Page 26 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

Rosa put me to work before I had fully decided to let her, which seemed to be the only way anyone operated in this kitchen, and within minutes I had flour on both hands and a stack of dough circles waiting for filling while she stirred something on the stove that smelled like better decisions than the ones I'd been making all evening.

"Pinch it here, not there. You are making a purse, not a coin."

"I'm trying."

"Try harder. The filling escapes if you're lazy about the seal, and then you have soup instead of pierogi, and nobody wants soup when they were promised pierogi." She said it like a woman who had watched exactly that tragedy unfold more than once. "You like him."

It was not a question, so I did not treat it like one. "Is it that obvious?"

"You came to Chicago for a supplier expo and you are standing in his kitchen at nine at night pinching dough. Draw your own conclusions." Rosa did not look up from the pot. "He likes you too. I've cooked in this kitchen for a very long time. I know what an empty table looks like, and I know what it looks like when he brings someone to it."

"Does he bring people to it often?"

"Never." She said it the way she said most things, like a fact filed and closed, no room left for follow-up questions. "That is why I am telling you to be careful with him, and also why I am giving you extra pierogi, because a woman doing something brave should not do it on an empty stomach."

"Is dating the boss brave or insane?"

"Foolish, usually. Worth it, occasionally." Rosa said it without missing a stir, like a question she had already answered for herself years ago and simply hadn't been asked directly until now. "He does not let people close. When he does, he does it badly, because he has had no practice. Be patient with the bad parts. There will be bad parts."

"How many bad parts are we talking about? Rough estimate."

"More than you're prepared for. Fewer than you'll survive." Rosa tapped the wooden spoon twice against the rim of the pot, a habit I was already starting to recognize as punctuation. "That is the honest answer. Anyone who gives you a smaller number is selling you something."

"That's oddly reassuring, coming from a woman holding a spoon like a weapon."

"I have used it as one. Ask Nik about the wooden spoon incident sometime, if you want to see him turn a very interesting color."

I turned that over while I butchered another pierogi into something closer to a coin than a purse. "Can I ask you something? What was he like as a kid, before all of this?"

Something in Rosa's face softened in a way I hadn't seen yet, which was saying something, since I'd already watched her run an entire kitchen through sheer force of personality.

"He was a serious little boy. Too serious, always watching the door like someone might come through it who shouldn't." She stirred, considering. "Except once. His father's name day, some party with important men in very good suits, all of them busy being impressed with themselves. Dmitri was seven, maybe eight, dressed up like a tiny businessman, and he was carrying a bowl of borscht across the room like it was the most important job anyone had ever given him."

"Oh no."

"Oh yes. He tripped over another child's foot, and the borscht went everywhere, all over the suit, all over a very important man's shoes, and the room went completely silent, the way rooms do right before something terrible or something wonderful happens." Rosa's eyes were bright with the memory. "And this serious little boy, covered in beet soup, stood up, looked at the man whose shoes he had just ruined, and said, with his chin up like a tiny general, that the shoes had improved."

I laughed so hard I had to put down the dough, an enormous, unexpected laugh that came from somewhere lower than my chest. "He did not."

"He did. His father laughed until he cried. I have never seen that man laugh like that again, before or after." Rosa shook her head, still smiling, and for a moment the kitchen held something that felt less like cooking and more like church. "That boy is still in there. He just stopped letting anyone see him ruin his suit."

"Does he know you tell that story?"

"He knows I could. He has never asked me not to, which tells you something too, if you know how to listen for it." Rosa wiped her hands on her apron, satisfied, the particular satisfaction of a woman who had just handed over something valuable and knew exactly what it was worth. "Most men who build empires spend a great deal of money making sure nobody remembers who they were before it. He never asked me to forget the borscht."

By the time dinner was finally served, actually served, at an actual table instead of eaten standing over Rosa's stove, I had a version of Dmitri in my head that no headline would ever print, a boy with beet soup on his shoes and his chin up anyway.

"Rosa likes you," Dmitri said, watching me across the table with an expression I was starting to recognize as specific to him, equal parts amused and undone. "She doesn't perform liking people. If she feeds you, it's real."

"She told me you don't bring people here."

"I don't."

"Why me?"

He was quiet long enough that I thought he might deflect the way he sometimes did, folding the question into something smaller and easier to answer. He didn't.

"Because I've spent twenty-three years building something specifically so nothing could reach the parts of me that still remember what it felt like to have nothing," he said. "You should know what that means, if you're going to be in a room I actually live in."