Page 60 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"With respect, some of my best work has started as a mood." Luca closed the folder, unbothered. "I've been doing this long enough to know when a quiet building is actually quiet and when it's just waiting for someone to stop watching it. This is the second kind. I can't prove it. I can just tell you."

I looked at the warehouse marked on the map, the one that still sat two blocks from where my father died, and found that I believed him without needing the proof he didn't have. "Keep eyes on it. Double the rotation after dark. If it's nothing, we've spent a few extra hours of somebody's night. If it's something, I want to already know before Basile finishes deciding to use it."

"Already moving on it," Nik said, writing something in the margin of his own copy.

We worked the rest of the floor plan for the better part of an hour, the three of us circling the same table the way we had circled a hundred smaller problems over the years, except this one had her name attached to the far end of it whether anyone said so out loud or not. Every exit we mapped was an exit she might need to use. Every rotation we tightened was a rotation standing between four hundred strangers and a room I had personally watched her build with nothing but sheer will and good instincts.

At some point Luca excused himself to walk the loading bay one more time before the light went, and Nik lingered after the door shut behind him, still studying the map like it might tell him something new if he stared at it long enough.

"You've been quiet tonight," he said. "Quieter than the work requires."

"I'm thinking."

"You're always thinking. This is a different quiet." He set the marker down and looked at me directly, which by now I had learned to read as a man deciding whether a conversation was worth having. "Say it. I'd rather hear it than watch you carry it around the room for another hour."

I had spent most of my adult life treating survival as a discipline, something a man practiced the way he practiced a language, until the discipline of it swallowed the reason he'd started in the first place. I did not want to die. I had never wanted to die. But wanting to live and wanting to survive, I was beginning to understand, standing in a room built entirely to keep me breathing, were not the same appetite at all. Survival had always been for the business, for the buildings that quietly carried my name in their foundations, for the men in this operation who depended on me not making a mistake that cost them their own lives along with mine. Tonight, for the first time I could actually locate the edges of, I wanted to survive for a person. She was one person, three states away, currently convinced I had no idea what she was doing with her evening.

"For twenty-three years I built a life around the idea that surviving alone was the only kind that counted," I said. "That it was cleaner. Safer for everyone standing near me."

"I remember the theory."

"I'm not sure I believe it anymore."

Nik didn't smile, exactly, but something in his face loosened, the specific look of a man who had been waiting a long time to hear a sentence and had finally gotten it. "That took you long enough."

"You could have said something sooner."

"I said plenty of it, back when you weren't ready to hear it. There's a difference between a man who doesn't understand a thing and a man who understands it and hasn't decided yet whether he's allowed to want it." He picked the marker back up, turning it once between his fingers before he set it down again, unused. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I told Cora, months ago, that she deserved to know what was happening to her brother as it happened, no filtered version, no summary handed to her after the fact. I meant it about Sean." I looked at the map, at the red circles standing in for a night I still could not fully guarantee she would walk away from. "I haven't extended the same rule to the rest of it. She knows there's danger. She doesn't know the actual shape of it, the warehouse, Basile's name, the exact math of what four hundred guests and one target in the same room actually means. I've been protecting her from the size of it instead of trusting her with it."

"That's the old way again."

"I know what it is."

"I'm not saying it to lecture you. I'm saying it because you already know, and knowing something and doing something about it have never once been the same skill for you." Nik said it plainly, without heat, the way he said the things that mattered most to him. "She caught a security gap in a hallway your own people walked past for a week. She is not going to fold under the weight of the truth, Dima. She built a company out of surviving worse odds than the ones currently sitting on this table."

"I know what she's capable of."

"Then stop deciding for her what she can carry."

I did not have an argument for that, because I did not have one left worth making. I spent twenty-three years convinced that the kindest thing a man in my position could do was manage what the people he loved were allowed to see, so that none of them ever had to carry the actual weight of what protected them. Rosa had told me, in her own kitchen, that this was not kindness so much as it was a very well-dressed kind of hoarding, keeping the danger to myself instead of letting anyone close enough to help carry it. I had believed her the moment she said it. It had simply taken me years past that moment to finish believing it all the way through.

"I'm calling her," I said. "Tonight. All of it. The warehouse, Basile, the timeline, Kirill, every piece of this table she doesn't currently have."

"Good. Don't rehearse it. Say it the way you just said it to me."

"You're not going to argue."

"I already made my argument. Several times, over several years, to a man who was not ready to hear it. I'm not in the business of repeating myself to someone who's finally agreeing with me." Nik gathered his own copy of the floor plan, folding it with the same careful precision he brought to everything, and paused at the door. "For what it's worth, I think you'll survive this. Not because the plan is good, though it is. Because you finally have a reason strong enough to survive for, and men fight differently when that's true. I've seen it exactly once before, a long time ago, in a much smaller war, and it changed everything about how that fight ended."

He left before I could ask him which war he meant, though I suspected I already knew, and that he had told me on purpose, the way he told me most things, sideways and only once.

The office went quiet the way it only did at this hour, the building settling around me, the maps still spread across the table like a version of the night that hadn't happened yet and might not happen at all if every rotation held the way we needed it to hold. I stood there a long moment, looking at the red circles standing in for exits, for guards, for every contingency a careful man could plan for in advance, and understood, with the particular clarity that only ever arrived after I stopped fighting it, that all of it added up to less than the one thing I still hadn't done.

For twenty-three years I'd made a religion out of surviving alone. I picked up the phone to call her. I was done worshipping it.

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