Page 27 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Tell me."

So he did. Not the version I'd already half assembled from headlines and Nik's careful non-answers, but the whole thing, slow and specific, the way a man tells a story he has rarely told out loud before and doesn't entirely trust himself to get right the first time. His father had run a fish wholesaler's warehouse on the south side, three trucks and a business built on nothing sturdier than arrogance. A disagreement over a shipment got him shot before Dmitri was even old enough to rent a car. Two men showed up at his apartment to deliver the news, and he remembered the drive to the warehouse afterward more clearly than he remembered either of their faces. Waiting there was sixty-two thousand dollars of debt nobody had bothered mentioning until it became his problem to solve.

"Sixty-two thousand dollars. At twenty-four. I can't imagine finding out my father was gone and owing that much money in the same afternoon."

"I didn't have time to imagine it either. That was the useful part, if there was a useful part. Grief is a luxury that requires time you don't have when six men are waiting to see what you do next."

"I stood in that warehouse for eleven minutes before I said anything," he said. "Six men waiting to see if I'd fold. I was twenty-four. I didn't feel twenty-four. I felt like the only adult in a room full of men twice my age, which is its own kind of terror I don't recommend."

"What did you say? At the end of the eleven minutes?"

"I'm in charge now. That was the whole speech. Nobody argued." He turned his water glass a slow quarter turn, the same habit I'd clocked at Nightingale months ago without understanding what it meant yet. "I built everything after that out of not wanting to feel that particular kind of powerless ever again. Every rule, every locked door, every empty room in this apartment. It all traces back to eleven minutes in a warehouse."

"Did it get easier? Being the person who says 'I'm in charge now' and means it?"

"No. It got quieter. Easier would mean the weight goes away. It doesn't. You just learn to carry it without letting anyone watch you do it." He looked at me steadily, none of the careful distance he usually kept in rooms that held more than the two of us. "Rosa was already in that kitchen when it happened. She stayed. She's the only person from before who never needed me to explain why everything changed after."

"That explains a few things about tonight."

"It explains all of it."

I did not fill the silence that followed, because I had learned enough about him by now to know that silence, from me, was its own gift.

"Your turn," he said finally. "Fair trade."

I thought about deflecting, about turning it into something funny the way I usually did, and found I didn't want to, not with him, not tonight.

"My dad left when I was nine," I said. "Not dramatically. He didn't storm out or announce anything. He just took a business trip that kept extending itself until we stopped expecting him back. My mom never really explained it, and I stopped asking around the time I turned eleven, because the answer never changed no matter how many ways I asked the question." I traced the edge of my napkin, not quite meeting his eyes. "That's part of why the loan, why the house, why all of it matters so much. She held everything together with nothing for years. I guess I decided somewhere in there that if I built something sturdy enough, nobody I loved would ever have to hold it together alone again."

"Do you ever hear from him?"

"Every few years. A card at random, no return address, like he's checking a box instead of trying to reach me. I stopped answering them around the same time I stopped hoping they'd say something different." I shrugged, though it cost me more than the gesture let on. "It's fine. It became fine a long time before I admitted it, if that makes any sense."

"That's not a small thing to tell someone."

"You went first. Seemed only fair."

He reached across the table and took my hand, and neither of us said anything else about it, because some things land better in silence than in anything either of us could have said.

We might have stayed there all night if the house phone in the hallway hadn't rung, sharp and old-fashioned, a sound that belonged to a different decade. Dmitri excused himself, and I let him go, and Rosa reappeared with dessert I didn't have room for and ate anyway, because refusing felt like it would have hurt her personally.

I sat alone at the table for a few minutes after Rosa cleared the plates, turning the whole evening over the way I turned over a seating chart, looking for the seam where something might come apart under its own weight. I couldn't find one. That, more than anything else that had happened since I landed in this city, was the detail that unsettled me, in the good way, meaning I had finally stopped bracing for the other shoe.

Afterward, restless and too full to sit still, I wandered the hallway toward the room Dmitri had disappeared into, meaning only to ask if he wanted coffee. The study door stood open a few inches, enough for his voice to reach me before I reached the door, and something in the register of it stopped me in the hallway with my hand still raised, mid-knock, undelivered.

The apartment had gone quiet around me in the particular way expensive places do, no creaking floors, no rattling pipes, nothing but the low hum of a building built to keep its own secrets. I could hear my pulse in that silence, which struck me as absurd, given that I hadn't done anything yet except stand in a hallway holding my hand up like a woman who had forgotten what doors were for.

It was not the voice from dinner. It was flatter, colder, careful in a way I had never heard from him, not even in the ballroom the first day we met, not even in the version of him I'd once teased for negotiating furniture placement like it was a hostage situation.

"Don't tell me what the ledgers say, Kirill," I heard him say. "Tell me why they say it."

14

DMITRI

The office still smelled like the coffee Nik had burned an hour before I got there, bitter and slightly scorched, and I poured a cup anyway because I had learned a long time ago that complaining about Nik's coffee never improved it. He was already at the desk when I walked in, three folders squared in front of him with the particular precision of a man who had rehearsed what he wanted to say and needed the folders to make it look like he hadn't.

"Morning," I said.