Page 55 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

It was four weeks. I did not need Basile to say the word gala to understand exactly which door he meant. There was only one thing on my calendar that far out that mattered enough to plan a war around, only one night with four hundred strangers in one room and every guard I owned spread thin watching a building instead of a man, only one night Cora had spent three months building name card by name card without ever knowing she was also building the exact conditions my oldest enemies needed to finally reach me.

I left before either of them saw me, walked back to the car with my hands steady and my mind anything but, and sat behind the wheel a full minute without turning the key.

I laughed once, short and without humor, the sound a man makes when a joke is too true to actually be funny. I had been writing checks to that foundation for months, quietly, through three different accounts, so nobody would ask why a man like me cared about a children's wing that did not exist yet. I had covered the catering deposit myself, twice, when the first vendor fell through. Somewhere in the last four weeks I had personally funded the exact evening someone intended to use to kill me, and I had done it gladly, because it made her happy, and there was a version of that joke that would have made Nik laugh until he could not breathe, if I had ever managed to say it out loud to anyone who could hear it.

I did not say it out loud, not to Nik, not to anyone. I said it once, quietly, to the empty car, because there was no one else in this life I trusted enough to hand a joke that dark and watch what they did with it.

"Twenty years in this business," I said, to no one, "and I have never paid for my own funeral in advance before now."

Nobody laughed. Nobody was there to. It landed anyway, quiet and unfunny, straight through the ribs.

I turned the key and drove back toward the office, doing the math the whole way, hoping each time I would land somewhere different.

Four weeks was nothing. Four weeks was a seating chart and a dress fitting and a hundred small decisions Cora was making in a room across the city with no idea she was choosing the exact night men who had hated me for reasons older than she was would try to make sure I never saw another one. Four weeks was time enough to find proof I still did not have, or time enough to lose her trying.

Four weeks. They were going to do it in four weeks.

29

CORA

He was standing outside my door when I opened it, no phone in his hand, no car idling at the curb the way it usually did when he only had twenty minutes to give me between one crisis and the next, and something about the stillness of him told me, even before he spoke, that this visit was going to be different from the last two weeks of short calls and shorter goodbyes.

"I should have called first," he said.

"You've never called first in your life. Why start now?"

"Because I wanted the chance to leave, if you told me to, before I said any of what I actually came to say." He said it plainly, no charm in it, no easy line waiting to soften the edges. "May I come in?"

I stepped back and let him, and he crossed my living room like a man walking into a courtroom instead of an apartment he had spent half the last few months in, and for once I did not have a joke ready, which almost never happened to me.

"You've been distant," I said, before he could start. "Weeks of it. Shorter calls, shorter visits, that look on your face like you're doing math I'm not allowed to see the numbers for. I've been telling myself it was work. I don't actually think it was work."

"It wasn't only work." He sat on the edge of my couch, shoulders bowed forward, and for a long moment he studied his own hands like they belonged to someone else. "There's a leak inside my organization. Someone selling information to a man named Basile, who wants what's mine and has wanted it for longer than you've been alive. I've known something was wrong for weeks. I only confirmed who two nights ago."

"Who?"

"Kirill." The name came out rough, like it cost him something physical to say it. "A man I buried his father for. A man I would have called family before I would have called half my own blood family."

"Dmitri."

"I'm not finished, and if I stop now I don't think I'll manage to start again." He looked up, and whatever he saw on my face seemed to steady him instead of stopping him. "I followed him two nights ago. Watched him meet with Basile from behind a stack of pallets like a man half his rank, because I no longer trust anyone enough to send in my place. I heard enough to know they're planning something, and not enough to prove it to anyone who'd need proof. I know the target. It's the gala, four weeks from now. A room full of guests who trust me because you built something worth attending, and every guard I employ watching the doors instead of watching me."

The room went very quiet. Somewhere outside a car alarm cycled through its complaint and gave up.

"You're telling me someone is planning to kill you at my event."

"Yes."

"And you found this out two days ago and you're only telling me now?"

"Part of it goes back further than that." His jaw worked once before the rest of it came out. "Two weeks ago, Nik brought me proof of the leak itself, before I had a name to put to it. For about five seconds, sitting in my own office, I let myself wonder if it could be you. Not seriously. Not for longer than it takes to breathe in and out once. But it happened, and I hated myself for it more than I've hated myself for almost anything, and instead of telling you that, I did what I've always done. I went quiet. I decided silence was safer than handing you a truth that ugly."

"You thought I might be the leak."

"For five seconds. Out of two weeks. I'm not telling you that to be forgiven for it. I'm telling you because you asked me once, a long time ago, never to let you find out the hard way that I was protecting you by lying to you, and I did exactly that anyway, and I would rather you be furious with me for the true version than grateful for a kind one I made up."

I sat down across from him, my legs suddenly unwilling to hold me up through the rest of this conversation standing. "That's the most insulting thing you've ever said to me, and somehow also the least insulting thing you've ever said to me, and I need a minute to figure out how both those things are true at once."