. "I have been waiting for this since your cousin's wedding, Dima. You stood in the corner of that entire reception watching a woman argue with a florist about ribbon width, and I told your mother's sister that you had the exact look on your face your father used to get watching me refuse to let him carry my own bags."

"I do not remember you saying that to anyone."

"You would not. You were too busy staring." She slid a plate my way without asking whether I wanted one, because Rosa had not asked me that question in thirty years. "I am not surprised, Dima. I have not been surprised by you in longer than you think."

"You could have told me sooner. It might have saved me a great deal of time."

"Nobody saves you time, Dima. You spend exactly as much of it as you decide you need, and not a minute less, no matter how loudly the rest of us try to hurry you along." She got up to check whatever was baking, opened the oven a crack, and closed it again without any real urgency behind either motion. "I tried hurrying your father once, when we were both young enough to think that worked on anyone. It did not work on him either."

"And missed watching you figure it out yourself, the slow, stubborn way, like your father did everything." She sat across from me and folded her hands, a small habit that always meant the teasing had turned into something she actually meant. "I am happy for you. I want you to hear me say the words, since you are so fond of hearing things said plainly now. I mean it, and I think your mother would have liked her."

"You have never met her."

"I do not need to meet a woman to know she is the kind who hits a man with a serving lid instead of waiting to be rescued. Nik told Luca, and Luca tells everyone, because Luca has never kept a good story to himself in his life." She reached over and patted my hand, brisk and brief, already moving on before the moment could turn into something that embarrassed either of us. "Eat. Whatever you are flying toward will still be there in an hour."