Page 19 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I told him about payroll runs I made by transferring money out of my own savings account and calling it a loan to the business I never wrote down anywhere, because writing it down would have made it real in a way I wasn't ready for. I told him about Sean, and the notebook, and the tab with his name on it in ink I'd chosen specifically because it didn't look like anything official.

Then, because the first part had come out easier than I expected, I told him the part I usually didn't tell anyone.

"Before Walsh Events, I worked corporate. Big firm, two years in, on track for a promotion I'd been chasing since my first week. I built the pitch for a client account myself, worked eighty-hour weeks for two months to get it right, and my director took full credit for it in the meeting that landed us the account. I said something. Not even a big something, just a factual correction, in front of the client, because I genuinely thought accuracy mattered more than politics." I laughed, and it came out sharper than I meant it to. "They fired me eleven days later. Officially it was restructuring. Unofficially, my director told a mutual friend I'd been let go for not knowing my place."

"Your place."

He said the words back flat, like he was weighing them before he decided what to do with them, and something about hearing them repeated in his voice instead of my own made them sound smaller than they had any business sounding after three years of carrying them around.

"That was the exact phrase. I looked it up afterward, actually researched what it meant historically, because I wanted to understand exactly what I'd been accused of. It means know your rank. Stay in your lane. Don't correct the people above you, even when you're right, especially when you're right." I shook my head, still somehow amazed by it three years later. "I started Walsh Events four months after that, mostly out of spite, and I have not let anyone tell me my place since."

He hadn't said a single word through any of it: not one interruption, not one reassurance offered too early to actually mean anything, not one of the automatic sympathetic noises people make when they're only half listening and want you to know they're trying.

"You're not going to say anything?" I asked, half joking, and only half.

"Would you rather I did?"

"I don't know. Most people jump in around the payroll part. Tell me it's going to be fine, or that I'm so strong for handling it, which is usually code for they've stopped listening and want me to stop talking."

"I'm not most people."

"No," I said, and felt the same thing land that had landed the first time I ever heard him say it, except heavier this time, because I understood now exactly how true it was. "You actually listen. It's honestly a little unsettling. I keep waiting for the part where you tell me what to do about it."

"I don't have anything to tell you to do about it. You already did the thing." He said it simply, like it was obvious, like the entire shape of what I'd just told him only had one possible ending and I'd already reached it. "You built something that answers to nobody's idea of your place except your own. That's not a small thing. Most people spend years figuring out how to do exactly that, and most of them never manage it."

Nobody had ever put it that plainly before, not my mother, not Naomi, not even the version of myself that argued with the bathroom mirror on the worst mornings, and something in my chest did the thing it kept doing around him lately, a kind of loosening I didn't have a professional word for and didn't particularly want to look one up.

The candles caught the draft from somewhere and bent all at once, and for a second the whole room seemed to hold its breath along with me. He had moved closer at some point without my noticing exactly when, close enough that I had to tip my head back slightly to keep looking at him, and the four hundred empty chairs and the gold leaf and the entire job I was supposed to be doing all receded to something happening very far away, in a different room, to a different version of me.

"You should probably know," I said, "that I have a tendency to narrate my own nervousness out loud when I don't know what else to do with it. Just so you're prepared. It's not charming. It's a coping mechanism from a childhood I don't have time to unpack tonight."

"I'll take my chances."

"Because right now, for example, I'm thinking that this is either happening, or I've had way too much cold brew today, and I genuinely cannot tell which, and I would very much like some kind of sign before I embarrass myself any further, and I'm aware I'm still talking, and I don't seem to be able to stop, and..."

He closed the distance between us and kissed the sentence right out of my mouth, sure of himself, like he had already decided exactly how this was going to go and was simply waiting for me to catch up to it.

He leaned in, close enough that I stopped narrating my own thoughts out loud for the first time since I'd met him, and Luca's call went straight to voicemail three times before either of us noticed it ringing.

10

DMITRI

The freight office sat two streets back from the rail yards, a squat brick building with one working light over the door and a smell that never fully left it, diesel and cold steel and the particular mildew of paperwork that had been stored somewhere damp for longer than it should have been. I walked in still half in a ballroom I had left twenty minutes earlier, the taste of that unfinished moment still sitting somewhere behind my teeth, and made myself leave it at the door the way I had trained myself to leave everything that wasn't the job in front of me.

Nik was already there, sleeves rolled, standing over a desk covered in manifests. He looked up once, read whatever was on my face, and did not comment on it.

Three missed calls sat on my phone from the drive over, all Luca's, all logged within four minutes of each other, and I had felt every one of them buzz against my leg while I was still standing close enough to Cora to smell whatever she'd washed her hair with that morning, deciding whether the call could wait one more minute. It could not. It never can, which is exactly the kind of fact a man in this life is supposed to have made peace with a long time before tonight.

"Talk to me," I said.

"Milwaukee shipment again. Not Kirill's numbers this time, or not obviously. The manifest says forty-one crates left the yard. The rail company's paperwork says thirty-eight arrived. Somewhere between here and there, three crates stopped existing, and nobody can tell me when."

"Who flagged it?"

"Dario. He was doing a routine count for the morning run and the totals didn't sit right, so he called it in before he clocked out." Nik nodded toward a man standing near the loading doors, mid-thirties, arms crossed, watching us with the careful stillness of someone who wanted credit for catching a problem without wanting to be blamed for causing one. "Good instincts. He's been with us eight months."

I crossed to the desk and pulled the manifest toward me, scanning it the way I scanned any set of numbers that had gone wrong, looking for the shape of the lie inside the shape of the mistake, because the two rarely looked alike once you knew what to check for.