Page 21 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Wrap up the rest," I said. "I need to be on a flight in the morning."

Nik did not say anything. He looked at me for a long moment, one eyebrow lifting slowly, the quiet, deliberate silence of a man doing careful math on a sentence he could not remember me ever saying in twenty years of standing in rooms like this one with him.

"You've never asked me to close out a shipment problem before," he said finally. "Not once. Not for the birthday I mentioned, not for the funeral you still came back early from."

"I'm asking now."

"I noticed." He said it without any of the dry amusement he usually wrapped around observations like this one, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd made the joke. He picked up the manifest again, already sorting the next hour of work in his head the way he always did, and did not look up when he added, "For what it's worth, I'm not asking why. I already know why. I'm just telling you I noticed."

"I know you did."

"I'll finish it. Go catch your flight, Dima."

I did not explain myself further, because there was nothing to explain that either of us didn't already understand, and because some sentences lose their weight the moment you try to justify them out loud. Experience had taught me that much, if nothing else, and I had learned it the expensive way, more than once, in rooms far less forgiving than this one.

The night air outside the freight office smelled like diesel and river water, cold enough that I felt it in my teeth. I walked out into the parking lot, the rail yard lights throwing long shadows across the gravel, and stood there for a moment longer than I needed to, letting the quiet settle before I reached for my phone. It was still early enough in New York that a woman I had left mid-sentence in a ballroom might be awake, turning the evening over the same way I was turning it over now, and I found I did not mind the idea of her doing that nearly as much as I once would have.

I pulled out my phone before I had even reached my car.

I'd booked the six a.m. flight back to New York before I'd even signed off on the shipment paperwork. Fifteen years, and I had never once left before the job was finished.

11

CORA

Coffee not made, hair unbrushed, wearing sweatpants with a hole starting at one knee and a T-shirt from a client gala old enough that the company on it had since rebranded twice, I stood in my kitchen doing the math on how many clean mugs I had left before laundry and dishes both became emergencies on the same morning, when someone knocked on my apartment door.

It had been that kind of stretch, the kind where the coffee maker developed a personality and the personality was spite, where I woke up every hour convinced my phone had buzzed even when it had not, replaying a moment in a candlelit ballroom that had gotten interrupted before it finished being a moment at all. I told myself I was fine. I told myself that several more times than a genuinely fine person ever needs to.

Nobody knocked on my apartment door. My building did not have a doorman to warn me, my buzzer had been broken since spring, and the handful of people who knew my actual address tended to text first out of basic human decency. I stood very still in my kitchen, one hand on the coffee grinder, and ran through every version of who it could be. It could be a package I had not ordered, or a neighbor about the radiator again, or, worse, Naomi, materializing early with opinions about my life choices, which she did occasionally and without warning, as a public service.

The knock came again, two knuckles, patient in a way that ruled out most delivery drivers and all neighbors.

I had approximately four seconds to decide whether I cared that I looked like a woman who had lost a fight with her own laundry pile, and I spent all four of them uselessly, because by the time I reached the door I had neither fixed my hair nor found a better shirt, and it was too late to do anything but open it and hope for a package.

It was not a package.

Dmitri stood in my hallway in the same suit he had probably worn onto a plane, tie loosened, top button undone, looking like a man who'd flown somewhere and back without once stopping to catch up with himself. There was a faint gray cast under his eyes that no amount of good tailoring could fully cover, the specific exhaustion of a man who had not slept so much as delayed the decision to.

"You look terrible," I said, because apparently that was the sentence my brain reached for first, ahead of hello, ahead of what are you doing here, ahead of literally anything a normal functioning adult might say to the man standing in my doorway at an hour I had not yet made peace with.

"You look surprised."

"I am surprised. This is what surprised looks like on me. Sweatpants and accusations." I stepped back from the door before I fully decided to, which was answer enough. "How do you even know where I live?"

"You put your address on the vendor intake form. Section four."

"That form was for event logistics, not for showing up unannounced at seven in the morning."

"It's eight."

"That is not better, Dmitri."

He came in anyway, and I let him, and the apartment that had felt perfectly adequate for one disheveled woman and her coffee crisis suddenly felt very small and very lived-in, in the specific way that only becomes obvious the second someone else is standing in it. There was a stack of unread mail on the counter I had been ignoring for a week, a sweater slung over the back of the one good chair, the particular chaos of a life nobody had been expected to see up close.

"I would have called," he said, "except I did not entirely decide to come here until I was already on the sidewalk."

"That's not how decisions work."