Page 9 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

"It's five forty-seven," I say, sipping a chamomile tea as I look through the receipts.

"Close enough,” she sing-songs while fluffing her hair. “I have a date."

"You have a date every Tuesday."

"I know," she says, very pleasantly, "because I have a life." She plants a kiss on my cheek, grabs her jacket off the hook by the back door, and leaves through the front door with a wave.

Closing is my favorite part of the day, which probably says something about me that I don't want to examine too closely. It's quiet in a way the café never is when it's open. Just the hum of the refrigeration unit and the sound of the cats settling into their evening arrangements.

I start with the tables. I have a system: wipe east to west, stack the chairs in pairs, mop the floor. Socks trails me the whole way, weaving just close enough to be a tripping hazard without technically being one. She does this every night. I've learned to shuffle instead of step.

Rhodes is already in his bed by the window, the big soft one I bought him specifically because he kept stealing the dog bed from the donation box. He's enormous and gray and has the energy of a retired accountant, which makes me think of the sandwich man across the street for a second, which makes me think of Eduard, which is a thing that happens more than I'd like it to.

I move on to the pastry case.

There's a peacefulness to this part. Wrapping the leftover muffins, wiping the case down, making a note of what sold well and what sat. Tonight's note:double chocolate too dense, scale back the cocoa next batch. The lemon poppyseed was gone by eleven. I write that down twice by accident and don't bother crossing it out.

Through the front window, the street outside is doing its early-evening thing. The sandwich shop across the way went dark at five. The building opposite, the one I’ve seen Eduard watching from time to time, has a couple of lit windows on the second floor, but that's it. I never paid much attention to that buildingbefore Eduard started staring at it. Now I notice it every day, which is definitely his fault.

Cookie jumps up onto the counter and sits directly on my cleaning cloth.

"That's helpful," I tell her.

She blinks slowly. Unapologetic.

I'm mid-argument with her about it when movement across the street catches my eye.

Not the slow, unremarkable movement of end-of-day foot traffic. Something faster. Wrong-shaped somehow, the way your eye catches a thing before your brain knows why. Two men come around the corner from the north end, moving with a kind of deliberate-casual that isn't casual at all. And coming from the south, a third.

And between them, walking out of the building with his paper bag already crumpled in his jacket pocket, is the sandwich man. The one with the bench routine you could set a watch by. The one Eduard has spent seven mornings pretending not to watch.

I don't move. I'm not sure why. Maybe because the thing happening across the street has a distinct feel to it that my body understands before my brain catches up.

The three men close on him from different angles at the same time.

It happens fast. Faster than I expected, which is strange because I don't know what I expected, I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. There are words, short ones, and the sandwich man puts his hands up, and then the sound reaches me through the glass, a sharp crack that bounces off the buildings in a way that makes it sound further away than it is, and he goes down.

My hand is over my mouth. Cookie bolts off the counter.

I don't scream. I don't know why I don't scream. It's not courage, I'm pretty sure. It's more that my voice seems to have made a private decision to stay where it is while the rest of me works out what's happening.

What's happening is that the sandwich man is on the ground and not moving, and two of the three men are already walking, not running, which is somehow worse than running, back the way they came.

The third one isn't.

He's standing still on the pavement, and I don't know when it happened, but he's looking directly at the café. Directly at the window. Directly at me.

I've never had someone look at me like that before. Like I'm a problem they've just noticed and are already deciding what to do about.

My whole body goes cold.

I step back. My hip catches the edge of the counter, hard enough to bruise, and I don't even feel it. I step back again, further into the café, out of the direct line of the window, and my brain finally kicks in with something useful, which is: go to the back, lock the door, call someone, anyone, the police, Delilah, it doesn't matter.

I turn for the back and crash straight into a wall of muscle.

I’m just about to scream when my upper arms are grabbed and I’m pushed back just enough to see it's Eduard.

He's not in the suit tonight. He’s wearing a dark jacket, over darker shirt, moving the way he sometimes moves when he first comes through the door, that four-second read of the room, except this time it takes about half a second and it ends with him looking at me and nowhere else.