Page 87 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I ate. We talked about nothing that mattered for the rest of the meal, the restructuring, a cousin's new baby, a recipe she insisted I would never replicate no matter how carefully I watched her make it, and it was, without question, the easiest hour I had spent in three weeks.

I did not book the flight until I was home again, standing in the kitchen of an apartment that had never needed to hold two people's worth of noise and suddenly felt too large for one. The lights of the city spread outside the window the same way they always did, indifferent and enormous, and this time I felt no pull to sit down across from that view alone and call it enough. I opened my phone, found the first available seat out of O'Hare, and did not check the calendar first the way I checked it before every other trip I had taken in fifteen years.

I booked a one-way ticket to New York with no meeting on the calendar, no vendor to review, no excuse at all. Fifteen years, and it was the first flight I'd ever taken for no reason except wanting to be somewhere.

48

CORA

I had called him three nights after the raid, once I had stopped rehearsing the sentence in my bathroom mirror and simply said it out loud into the phone: that I wanted to wait, that waiting scared me far less than never finding out what came after it. He had gone quiet on the other end long enough that I asked if the call had dropped. It had not. He told me later that was the first time in years he had not immediately known what to say back.

The Walsh Events office had gone back to feeling like mine again, which was its own small miracle after three weeks of reporters calling the front desk asking for a comment on a raid I had only helped catch by accident. Beckett had stopped flinching every time a stranger walked through the door. Naomi had stopped screening my calls for me like I was a witness in protective custody. I had spent the entire afternoon doing the single most ordinary thing I could remember doing in a month, approving centerpieces for a law firm's holiday party, and I had never been so grateful for a client whose biggest crisis was whether the candles read as festive or funereal.

I got home a little after six, dropped my bag by the door, and stood in my own kitchen running the same tired inventory I had run in this exact spot two years ago, tallying clean mugs against the ever-growing pile in the sink and losing, same as always, same as every single time. Somewhere in the last eleven months my whole life had rearranged itself around a man who ran an organization I still did not fully understand the size of, and yet here I still was, doing dishes math on a weeknight like nothing about that had changed anything at all. Some things about my life had changed enormously. The mug situation had not.

Naomi buzzed up twenty minutes later holding a bottle of wine and offering absolutely zero explanation for either the wine or her sudden presence in my building.

"I was in the neighborhood," she said, breezing past me into the kitchen like she lived there, which, some weeks, she basically did. "Also I texted you four times and you didn't answer, which usually means either a client emergency or you're finally sleeping properly, and I wanted to see which."

"It was neither. I was approving centerpieces."

"Extremely boring. I brought wine anyway, since apparently that's my actual job now." She was already rifling through my cabinet for glasses, narrating the search out loud because my kitchen organization had clearly wounded her on some personal level. "You have four mugs and one clean glass, Cora. One. I know your business is thriving. I have seen the numbers. Explain the glassware."

"It's a mystery even to me."

"That's not an answer, that's a deflection with better lighting." She found two mismatched mugs and declared them acceptable under emergency conditions, which was evidently the tier of evening we were having, and I still had not managed to get a straight answer out of her about what, exactly, qualified as an emergency, when the buzzer went again.

It was Beckett, holding an actual folder, looking faintly apologetic about existing in my doorway on what was supposed to be his evening off.

"I know, I know. It's the Whitmore contract. I was already in this neighborhood, and I figured I'd rather hand it to you now than have you yell at me about it tomorrow morning." He set the folder on my counter, spotted the wine, and made no move to leave. "Also I may have texted your brother about cake, because I had a craving and a theory that he always has some."

"You texted my brother. About cake."

"We're close now. It happened gradually. Don't make it weird."

"You two talk without me. That is genuinely unsettling information to receive on an otherwise ordinary evening."

"We text about cake almost exclusively," Beckett said, entirely unbothered. "It's a very narrow friendship. Extremely stable."

Sean arrived eleven minutes after that, two cake boxes balanced in one arm, already mid-sentence about traffic before the door had fully opened.

"Beckett said cake emergency, so I brought two, one for the actual emergency and one in case the first one turns out to be a decoy." He dropped onto my counter stool like he owned it, eyeing Naomi's wine with open interest. "Also your doorman let me straight up without buzzing, which either means my face is now on some approved list, or your building has gotten dramatically worse at security."

"He's met you eleven times, Sean."

"Twelve. I'm counting." He set both boxes down with the theatrical delicacy of a man who considered cake transport a serious professional discipline, then glanced between Naomi's wine and Beckett's folder with open suspicion. "Is this a thing? Am I missing a thing? It feels like I walked into the middle of a thing."

"Nobody is missing anything," Naomi said, far too quickly to be believed by anyone in the room, including herself.

I was still trying to figure out how three separate people had converged on my apartment inside of half an hour with no coordination whatsoever, none of them able to explain it beyond a vague and suspiciously specific craving, when the buzzer sounded a fourth time and Rosa's voice came through it, cheerful and entirely unbothered by the late hour.

"I am in the city for the evening," she announced, the moment I opened the door, sailing past me with a tin of something that smelled like butter and dill. "I thought I would see how you were keeping yourself. Nik and Luca insisted on coming along, because apparently I cannot cross a single state line without an armed escort anymore."

Nik and Luca filed in behind her, Nik offering a short nod that somehow managed to look both professional and faintly embarrassed, Luca already eyeing my kitchen like he was assessing it for the best angle to open a bottle in.

"I want it on record that I suggested waiting downstairs," Nik said.

"He did," Luca agreed. "I overruled him. It seemed rude to make Rosa's security detail stand in a lobby." He set a bottle of something clear and unmarked on my counter next to Naomi's wine, entirely too casually for a man who had presumably carried it through an airport. "Personally, I was also curious what your apartment looked like. I have heard a great deal about it."