Page 9 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

Nobody had moved him. Nobody had touched anything. Six men stood in a loose circle around the body of the only man any of them had ever taken orders from, waiting for someone to tell them what came next, and none of them had the authority to be that someone. I remembered thinking, absurdly, that the warehouse was colder than it had any right to be for early autumn, and that my father had never once mentioned fixing the heat, and that this was apparently the thought my mind had chosen to have while standing over his body.

Eleven minutes passed before I said the only sentence that mattered, and I did not ask anyone's permission to say it, because there was no one left whose permission would have counted for anything.

"I'm in charge now."

Nobody argued. That was the part I remembered clearest, clearer than the blood or the cold or the sound the door made when the coroner's men finally arrived. Six grown men, some of them twice my age and none of them inclined to take orders from anyone under thirty, had looked at a twenty-four-year-old in a borrowed jacket and simply agreed, because the alternative was standing in that warehouse forever with no one giving the orders at all.

I came back to the present without ceremony, the way I always did. I looked out through the office window at the yard, where the afternoon light had gone flat and gray the way it does in this city more months than it doesn't.

Kirill was still out there, past the loading doors, near the fence line at the edge of the yard.

He stood with his back half turned to the building, a phone pressed to his ear, and it took me a moment to understand what was wrong with the picture before the realization settled fully into focus. It was not the burner I had issued him for business, the one every man on my payroll carried and used for exactly the purposes I allowed. It was a different phone entirely, smaller, older, the kind a man kept separate on purpose and remembered to leave in his car most days.

I told myself it was nothing. Men called wives, girlfriends, bookies, mothers who worried when they didn't hear from them by a certain hour, and not every private phone was one worth building a theory around. I had built an entire career on knowing the difference between a real problem and something a tired mind invents out of nothing. I told myself that now, deliberately and a little too carefully, the same way I reminded myself of most things I did not want to be true.

I watched anyway, because some part of me had already stopped believing my own reassurance.

Through the window, I watched Kirill make a call to a number that wasn't in any phone he was supposed to be using.

I did not look away until he did, and even then, I filed the phone itself away with everything else I had learned to remember, because a man who forgot the small details eventually paid for the large ones.

5

CORA

A week after the signing, our office looked like a paper storm had swept through and given up halfway. Mood boards covered every flat surface that wasn't currently a person, a half-eaten bagel anchored a stack of vendor invoices against the draft from the window unit, and somewhere under all of it was a conference table I hadn't actually seen in three days, though I trusted it was still there.

"Okay." Beckett stood at the head of that buried table with a seating chart the size of a windshield, color-coded in a rainbow that had clearly taken him all morning. "I organized it by relationship dynamics instead of just families, because families sit together anyway, so why not solve for something harder."

"Show me," I said, already regretting it.

He turned the chart around with the flourish of a man unveiling a car. It took me a full three seconds to understand what I was looking at, and another two to understand why my stomach had dropped.

"Beckett. You put the Kowalskis directly across from the Hendersons."

"Right, because they're both loud, high-energy tables, I wanted to balance the energy across the room."

"They're loud because they hate each other. The groom's aunt keyed the bride's mother's car at the engagement party. There's a restraining order, Beckett. An actual, notarized restraining order."

His face went through several stages of a man watching his own morning collapse. "The color coding didn't flag that."

"The color coding doesn't know anything. The color coding is markers."

"I cross-referenced it against the guest list twice."

"Did you cross-reference it against the notes column? It says 'court ordered, no contact' in bold red letters, which I know for a fact is a color you own, because half your chart is that exact shade of red."

He looked down at the offending column like it had personally wronged him. "I thought that was just, like, an intensity flag."

"It is an intensity flag. The intensity is a restraining order."

Someone near the printer laughed and turned it into a cough fast enough that I let it go.

Behind us, Naomi had her phone wedged between shoulder and ear, pacing a tight, furious lap around her desk while she talked, and had been climbing toward a rolling boil of narration for the last ten minutes, one none of us could tune out even if we'd wanted to.

"No, I understand the pipe burst, I'm not arguing that the pipe burst happened, I'm asking why nobody called me before they rerouted four hundred guests into a room that seats two hundred and eighty." There was a pause, during which her eyebrows climbed somewhere near her hairline. "A tent. You want to put a tent. In the dead of winter. In this city."

"Fix the chart," I told Beckett, sliding it back across the table before the Kowalskis and Hendersons could start a war on paper as well as in person. "Family blocks. Boring is safe. We are not in the business of balancing energy."