Page 33 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"You were snoring loud enough to set off a car alarm somewhere over Pennsylvania."

"That was turbulence."

"It had a rhythm, Luca."

Luca opened his mouth to argue further, thought better of it, and settled for straightening his jacket with as much dignity as a man could manage while still working the sleep out of his own voice.

The car from the airport into the city was quiet in a way that felt loaded rather than empty, weighted with the same stillness that had sat between us on the plane. Cora watched the city slide past the window, buildings stacking taller and closer together the further in we drove, and I watched her do it, memorizing the particular way she leaned her head against the glass like the city still had something to say to her after all these years of living inside it.

"You're staring," she said, without looking away from the window.

"I am."

"Most men pretend they're not doing that."

"I stopped pretending things around you a while ago."

She smiled at that, small and private, the kind she didn't perform for anyone else in the car, and reached for my hand again like it was the most natural thing in the world. By now, somehow, it was.

The car stopped outside her building, and neither Nik nor Luca said anything as we got out. Both had clearly drawn the correct conclusion, and both had the sense not to comment on it. I walked her up, past the buzzer panel that still hung open from whatever repair had never come, nobody in the building to notice either of us, up a narrow flight of stairs that smelled faintly of someone else's dinner, to a door she unlocked with a hand that wasn't quite steady.

She paused there, key still in the lock, and looked back at me instead of turning it right away.

"You don't have to come up," she said. "I know it's late, and Nik's probably already three reports deep on the vendor by now."

"I know."

"That wasn't a no."

"I know that too."

She held my gaze a moment longer, some private decision settling itself behind her eyes, taking its time, the same way she handled everything that actually mattered to her, and turned the key.

Her apartment door closed behind us. Neither of us reached for the light.

17

CORA

The door clicked shut behind us, and neither of us reached for the light, and for a second we just stood there in the dark, close enough that I could hear him breathing, close enough that the whole apartment seemed to hold its breath along with him.

"You're sure," he said, not really a question, more like he was giving me one last chance to change my mind before he stopped being able to offer it.

"I have never been more sure of anything in my color-coded, over-organized, mildly unhinged life."

"That's oddly specific."

"I contain multitudes. You said so yourself once."

"I don't remember flattering myself that thoroughly."

"You absolutely did. First morning, folding tables, very mysterious about your job history. I noticed." I reached up and undid the top button of his shirt, mostly to have something to do with my hands, since apparently even now I was incapable of standing still in a silence without narrating my way through it. "I keep a mental record on everything. It's a whole system. Color coded, obviously."

"Obviously."

"You're allowed to be nervous, for the record. I promise not to hold it against you. I'm fairly sure I invented nervous."

"I'm not nervous."