Page 20 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Dario," I said, without looking up. "Walk me through the count."

"Sir. I ran it twice before I called anyone, because I didn't want to waste your night over a clerical error." He came closer, measured in his footing the way men are careful in front of someone they're not yet sure how to read. "Forty-one on the outbound manifest from the warehouse. Thirty-eight physically on the platform when the rail company logged the transfer. I checked the loading log against the driver's route sheet. Everything matches until the transfer point. After that, the numbers just don't."

"Where's Kirill?"

"He signed off on the outbound count himself, at the warehouse. He's not here. I called him when I found the discrepancy, and he said he'd be in first thing to walk through his half of it."

"He didn't offer to come in tonight?"

"He offered. I told him not to bother, since Dario already had the platform numbers and there wasn't much left for him to add standing around in the cold." Nik's tone stayed level, but I caught the small flicker of a man choosing his words the way he chose them when he wanted me to draw my own conclusion instead of handing me his. "Your call whether that reads as reasonable or as a man staying somewhere he'd rather be."

That detail sat wrong the moment I heard it. Kirill had signed off on this count and then not shown up when it fell apart, which was either a man confident enough in his own work that he saw no reason to lose sleep over someone else's math, or a man who already knew exactly where the three crates had gone and didn't feel like standing in a room while I found out.

I did not say either of those things out loud. I have learned that suspicion spoken too early poisons a room faster than the thing you're suspicious of, and I did not have proof of anything yet, only a pattern I had been watching for months and did not like the shape of.

"Show me the transfer point," I said.

Dario walked me through it in under two minutes, precise, competent, better organized than most men twice his time with the company. The transfer point was a loading bay with two cameras, one of which had been marked for maintenance three days earlier and had not yet been fixed.

"Convenient," I said.

"That's what I thought too, sir. I flagged the maintenance ticket in my report."

I checked the working camera's footage myself, standing over Nik's shoulder while he scrubbed through the timestamp, and found the gap exactly where a gap would need to be for three crates to disappear without anyone catching it on tape, a thirteen-minute stretch where the loading bay's angle showed nothing but an empty platform and a driver who had conveniently stepped away for a cigarette.

"Pull his personnel file," I said. "Tonight. I want to know who else that driver has worked transfers with in the last six months."

"On it," Nik said, already reaching for his phone.

I worked the problem the rest of the way in silence, cross-referencing route sheets against fuel logs against the timestamps on every scan gun in a four-person chain, because the truth about missing inventory is that it is never actually missing, only moved somewhere nobody thought to look, and the job of finding it is mostly a matter of being more patient than whoever hid it. Nine minutes after I picked up the first manifest, I had the shape of it: a second truck, unlogged, that had idled at the transfer point during the exact thirteen-minute gap, pulling away four minutes before the camera came back online.

"Find that truck," I said. "Quietly. I want eyes on it before it knows it's being looked for."

"Understood." Nik was already moving toward the door, phone to his ear, giving orders in the flat, efficient voice he used for exactly this kind of night, the one that made men on the other end of the line sit up straighter without ever knowing why.

I stood in the middle of the freight office with the problem solved and no particular satisfaction in having solved it, which was new. It had taken nine efficient, precise minutes, exactly what I had built twenty-three years of reputation doing, and every one of those minutes I had spent some other part of my attention two states away, in a ballroom with candles that bent in a draft and a woman who had stopped narrating her own thoughts out loud the second before my phone started ringing.

I looked at my watch, not to check how long the problem had taken but to check what time it was against a flight schedule I had not yet booked, a number I already knew without needing to look it up, as familiar to me as the layout of every warehouse I had ever owned.

I had never done that before. I had worked more nights like this one than I could easily count, problems that needed my full attention at hours nobody keeps for anything good, and until tonight the clock had never meant anything except how much longer the problem itself would take. I used to be able to lose an entire night to a discrepancy like this one and not notice the sun coming up until someone handed me coffee and told me to go home. That version of me would not have recognized the man standing in this freight office checking a flight number against his watch before the paperwork was even signed.

Tonight the clock meant a plane, and a woman, and how many hours stood between where I was and wherever she was, and it had taken me nine minutes of otherwise perfect focus to notice I was doing it. Nine minutes was not a long time to lose a piece of yourself to a distraction. It was, I understood clearly for the first time standing in that cold office, exactly long enough to prove the distraction was no longer optional.

Dario hovered near the desk, not quite dismissed, not quite sure if he should be.

"Good work tonight," I told him. "The camera detail. Most people would have missed it or been too nervous to flag it before they had someone to blame."

"Thank you, sir. I just didn't want three crates to still be gone tomorrow because I was worried about looking paranoid tonight."

"Paranoid is a word people use for instincts they haven't been proven right about yet. You'll do fine here." I meant it, and filed the name away in the part of my mind that kept track of which men were worth watching for the right reasons. It was a short list. Dario had just earned a place on it in under an hour, which was faster than most men managed in a year.

Nik came back in, phone lowered. "Truck's a rental, paid in cash, registered to an address that doesn't exist. We'll have eyes on the driver's known routes by morning."

"That's fast, even for you."

"You want me to keep pulling the thread tonight, or does it wait?"

I thought about that longer than the question deserved. Every instinct I had built over two decades said stay, said finish it personally, same as always, said a man does not hand off the closing minutes of a problem this size to anyone, not even Nik, not even after twenty years of trusting him with exactly this kind of thing.