Page 12 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I told him that was fine and let him lead me back through the dining room to the corner table I had occupied so many times he no longer bothered walking me through the room first. It was a round table, low light, a wall at my back and a clean sightline to the door, because old habits do not become habits by accident.

Five days had passed since I sent an unreasonable quantity of flowers to her office and signed the card with two initials instead of a name. She had answered three separate emails about vendor logistics since then without mentioning them once, which told me either that the initials had meant nothing to her, or that they had meant exactly what I intended and she had decided to make me wait for the reaction.

I set the folder Nik had prepared for me on the table exactly once, squared it to the edge, and did not open it. There was nothing inside worth reading twice. A logistics review, I had called it, when I told Cora I wanted to go over the summit vendor timeline in person instead of over email. It was, technically, true. I had chosen the word logistics with the same care I chose most words, because it gave both of us somewhere to look if either of us needed an exit that did not require admitting what this actually was.

"Sir." Luca's voice arrived in my ear, low and even, from the car parked across the street. "You've been sitting there for four minutes doing nothing but staring at a folder you have no intention of opening. Should I be worried, or is this a new form of meditation?"

I did not answer him. Answering Luca out loud in a restaurant, with no one able to hear the other half of the conversation, was how a man ended up on a psychiatric hold, and I had told him as much on at least six separate occasions.

"I'll take the silence as confirmation," he said. "Noted for the file."

Cora came through the door four minutes later, coat over one arm, hair down for once instead of pinned back the way she wore it on job sites, and something in my chest did a thing I did not have a polite name for. Antoine walked her back himself, which told me he had already decided this dinner mattered more than the average reservation, and I stood when she reached the table, because my mother had raised me with certain habits that had survived everything else about the life I had built since.

"Logistics review," she said, sliding into the chair across from me and eyeing the folder like it owed her money. "You couldn't have just emailed me the vendor timeline?"

"I could have."

"But you didn't."

"No."

"Because?"

"Because emails don't tell me whether the caterer's actually going to hold the tasting date, or whether you're going to fight me on the cancellation window again." It was not the real reason and we both knew it, but it was close enough to true that neither of us had to say anything harder out loud yet.

"She's already stiff about the tasting date. I told the caterer I know a man who can make problems disappear, which I immediately regretted, because now she thinks you're either mafia or extremely well connected, and honestly I'm not sure which one worries her more."

"She's not wrong on either count."

Cora laughed, the real one, not the polished one she used on clients, and it did something to the room that had nothing to do with the lighting.

A waiter appeared before either of us reached for a menu, and I ordered without opening mine, the way I always did here. Cora watched the exchange with her head tilted slightly, the same look she had worn on the ballroom floor when she was working out where a table belonged.

"You didn't even look at the menu."

"I know what I want."

"How long have you been coming here?"

"Fifteen years."

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, like the number surprised her more than she expected it to. "And you order the same thing every time?"

"The duck. Since the first visit."

She sat back, studying me the way she had studied sightlines that first morning, like I was a problem she was working through rather than a man across a table. "Fifteen years, same table, same dish, same restaurant. That's either the most romantic thing I've ever heard or deeply, deeply sad, and I genuinely can't decide which."

"Both. Frequently." It was the same answer I had given her the first day, and something crossed her face that told me she remembered it too.

"Sir." Luca again, threading in over the sound of the restaurant. "She just made you smile with your teeth showing. I've known you three years and I've seen that happen exactly twice, and both times someone ended up in the hospital shortly after, so I need you to understand I'm now on high alert."

I pressed two fingers briefly against the stem of my water glass, a small motion, nothing anyone at the table would clock as anything but a man adjusting his grip.

"You just did the thing," Cora said.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you go somewhere else for half a second and come back like nothing happened. You did it in the ballroom too, a couple times. Where do you go?"