Page 48 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Double whatever we already have watching Cora's building," I said. "Without her noticing the difference. I don't want her frightened over a pattern of wire transfers that might turn out to mean nothing."

"Already done, this afternoon, before I came up here." Nik almost smiled, and didn't quite let himself. "I know how you think, even when you haven't said it yet."

I closed the folder. Some old part of me, older than Nik, older than this office, older than the version of myself who negotiated territory lines over expensive wine, sat up and reasserted itself. It frightened me a little, even after twenty-three years of knowing exactly what it was capable of doing to a man from the inside.

Trust no one. Love no one. Especially not now, when the second one was already true and the first one was the only thing that had ever kept men like me alive long enough to regret it. The men who raised me in this life had drilled that rule into me before I was old enough to argue with it. Not as advice. As a rule with a body count behind it, backed up by how many good men had died trusting the wrong face across a table. I had spent every one of those years treating it as settled.

The rule had a dozen smaller rules folded inside it, refined over decades by men who had learned the hard way what happened to the ones who forgot. Every one of them was lighting up in my chest now, a switchboard I had not touched in months suddenly live with every line at once.

"Who else knew about the meeting with Basile?" I asked. "Before it happened. Not after. Before."

"You, me, Kirill, and whoever Kirill might have mentioned it to, which is the entire problem." Nik paused. "And Cora, in general terms. You told her there was a threat."

"She didn't know it was Basile. I didn't say his name to her."

"I know you didn't."

"She didn't know the date of the lunch, the location, any of it."

"I know that too. I'm not accusing her, Dmitri. I'm answering the question you asked me."

I had not been accusing her either, not out loud, and yet my mind had already gone there on its own before Nik finished his sentence, sliding her name into the same cold column as the accountants and the driver and Kirill with a speed that sickened me the instant I noticed it happening. I sat with the thought instead of flinching away from it, because flinching away from an uncomfortable fact had never once kept it from being true, and I made myself actually examine it the way I would have examined any other name on that list. She knew there was danger. She knew it involved people from my world. She talked to vendors, caterers, venue managers, a hundred people a week who moved through rooms I would never fully be able to account for, any one of whom might mention an offhand detail to the wrong person without meaning anything by it at all.

It lasted four seconds, maybe five. That was long enough.

I hated myself for those five seconds more than I had hated anything in years, more than I had hated myself the year I visited Petro and watched him answer his own door in a house that had stopped being a home. This was worse, because it was not something done to me. It was something I had done, quietly, efficiently, exactly the way the rule had trained me to do it, since before I was old enough to understand what the training was for. No amount of knowing better afterward changed the fact that some version of me, given the right pressure at the right hour of the night, was still capable of looking at the woman I loved and running her through the same threat assessment I would have run on a stranger.

"Dmitri." Nik was watching me. "Wherever you just went, come back."

"I'm here."

"You went somewhere."

"I said I'm here."

He let it go, because that was the kind of thing Nik knew when to let go, and he gathered the folder back up under his arm the way he'd carried it in, careful, like it was something that might still detonate if handled wrong.

"I'll keep pulling the thread," he said. "Quietly. Nobody on that list finds out they're on it, not yet, not until we know more than a pattern of transfers and a bad feeling about a corner table."

"Good."

"Go home, Dmitri."

"I will."

I did not go home. I sat in the office long after Nik's footsteps had faded down the hallway, the folder's absence somehow louder than its presence had been, and I turned the whole evening over in my mind the way I used to turn over a glass on a table when I needed my hands occupied while the rest of me worked. Someone close to me had been paid to become a hole in my own defenses, and I did not yet know who, and until I did, the only honest thing to do was assume it could be anyone, which was exactly the kind of thinking the rule had been built to produce, and exactly the kind that had kept men like me alive for decades before Cora Walsh ever walked into a ballroom and made staying alive feel like it might not be enough anymore.

My phone sat on the desk where I'd left it hours earlier. I picked it up once, unlocked it, and got as far as typing her name into a new message before I stopped. There's a leak, I wrote, and deleted it. Nothing certain yet, but I wanted you to know, I tried next, and deleted that too, because it read like the opening of a conversation I did not yet trust myself to finish without asking her a question I had no right to ask. A third attempt said less and somehow gave away more. I miss you. That one I stared at the longest before I deleted it as well, because even that felt like something I hadn't earned tonight. Every version sounded like exactly what it was: a man trying to explain a fear without naming its worst shape. I could not find a way to send her half a truth without it curdling into something closer to the whole lie I was already telling myself. I set the phone face down on the desk, screen dark, and told myself it could wait until morning, when I would have better information and a steadier voice to deliver it with. It was not a decision I examined closely. Examining it closely would have meant admitting what it actually was, and I was not ready to hand that particular truth to myself yet, let alone to her.

I thought about the lake house instead, because it was easier than thinking about the alternative. I thought about her laughing on the dock with a fishing rod wrapped around her wrist, about a pancake argument that had mattered more to both of us than either of us would ever admit, about the specific, terrifying ease of an entire day with nothing at stake. That ease felt like something borrowed now, from a version of the week that had ended the moment Nik walked into my office with a folder under his arm. I understood, sitting there in the dark with my phone screen gone black again, that I had just spent five seconds doing to Cora exactly what I had spent twenty-three years refusing to do to anyone I loved. The fact that I loved her at all was precisely what had made it possible.

I did not call Cora that night. I told myself it was because I had nothing to say. It was the first lie I had told either of us since the night I promised her everything, whatever it was, however bad.

25

CORA

The calls got shorter first, which I noticed the way you notice a room's gotten colder before you can find the open window, a vague unease that took three separate phone calls to actually name. The first night it was four minutes instead of forty. The next night it was a text instead of a call, three sentences, businesslike, signed off with a period instead of anything that sounded like him. Then he canceled dinner with an excuse so thin I could see through it from across the city, something about a supplier situation that needed his personal attention tonight, and I told him I understood, and I did understand, and neither of those facts made the small cold feeling in my chest go away.