Page 37 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Great. Very healthy foundation for a relationship."

"I'm happy," I said, and the word came out flatter than I intended, more confession than statement, because it was true and because saying it out loud in her kitchen at an hour I usually spent alone felt like handing her something I hadn't fully examined myself yet. "I don't entirely know what to do with that."

She turned from the counter, coffee forgotten for a moment, studying me with an attention I had come to recognize as her full attention, the kind she gave floor plans and seating charts and, apparently, me. "That sounds like a strange thing to be unsettled by."

"It is the least familiar thing I have felt in twenty-three years. Threats, I understand. I can read a threat from across a room before it opens its mouth. This." I gestured at the kitchen, at her, at the disaster still drying on my forearm. "I don't have a protocol for this. I built my entire life around never being caught without one."

"Do you need a protocol for being happy?"

"I don't know. I've never needed one before, which is precisely the problem." My empty coffee cup got a slow quarter turn under my hand, the same restlessness that never seemed to need a reason. "It's the most exposed I have ever felt, and nothing is actually threatening me. That should be a relief. Instead it feels like standing somewhere with no cover."

She crossed the small kitchen and stood between my knees, taking my face in both hands, coffee grounds and all, and looked at me with none of the deflection either of us usually reached for first. "For what it's worth, I don't think you have to have a protocol for this. I think you just have to keep showing up and figuring it out badly, the way you did with the French press."

"I lost that fight."

"You'll win eventually. Or you won't, and I'll just keep making the coffee. Either way, we're fine." She kissed me, brief and certain, and went back to the press before I could decide what to say to that.

While she finished it properly, I found myself thinking about the vendor thread Nik was still pulling on, the one that had put us both on a plane the night before. I hadn't planned to think about business at all this morning. I had planned, as much as I plan anything involving her, simply to enjoy an ordinary hour in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman who happened to also be the least ordinary thing that had ever happened to me. But the thought of that vendor sitting unexplained on a guest list next to a hundred details Cora had built with her own hands kept surfacing anyway, insistent. Somewhere in the middle of watching her pour water in careful stages, I realized I wanted to look into it myself, not as the man who solved problems with a phone call and let someone else handle the unpleasant parts, but as someone trying to be useful inside her world the way she had made herself useful inside mine: sitting through my meetings, catching what my own people had missed, asking exactly the right question at exactly the right moment.

"What?" she said, watching my face.

"Nothing. I was thinking about the vendor."

"On my one morning off from being terrified about my own event." She said it lightly, but something in her eyes sharpened. "Should I be worried?"

"I don't know yet. That's the honest answer." I reached out and caught her wrist before she could turn back to the counter, needing her to hear the next part directly. "I want to look into it myself. Not send Nik to handle it and receive a summary. I need to actually understand what's happening in your world, the same way you sat in that conference room and understood mine inside an hour."

"You do realize you already have an entire team for this?"

"I have a team for everything. That's not the point." I turned my cup another quarter turn, searching for the right way to say the thing without making it sound like more than it was, or less. "Everything in my life gets handled by someone else eventually. Threats, logistics, even the parts of myself I'd rather not look at directly. I want this to be something I actually did, not something that got done on my behalf while I stood somewhere safer."

"That's a very roundabout way of saying you want to help."

"Then let me help. Simply, without a task force behind me."

Her expression softened, surprised and pleased in a way she didn't bother hiding. "That's either extremely sweet or extremely alarming, considering your usual definition of looking into something."

"Possibly both."

"I'll allow it." She patted my cheek, entirely unrepentant about the condescension in the gesture. "You've earned your coffee, technically. Blood, sweat, and ceiling casualties."

She finally poured two cups, and the coffee, when I tasted it, was good enough that I understood, briefly, what all the artisanal packaging had been promising. I was still holding the cup, still watching her lean against the counter in my shirt looking more at home in her own kitchen than I had ever felt in any of mine, when my phone buzzed against the table.

I almost let it sit. For exactly one second, I considered simply not looking, the way she had done with her own phone the night before, choosing the kitchen and the coffee and the woman in front of me over whatever was waiting on the screen. But old habits do not unlearn themselves in a single morning, however good the coffee, and I picked it up anyway.

Nik's text was short, and it emptied the warmth out of the room before I had even finished reading it. It read: "Shell company traces back to an address Basile's people have used before. Could be nothing."

I looked up and found Cora watching me, her own good mood already fading to match whatever she was reading in my face, the two of us standing in the wreckage of a kitchen I had lost a fight to less than an hour earlier, none of it feeling quite as funny anymore.

Neither of us believed that for a single second.

19

CORA

The vendor discrepancy landed on my desk the following week disguised as the most boring problem in the world, which in hindsight should have been the first thing that worried me, since nothing that actually mattered in my life had ever announced itself as boring first.

"It's a paperwork thing," Beckett said, sliding the folder across my desk with the mild irritation of a man dealing with a filing error rather than anything worth losing sleep over. "The vendor's registered under two different names, one on the summit contract and one on the invoice that actually got paid. Happens more than you'd think. Somebody's assistant fat-fingered a business license number, or the company got bought out and nobody updated the paperwork."