Page 36 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

Then I reached over, turned it face down against the wood, and didn't look at it again that night. Whatever it was could survive until morning. For once in my very organized life, so could I.

18

DMITRI

I woke before her, which had become a habit over the last few months, though usually I woke in my own apartment with its wide, silent rooms and not in a bed barely large enough for two people who liked each other this much. Cora slept curled toward the window, hair a disaster across the pillow, one hand still loosely closed around a fistful of my shirt like she'd caught it in her sleep and decided not to let go. I lay there longer than I meant to, just watching her breathe, and felt something settle into my chest that I did not have a name for and was not entirely sure I wanted one.

Eventually I got up, careful not to wake her, and went looking for coffee.

That was where the morning started going wrong.

Cora's kitchen had been built, as far as I could tell, for a single occupant who was considerably smaller than I was. I found this out the hard way, cracking my elbow on a cabinet door I hadn't accounted for, and then again when I discovered the counter space amounted to roughly one cutting board's worth of usable surface, most of it currently occupied by a French press I did not recognize and a bag of coffee beans with a label so aggressively artisanal it listed the farm, the altitude, and what I could only assume was the goat that had grazed nearby.

I am not, generally speaking, a man who loses to small appliances. I have negotiated with men who considered losing a personal insult worth killing over. I have stared down a warehouse full of armed strangers at twenty-four and made every one of them back down. A glass cylinder with a metal plunger did not strike me, on first inspection, as a serious opponent.

The French press disagreed with that assessment almost immediately.

I ground the beans, or attempted to, in a hand grinder that required more torque than seemed reasonable for something meant to sit on a countertop, and then poured water that had not quite finished boiling, because her kettle apparently operated on some private schedule of its own. When I pressed the plunger down, it resisted in a way that suggested I had done something categorically wrong, and then gave all at once, sending a fine spray of coffee grounds and hot water across the counter, the front of my undershirt, and, for reasons I still cannot explain, the ceiling.

"Impossible," I said, to the kitchen, since there was no one else awake to hear me say it.

The kitchen did not respond. It rarely does, in my experience, which is usually a comfort.

I was still standing there, surveying the wreckage, coffee grounds drying on my forearm like some kind of punishment, when I heard her laugh from the doorway.

"You're fighting my French press."

"I'm losing to your French press."

"Everyone loses to that French press the first time. It's basically a hazing ritual. I should have warned you." She came in wearing one of my shirts, which did something to my chest I was not prepared to examine before coffee, and surveyed the damage with the calm, practiced eye of a woman who had clearly cleaned up worse. "You didn't let it bloom."

"Bloom."

"The grounds. You pour a little water first, let it sit, then the rest. If you don't, it fights back. It's basically a metaphor for something, I just haven't figured out what."

"I have run an entire criminal enterprise for twenty-three years without once being defeated by breakfast."

"Well, congratulations, today's the day. Welcome to the losing team." She kissed my jaw on her way past, entirely too pleased with herself, and reached past me to right the French press with the ease of long practice. "Sit down before you injure yourself further. I'll make it. You can supervise."

"I don't like supervising."

"You're extremely good at it, though. I've seen you do it to Nik. Same energy, smaller kitchen." She measured grounds into the press with an ease that made it look like nothing at all, no torque, no argument, the water going in slow and patient exactly the way she'd described it. "You want to know the actual secret? You have to let it want to work. You were fighting it like it owed you money."

"Everything owes me money. It's a very reliable worldview."

"Not this kitchen. This kitchen owes you nothing and owes me everything, and it knows it." She glanced back at me, eyes bright with the specific delight of a woman watching a very large, very dangerous man lose comprehensively to a piece of glassware. "You're welcome to try again tomorrow. I'll even coach you."

"I don't need coaching."

"You need extensive coaching. I watched you lose to a kettle."

I sat, because there was no version of this argument I was going to win, and watched her work with an ease that made the entire process look insultingly simple, water poured in careful stages, a patience to it that had nothing to do with the impatience I'd just demonstrated so thoroughly. She hummed while she did it, off-key, unbothered by that fact, and I found myself watching her the way I usually reserved for watching a room for exits, except there was nothing here I wanted to leave.

That thought landed harder than I expected it to.

"You've gone quiet again," she said, glancing back at me. "Is this a pattern now? Am I going to spend the rest of my life reading your silences like tea leaves?"

"Probably."