Page 13 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I could have told her it was nothing. I had a decade of practice telling people it was nothing. Instead I found myself considering the actual answer, which was rarer than anything I usually let myself consider at a dinner table.

"Security check-in," I said. "Standard when I'm out of Chicago."

"That's not what I asked. I asked where you go. In your head."

"You want the honest version or the good one?"

"I've had enough of the good version from every man I've ever had dinner with. Try the honest one."

I turned the water glass a quarter turn, watching the light shift through it, and gave her something I had not planned on giving her tonight. "I go somewhere and check whether the room's still safe. Every few minutes. It's not a choice at this point, it's just what my head does in any restaurant, any hotel lobby, anywhere with a door I did not personally clear." I let that sit for a second, then added, because it seemed only fair, "I've been doing it since I was twenty-four. I don't remember what it felt like before."

She did not flinch, and she did not fill the silence the way most people did when a man handed them something true and heavy across a table. She just watched me for a moment, like she was recalculating something.

"That sounds exhausting."

"It's efficient."

"Those aren't the same word."

"No," I agreed. "They're not."

Luca chimed in again about something to do with the wine list, and I lifted two fingers to my ear before I caught myself, an old habit left over from years of adjusting an earpiece I no longer thought about.

Cora tracked my hand like she was still working out the geometry of a ballroom. "You do that. Touch your ear. Every few minutes, like there's a bee only you can hear."

"Force of habit."

"Is there something in there?"

"There might be."

"An earpiece? Are you secretly a government agent moonlighting as a mob boss? Because if so, I have several follow-up questions and none of them are about vendor timelines."

"It's called being careful."

"Is careful currently telling you anything interesting?"

"Careful," Luca said, delighted with himself, "would like it on record that he warned you dinner would come with commentary."

"He's telling me the wine's arriving," I said, which was not exactly a lie, since it happened to be true two seconds later when the waiter appeared with the bottle Antoine had chosen without being asked.

"Convenient timing."

"I have good people."

The food arrived, and for a while we let the conversation drift somewhere lighter: her stories about Beckett's color-coded disasters, mine about Rosa's ongoing war with produce vendors. It was easier than it had any right to be, two people who had met over a folding table finding out they were actually good at talking to each other when nobody required it of them.

"Can I ask you something that has nothing to do with logistics?" she said, halfway through the meal, setting her fork down like she wanted my full attention for it.

"Go ahead."

"What do you actually like? Not what the business needs, not what looks good, not what your image requires. Just you. What do you like?"

It should have been an easy question. I had answered harder ones under worse circumstances without missing a beat. Instead I sat there long enough that the silence started to mean something, weighing it slowly, the way I weighed anything that actually mattered, before I trusted myself to answer out loud.

"Sir," Luca said quietly in my ear, "you've gone quiet for nine seconds. That's a personal record for a dinner table. I'm going to need you to say something before she thinks you died."

"The lake," I said finally, to Cora, ignoring Luca entirely. "Early, before the city's awake. I take a boat out sometimes, before anyone needs anything from me. Nobody knows to call that early. It's the only part of my week nobody else has a claim on."