Page 25 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

Dinner was easier than the hallway had been. She told me about the expo, a vendor who had tried to sell her on centerpieces made entirely of dried fruit, Beckett's ongoing campaign to get the office a better coffee machine using increasingly elaborate spreadsheets nobody had asked for.

"He made a slide deck," she said. "For a coffee machine. There were projected return-on-investment numbers based on staff morale."

"Did the numbers hold up?"

"Surprisingly, yes. I still said no, on principle, but I couldn't argue with the math."

I told her about the lake, about a boat I had not taken out in longer than I wanted to admit, about the specific quiet of this city before the sun came up that I had never managed to describe properly to anyone who had not stood in it themselves.

"You should take me out on it sometime," she said. "The boat."

"You'd have to be here before six."

"I've done worse for less interesting reasons."

"It's not glamorous. It's cold, and it's quiet, and there's nothing to do except sit there."

"Sounds like exactly what you'd actually enjoy showing someone, then. Not the penthouse. Not the view built for magazines. The cold, quiet thing you actually do when nobody's watching."

She was not wrong about that either, and I was beginning to understand that she rarely would be.

"All right," I said. "The boat. Next time."

"I'm holding you to that."

"I know."

We were still laughing about something neither of us would have found funny in any other room, in any other life, when the buzzer sounded from downstairs, sharp and unfamiliar in a way that told me before the doorman's voice confirmed it that whoever it was had not been expected.

"Mr. Zolotov, I have a Kirill here. Says it's urgent, about the driver investigation. He says he tried calling."

I had not felt my phone. I did not entirely believe that was an accident.

"Send him up," I said, and watched something careful settle over Cora's face, the professional stillness she wore when a room shifted under her without warning.

Kirill came off the elevator already talking, already smiling, a folder under one arm and an apology arranged on his face that did not quite reach his eyes, though I had spent longer than I should have telling myself that was simply the shape of his face and not a fact about the man wearing it.

"Dima, I'm sorry, I know it's late, but I found something on the driver's route history I thought you'd want tonight instead of tomorrow." His eyes moved past me, found Cora, and something in his expression recalibrated fast enough that I almost missed it. "I didn't realize you had company."

"It could have waited until morning."

"I wasn't sure. You've been keeping count lately. I didn't want to be the reason the count went up." He said it lightly, a joke with a blade folded somewhere inside it, and set the folder down on the table without opening it, his attention already elsewhere. "You must be Cora."

"Cora, this is Kirill. He runs logistics."

"It's nice to meet you," Cora said, offering her hand with the easy warmth she gave everyone, the same quality that had gotten Rosa to adopt her inside of two minutes.

Kirill took it, and held it half a second longer than the moment required, his smile widening in a way that had nothing to do with courtesy and everything to do with cataloguing something for later use.

I watched that half second the way I watched everything that mattered, quietly, without letting my face admit I had noticed, and filed it in the same part of my mind where I kept the thirteen-minute gap on a loading bay camera and a phone that was not the one I had issued him. None of it was proof of anything. It rarely was, until it suddenly became all the proof a man needed.

"So you're the one," Kirill said, smiling with everything but his eyes.

13

CORA

Kirill's visit hadn't lasted long. A few clipped words with Dmitri near the door, a handshake that left my hand feeling appraised rather than greeted, and then he was gone, taking the whole strange charge of him with him and leaving a hallway that suddenly felt too quiet for the size of the apartment. Dmitri had excused himself to make a call he didn't explain, and Rosa, apparently unwilling to let a guest stand around doing nothing useful while she waited, had swept me straight into her kitchen before I could decide whether I was still supposed to be nervous.