Page 39 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"You okay?" Naomi asked, catching whatever had crossed my face. "You went somewhere."

"I'm fine. Just tired."

"You're doing the thing where you say fine and mean something else entirely."

"I'm allowed to have one unexamined feeling a week. It's in my contract."

She studied me a second longer, clearly not buying it, clearly deciding to let it go anyway because the office was still buzzing with a dozen other fires that needed her more urgently than my mood did. "Fine. Your one feeling. I'll allow it. But we're talking about it eventually."

"Noted."

My phone rang before I could decide whether that was a threat or a promise. Sean's name lit up the screen, which was unusual enough on its own, since he texted more than he called and only called at all when something had actually gone wrong rather than merely needing to. I almost let it go to voicemail out of pure habit, the same reflex that answered every one of his calls bracing for a number, an ask, an apology dressed up as an update. This time the reflex was wrong before I'd even picked up.

"Hey. Everything okay?"

There was a pause on the other end, too long for a normal pause, the kind of silence that has weight to it before a single word gets said.

"Sean?"

I could hear him breathing on the other end, quick and shallow, and somewhere behind him a car door, or maybe just the wind, and the small hairs on my arms rose before I had a single actual fact to justify it. Across the desk, Naomi went still too, watching my face the way she'd watched it a few minutes earlier, already reading something there before I'd said a word.

"There were guys asking about you outside my building, Cora," he said, too fast, too high, nothing at all like his usual flat, unbothered voice. "I didn't like how they asked."

20

DMITRI

I was already holding the phone when it rang, turning it over in my hand out of habit while I read through numbers Nik had left on my desk that suddenly meant nothing at all, and some old instinct in me registered the wrongness of the timing before the screen even lit up with her name. Cora did not call. Cora sent lists, color-coded, with deadlines she never bothered negotiating. A call from her, standing alone in my suite at the Larkspur on an otherwise ordinary evening, was already a fact worth noticing before I had heard a single word of it.

"Dmitri." Her voice came out in one long unbroken sentence, no room in it anywhere for me to get a question in edgewise. "Sean just called me. There were men outside his building asking about me, specific questions, not lost-tourist questions, and he sounded scared in a way he never sounds, and I don't know what that means, and I need you to tell me it doesn't mean what I think it means."

I did not answer right away. I had delivered enough bad news over the years to know a frightened person doesn't need comfort first. They need a steady voice asking the right questions in the right order, so their mind has somewhere to go besides everywhere at once.

"Where is Sean now?"

"Home. He said he locked the door. I don't even know if that's enough. I've never had to know what enough looks like before."

"Cora."

She stopped.

"Tell me exactly what he told you. Not what you're afraid it means. What he actually said."

I heard her breathe once, hard, visibly making herself slow down, and something about that steadied me too, the fact that she trusted me enough to actually try. "He said two men were standing outside his building when he left for work this morning, and they asked if he was Cora Walsh's brother. Not if he knew a Cora Walsh. If he was her brother, specifically, like they already had the answer and just wanted him to confirm it. He said one of them wrote something down after he answered. He said they didn't threaten him, not exactly, they were polite, which somehow made it worse, and then they just walked off like they'd gotten what they came for."

It was polite. I filed the word away, and I didn't like it.

"Did he get a description?"

"Two men, dark coats, one taller than the other, nothing else, he was too rattled to memorize faces, which, honestly, fair. He's a graphic designer, Dmitri, not a bodyguard. He panics when a client sends a passive-aggressive revision note."

"Is anyone with him right now?"

"His roommate, I think. I told him to stay inside and not open the door for anyone he doesn't recognize, which felt like something out of a movie to say out loud, and also the only thing I could think to say." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, the first real crack in it since she'd started talking. "Is this because of me? Because of us? Tell me the truth. I would rather know."

I closed my eyes for exactly one second. I could have told her it was nothing, a coincidence, a case of mistaken identity, and for a second I almost did. But that was the old answer, the one that had cost me nothing and protected no one, least of all her.

"I don't know yet," I said, which was true. "But I am not going to pretend the timing doesn't concern me. I'm handling it. Tonight."