Page 61 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

CORA

Nik called before nine, less than an hour after I'd finally let myself drift into something between sleep and static, and told me a car would be outside my building in twenty minutes. He didn't explain much beyond an address on the North Side and something in his voice I hadn't heard from him before. It was urgency dressed up as courtesy, the way these people apparently did things before an emergency got named out loud. I had told Dmitri everything the night before, on the phone, my own voice going flatter and flatter the longer I talked about a beige mailbox unit and a number I'd apparently never really stopped carrying around, and he'd told me things in return that I was still turning over somewhere behind my eyes by the time the car pulled up outside. By the time I landed in Chicago I had read my own notes on the vendor match four separate times, checking each detail against itself like repetition might make it more true. Walking into the building Nik had directed me to, I still hadn't decided which frightened me more, being wrong about what I'd found, or being right.

The office took up most of a floor, glass and dark wood and the particular hush of a place built for people who preferred not to be overheard, and the woman at the front desk knew my name before I gave it, which told me more about how carefully this day had already been arranged than anything anyone had bothered to tell me directly. She walked me down a hallway lined with framed maps of the city and left me at a set of double doors without knocking, the kind of gesture that assumed I already belonged on the other side of them.

I did not, entirely. I walked in anyway.

The room was smaller than the occasion seemed to call for, and fuller than I felt ready for. Dmitri stood at the head of a conference table buried under floor plans and a marked-up guest list I recognized as a rougher cousin of my own, Nik beside him with a laptop open and a phone already propped against a stack of folders, and a third man near the window who could only be Luca, close enough to Dmitri's height that I understood immediately why nobody sane picked a fight with either of them. Dmitri crossed the room before I'd fully cleared the doorway, took my bag out of my hand without asking, and set it on a chair like that single ordinary motion could stand in for everything neither of us had said out loud since the phone call.

"You didn't have to fly her in before breakfast," Luca said, mild, testing the room's temperature, which seemed to be his job whether anyone had assigned it to him or not.

"She had something we needed within the hour," Dmitri said. "Breakfast can wait."

"Some of us didn't get breakfast either," Nik said, eyes still on the laptop screen. "Consider that context for my mood."

I set my folder on the table, my own handwriting staring back up at me in a dozen different colors of ink, and felt the strange, lightheaded pull of being the only person in the room who had spent the last twelve hours convinced I might be imagining things. "Are we doing introductions, or should I just start talking?"

"Start talking," Dmitri said. "Reyes is dialing in."

"Reyes?"

"FBI. Someone I've worked with before, carefully, on the parts of this that overlap with a federal investigation already open on Basile. She knows enough to be useful. She doesn't know enough to be a problem." Dmitri said it like a man reading off a spec sheet, no apology in it, which somehow made it easier to hear than if he'd tried to soften it for me. "She'll listen. She won't ask you anything you don't want to answer."

The phone on the stack of folders lit up before I could decide how I felt about any of that, and a woman's voice came through it, clipped and unhurried, the voice of someone used to being the calmest person on every call she joined. "This is Reyes. I'm told you found something."

"I found an address," I said, and then, because the room was watching me the way people watch someone about to either prove something or fail spectacularly, I made myself keep going instead of stopping to enjoy how strange that sentence felt coming out of my mouth. "A year and a half ago a company calling itself Silverline Party Supply took six thousand dollars from one of my brides and vanished. I tracked down their registered address myself, because nobody else was going to, and found a mailbox unit past the warehouse district with no actual office behind it. Unit 4C. I wrote it down and never booked that company again, and until two nights ago I hadn't thought about that unit number in over a year."

"And two nights ago," Reyes said.

"Two nights ago I was cross-referencing the summit's approved vendor list against my own database, because it felt like the only piece of this I could actually control, and I found a company called Beaumont Table and Linen registered to the exact same unit. Same building, same floor, same box. A different name stitched over the old one, and an insurance certificate clean enough that it passed a security review nobody in this room would have questioned if I hadn't happened to recognize the address myself."

For a beat, nobody spoke. Nik lifted his eyes from the laptop, the first real attention he'd given me since I'd stepped through the door. Luca had gone very still near the window, the kind of stillness that read less like boredom and more like a man recalculating something he'd already decided he understood.

"You're telling me a shell company tied to an eighteen-month-old fraud case just walked a security review for a four-hundred-person event, under a fabricated name, using the same address it used the first time?" Reyes said.

"I'm telling you it's the same box," I said. "I don't know who owns Beaumont Table and Linen. I know it's the same four walls someone already used once to disappear with a bride's deposit and my professional dignity, and I know that's not a coincidence anybody gets to have twice."

"That's not a coincidence," Dmitri said. "That's a habit. People reuse what already worked."

"It's sloppy," Luca said, something almost admiring underneath the flatness of his voice, the grudging respect one careful person offers another for catching a mistake they'd have missed themselves. "Whoever's running Beaumont didn't think anyone outside their own operation would ever cross-reference against a fraud case from another state, another industry, filed under a name that never touched Basile directly."

"Nobody outside your operation would have," Reyes said. "This isn't the kind of match my office runs unless somebody hands it to us."

"I didn't hand it to anyone," I said. "I have a very good filing system and an unreasonable memory for addresses that once cost me six thousand dollars."

That got the smallest possible sound out of Nik, not quite a laugh, more the exhale of a man who hadn't expected to need one. Something eased through Dmitri's shoulders that he didn't bother turning into a smile, relief all the same, the kind that comes from watching someone else's competence do work he couldn't have done for me.

"I'll run Beaumont's incorporation records," Reyes said. "Registered agent, filing date, anything that ties back to a real person instead of a P.O. box. Give me an hour."

"We don't have an hour to spare," Nik said, still typing. "But take it anyway. We'll work with what we get."

The laptop on the table pinged, a small, ordinary sound that nobody in the room reacted to yet, and a second later a different voice came through the speakerphone entirely, bright and slightly too loud and unmistakably not anyone who belonged on this call.

"Okay, so, I've been looking at the floral order for the west terrace and I genuinely think we need to walk back the peonies, because at this price point we could do the exact same visual impact with ranunculus and nobody would ever notice, and honestly I don't even know why we're still fighting about this, it's not like anyone at the actual event is going to..."

The room went quiet in a way no map or timeline had managed all morning.

"Beckett," I said.