Page 14 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"That's it? A boat and some quiet?"

"You asked what I liked. I did not say it was complicated."

"No," she said slowly, like she was still turning it over. "I think that might be the least complicated thing you have told me since I met you, and somehow it is the thing that makes the most sense."

Something moved across the table that had nothing to do with words, a kind of quiet that felt earned instead of empty, and I let myself sit in it longer than I usually allowed myself to sit in anything.

"Your turn," I said. "What do you actually like? Not the business. Not the clients."

She thought about it with the same seriousness I had given the question, which told me something about how rarely anyone had asked her either. "Old buildings before anyone's touched them. That ballroom, the first morning, before any of the furniture showed up. Just the bones of a place and all the ways it could still go." She smiled, small and a little embarrassed by her own answer. "I like the part right before something becomes what it's going to be."

"That's not complicated either."

"No," she agreed. "I guess it isn't."

We stayed past when the plates were cleared, past the point either of us had any professional excuse left to be sitting there, the folder still closed on the table between us, exactly where I had left it three hours earlier. Antoine came by twice to ask if we needed anything and left both times with nothing to bring us, because neither of us wanted the evening interrupted by something as small as service.

"I should let you get back," Cora said eventually, though she made no move to stand. "You have an empire to run or whatever it is you do at this hour."

"The empire can wait ten more minutes."

"Watch it. That's the second reckless thing I've heard you admit to."

"I'm keeping a list."

She laughed again, easy and unguarded, and for a moment neither of us was thinking about anything beyond the table.

Across the room, a phone flashed. Neither of us saw who was holding it.

7

CORA

Two days after Nightingale, I walked into my own office and found Beckett and Naomi huddled around a laptop with the kind of stillness that meant they had already decided how a conversation was going to go and were dreading having to have it anyway.

"What?" I said, setting my bag down slower than I meant to, because something about the way neither of them looked up told me I did not actually want the answer.

Naomi turned the laptop around.

The photo was grainy, shot from across a dark room with a phone camera that had clearly been zoomed in well past its limits, but there was no mistaking the two people at the corner table, one of them in a suit that cost more than my rent and the other one laughing with her head tilted back in a way I recognized because it was, unfortunately, my own head. The headline sat above it in a font designed to look urgent. Mystery Redhead Dines With Reputed Chicago Boss.

"Reputed," I said, because it was the only word my brain seemed capable of producing. "Reputed is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

"Reputed is the word lawyers let you use when everybody already knows it's true," Naomi said, not unkindly. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm feeling like I need to know how many people follow this blog before I decide how upset to be."

"Two hundred thousand, give or take. It's not huge, but it's the kind of huge that other blogs steal from." Beckett said it like he was breaking bad news about a seating chart, careful and apologetic. "It's already been picked up twice that I've found. One of them added a headline about bratva daddies, which, I want it on record, is not a phrase I ever expected to type into a search bar for work purposes."

"Please stop saying bratva daddies."

"I'll say it as many times as it takes for it to feel normal, which based on my read of your face is not happening today."

"There's a comment thread," Naomi added, wincing on my behalf. "Somebody already guessed it was you specifically. Not the company, you. First name and everything."

"How?"

"You posted a picture of the ballroom on the company account back when we were first setting up. Apparently someone cross-referenced the dress."