Page 32 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"I'll add it to the list."

"There's a list?"

"There's a list. It's extensive."

"How long have you worked for him?" Cora asked Nik, apparently deciding boredom had made her bold enough to interview the witness herself.

"Twenty years."

"Is he always like this?"

"Worse, usually. You're catching him on a good week."

"I don't know whether to be flattered or concerned."

"Neither do I," Nik said, not unkindly. "After twenty years, I've mostly stopped trying to decide, and started just keeping a folder on it instead."

Nik went back to his folder not long after that, and Luca stayed exactly where he'd fallen, and the cabin settled into the particular quiet of a plane at cruising altitude, engines low and steady under everything, the kind of sound that made silence feel less like an absence and more like something a person could lean into. Cora had gone still too, watching the dark shape of the ground far below through the window, and I found myself watching her instead, a habit I no longer bothered pretending wasn't one.

"You've gone quiet," she said, without turning from the window.

"I'm thinking."

"About the vendor, or about something else?"

"Not the vendor."

"You want to tell me, or should I guess? I'm good at guessing. It's basically my entire professional skill set, reading a room and figuring out what nobody's saying out loud."

I looked at her for a long moment, deciding, the way I had been deciding about her since a ballroom full of dust sheets in the spring. Somewhere over Ohio I had stopped debating whether to say the true thing and started working out only how to say it.

"I don't do this," I said.

"Do what? Fly? You own the plane, Dmitri. This seems like something you do fairly often."

"This." I gestured at the small space between our seats, at the tray of half-eaten almonds, at nothing and everything at once. "Dinners that aren't business. Flights with someone I didn't need to bring along for any professional reason. Any of it. I haven't done this in longer than you've had a business card with your own name on it."

She didn't say anything right away, and she didn't reach for a joke to fill the space. I noticed immediately, because filling a silence with something clever was pure instinct for her, the same way reaching for silence itself was pure instinct for me.

"How long is that, exactly?" she asked finally, quiet, careful with it.

"Long enough that I stopped counting somewhere around the point it would have started to embarrass me." My hand found the water glass on its own and gave it the same restless quarter turn it always did when the rest of me sat too still. "I've ended things before they had the chance to matter enough to cost me anything. A friendship. A woman I should have treated better than I did. Both times I told myself I was protecting something. Mostly I was protecting myself, and I called it the same thing for years because that was easier to live with." I paused, turning the glass again, watching the last of the daylight give out beyond the window. "It's a tidy system, if you don't look at it too closely. Nothing gets close enough to leave a mark, so nothing ever costs you anything either. I built an entire life on that math and never once stopped to ask what it was actually buying me."

"And now?"

"Now I flew a private jet across two states to make sure a stranger on a guest list wasn't a problem, and somewhere over Ohio I realized I wasn't doing it for the guest list."

"I don't let people stay long enough to find out if they're the ones who'll leave first," she said, quiet, matching the register I'd set instead of turning it into something lighter. "That's most of the reason I built the company instead of dating anyone seriously for three years running. Easier to control a seating chart than a person's plans." She looked at me then, steady, with none of her usual reflex to soften a thing with a joke. "I don't think I'm scared of that with you, and that scares me more than anything else tonight has."

Cora reached over and took my hand, and she didn't let go of it, not when the flight attendant came back through with coffee, not when Luca stirred and resettled himself with a fresh, competitive snore that made Nik glance up with weary resignation, not when Nik took in the two of us, hands joined over the armrest, and looked back down at his folder without a single word, which from Nik was as close to a blessing as I was ever going to get.

We stayed like that for most of the descent, her hand in mine, neither of us filling the quiet with anything it didn't need. It was not a silence I had to manage or outlast, the way I had managed every other one for most of my life. It was just a place to sit for a while. I had not known, until that exact moment, that I had ever actually wanted one. Somewhere beneath the clouds, the city was still going about its evening, with no idea it had just become the one place I actually wanted to land.

New York came up underneath us in a wash of lights that made Chicago's grid look modest by comparison, whole avenues of it strung together like something built specifically to be looked down on from exactly this height, and the landing was smooth enough that Luca slept through most of it, waking only when the wheels finally hit the runway with a jolt that startled him upright, blinking, already asking Nik what he'd missed.

"Nothing you needed to be awake for," Nik told him, which was not technically a lie.

"I wasn't asleep. I was resting my eyes with commitment."