Page 11 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"You let people offer. That's different from letting them help."

I didn't have an answer for that fast enough, and he seemed to know it, his mouth tilting into the small, satisfied smile of a younger sibling who'd landed a point he'd clearly been saving.

Sean pocketed the check without quite meeting my eyes, mumbled something that was probably gratitude wearing the shape of a goodbye, and let himself out. The door chimed again behind him, cheerful and completely tone deaf to the moment.

I pulled out the notebook I kept in the bottom drawer, the one with a black cover and no label on the outside because a label would have made it real in a way I preferred to keep private. I'd started it the year I opened Walsh Events, back when I still believed a person could plan her way out of every disaster if she just wrote enough of them down in advance. Worst Case, the first page said, in handwriting neater than anything I produced these days, and every page after it had proven the title right in some small, specific way. Inside, tabs divided it by category: Loan, in blue, for the number my mother's signature was attached to; Vendors, in green, for the deposits I'd fronted out of pocket more than once when a client's check ran late; and Sean, in the black ink I reserved for things I didn't expect to ever fully resolve.

I flipped to his tab, added today's date and the number, and let the new total sit under the old ones without comment. Two years of totals, written in a hand that got steadier the more practiced it became, which felt like its own small tragedy if I let myself think about it too long. I didn't look at the sum at the bottom of the page anymore. I'd stopped needing to. I knew it the way you know your own weight, a number you carry around whether you look at the scale or not.

"You know I'm not going anywhere, right?" Naomi said, watching me close the notebook. "If this whole thing ever actually broke you, I'd notice. You wouldn't have to ask."

"I know."

"You say that like it's a fact you read somewhere, not a thing you believe."

"I believe it." I did, mostly. Believing it and building my whole life like it wasn't true were apparently two different muscles, and I'd only ever trained one of them.

She looked like she wanted to push it further, and might have, if the front door hadn't chimed a third time, this one accompanied by an actual grunt of effort.

The courier who came through it was visible only from the knees down. Everything above that was flowers, an arrangement so large it had to turn sideways to clear the door frame, white and deep red roses spilling out of a container the approximate size and shape of a love seat.

"Delivery for Cora Walsh?"

"That's... me." I stood up slowly, the way you stand up for something you're not sure you're allowed to touch yet.

"Where do you want it?"

"Anywhere that isn't on top of a person," I said, and three separate teammates cleared desk space at a speed I had genuinely never seen them apply to actual work.

The courier set it down with visible relief, had me sign for it, and left before I'd fully processed the scale of what had just entered my office. Naomi walked a slow circle around the arrangement, whistling low.

"That is not a bouquet. That's a hostile takeover."

"It's a client. It's probably just a thank you." I said it more for the room than for myself, since the room had gone noticeably quiet, Beckett included, seating chart forgotten in his hands.

"Cora. I have worked eight years in this industry. I have received exactly one arrangement in that time that required its own delivery permit, and it was for a funeral with four hundred attendees and a genuine celebrity in the casket. This is bigger than that."

"It's not that big."

"It cleared the door sideways."

I didn't have a rebuttal for that, mostly because she was right, and because some small, traitorous part of my chest had already started doing something warm and unhelpful at the sight of it. I found the small card tucked into the greenery, my name on the front in handwriting too clean to be the florist's, and slid it out.

I read it once, then again, standing very still in the middle of my own chaotic office while a small mountain of roses waited to see what I'd do about it.

The card read: "For the woman who ran a mob boss's afternoon without knowing it. D.Z."

6

DMITRI

Nightingale had occupied the same corner of the West Village for as long as I had been coming to New York on business, and in fifteen years the outside of it had not changed by so much as the color of its shutters. The shutters were still green, the brass bell over the door still rang true when it opened, and someone replanted the window box every season with the same white flowers. I had eaten at exactly one table in that restaurant since the first year I made this city part of my territory, and Antoine, who had been seating people there for longer than I had been alive in any meaningful sense of the word, met me at the door with the same two words he always used.

"Mr. Zolotov."

"Antoine."

"Table's ready. The lady hasn't arrived yet." He said it without inflection, the way a man says something he has decided not to have an opinion about out loud.