Page 3 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I was midway through a full reenactment of the last caterer's exact tone of voice during the great centerpiece standoff of the previous spring, complete with hand gestures, when the door at the back of the ballroom banged open hard enough to echo off the ceiling.

Naomi came through it at a dead run, coat sliding off one shoulder, hair escaping its clip, phone still clutched in one hand as if she had been mid-call when she decided running was more urgent than finishing the sentence.

"Sorry, sorry, the train decided today was the day to personally ruin my entire life," she said, breathless, dragging air in like she had sprinted the last several blocks. Knowing Naomi, she probably had.

Then her eyes landed past me, on him.

I watched it happen in real time. Her sprint died mid-step. The phone slipped an inch in her grip before she caught it. Every ounce of the frantic energy that had carried her through the door drained straight out of her posture, replaced by something stiller and far more careful.

"Naomi, this is..." I gestured toward him, realizing halfway through the sentence that I still did not have a name to put there. "Sorry, I never actually asked, which is embarrassing considering I've had him moving furniture for the last hour."

He did not answer. He watched Naomi with an expression I could not quite place, something between patience and reluctant amusement at whatever was about to happen next.

Naomi's mouth opened, closed, and opened again.

"Cora," she said, very quietly, the color gone from her face. "That's Mr. Zolotov."

2

DMITRI

The Larkspur gave me the same suite it had given me for fifteen years, and for the first time in as many, I noticed how little that fact meant to me walking through the door.

The same brass numbers hung on the same walnut panel. The same view of the park stretched out through glass cleaned twice a day whether it needed it or not. The same bottle of the same scotch waited on the same tray, because I had never asked for anything different, and a hotel that wanted to keep my business had learned not to test that. I set my jacket over the back of a chair and stood in the middle of a room I had occupied more nights than my own bed, and thought about a clipboard.

A woman I had known for exactly forty minutes had handed me a clipboard and told me where to put a table.

I turned that fact over the way I turn over anything that does not fit the shape of my life, checking it for a blade or a lie. There was neither. She had simply looked at a large man in a room full of unassigned labor and drawn the only sensible conclusion available to her. I had let her keep drawing it. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes, hauling furniture and getting told, with real conviction, that I had an opinion problem about symmetry, I had stopped being the reason a room went quiet when I walked into it. Nobody had spoken to me like household help in over two decades. Nobody but Nik had corrected my posture at a table in twenty years, and Nik got to do that because he had earned it in ways I did not enjoy remembering.

Naomi had said my name carefully, the way people talk when they think the wrong word might set something off. I watched Cora work it out in real time, her face moving fast from confusion to something closer to mortified. I let the moment sit for exactly as long as it needed to, thanked her for the day in a voice that gave nothing away, and left before she could apologize for something that never needed one. She had not come after me down the hallway with an explanation. I noticed that. It went into the same place everything else about her had gone that afternoon, the part of my mind that keeps track of what a person does under pressure.

I poured two fingers of the scotch I was not going to drink and carried it to the window instead of my mouth, because some habits exist purely to give the hands something to do while the mind works.

Thoughts about her kept leading me somewhere further back than I meant to go.

My father ran his operation out of the back of a fish wholesaler on the south side, a business built on three trucks, a warehouse he did not own, and the specific arrogance of a man who had never been made to answer for anything. He called it a regional concern, which was generous. It was a handful of men moving product across state lines and paying the right people to keep looking somewhere else, and it survived exactly as long as arrogant men usually survive, which is to say not very long at all. He was shot in that warehouse over a disagreement about a shipment that was never going to matter to anyone in five years, and I was twenty-four years old when two of his men came to my apartment to tell me, with the particular blankness of men who had run out of better ideas, that I was in charge now.

I did not have the luxury of grieving properly. I had a fish wholesaler's warehouse, three trucks, sixty-two thousand dollars of debt nobody had bothered to mention to me, and men twice my age waiting to see whether I would fold or hold. I chose to hold, and then I chose it again the next day, and the day after that, for twenty-three years, until the thing my father had built out of arrogance and bad luck became something with its name on buildings and its money in places money is supposed to be respectable. Untouchable was the word Nik used once, and I let him keep using it, because it was cheaper than telling him the truth, which is that nothing is untouchable. You simply raise the price of touching it until most men decide against it.

Personal lives are leverage. I had built my whole life around that one idea, and I had never needed reminding of it, not in fifteen years of the same suite and the same restaurant and the same careful, empty rotation of women who understood exactly what they were and were not signing up for.

And now I was standing at a window in that same suite, unable to stop thinking about a woman who had never once apologized for the volume of her instructions.

I had known who she was within the first two minutes. Nik had sent me the vendor file a week earlier, the way he sent me every file for an event carrying this much weight, and her name had been on the top of it in bold: Cora Walsh, Walsh Events. A photograph had been clipped to the proposal, competent and unsmiling, nothing like the woman who had just spent forty minutes narrating a nervous breakdown out loud while I carried her furniture. I could have told her who I was the moment she handed me that clipboard. It would have taken four words and ended the whole thing cleanly.

I had not said them. I still was not entirely sure why, except that nobody had asked me to move a table in twenty years, and it turned out I had missed being asked.

I had watched her direct a crew of exactly one, which was to say me, with the same total authority she would have used on a crew of twenty, snapping instructions about sightlines and clearance while her hands never stopped moving, a pen behind one ear and a second one already lost somewhere in her fist. She had not once paused to check whether I minded being told what to do. That was the detail I could not set down, more than her height or the color of her hair or any of the ordinary things a man is supposed to notice first.

My phone buzzed against the tray beside the scotch I still had not touched. Nik's name lit the screen. I answered on the second ring, out of a habit that had outlived the reason for it.

"Tell me the room isn't on fire," I said.

"The room is standing. Barely. AV showed up forty minutes late and got an earful from your event planner that I am told is already legend among the loading dock staff." Nik's voice had the flat, satisfied quality of a man delivering gossip he considered beneath him and was going to enjoy anyway. "You were seen. Helping."

"I was seen moving a table."

"That is helping, in the language normal people use."