Page 64 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"This isn't the same as Sean."

"It's exactly the same as Sean. It's you deciding, alone, in a room I'm not standing in, what I can survive knowing and what I can't. You did the math without me once already and got the answer wrong. I need you to explain to me why tonight is different, because from where I'm standing it looks like the same decision wearing a better suit."

"Tonight is different because the threat has your name on it specifically. Sean was collateral. You would be the target."

"Then you should want me somewhere you can see me, not three miles away wondering if the last thing I heard from you was an argument."

I crossed the room, needing to close the distance between us the way I had never once managed to close it with words alone, and stopped short of touching her, because some instinct in me understood that touching her right now would read as a tactic instead of what it actually was. "I have buried men who trusted the wrong person with their safety. I have stood in a house that stopped being a home because one family forgot that leverage only needs one soft place to work. I am not going to stand in a room tomorrow, running a plan I built with my own hands, and wonder the entire time whether the one person I actually care about walking out of it alive is standing forty feet from a man who wants to hurt her precisely because of what she means to me."

"Then you're not actually asking me to be safe. You're asking me to make it easier for you to survive tomorrow without breaking." Something thinned in her voice on the last word, the closest she'd come to breaking all night, and she let it sit there instead of covering it with anything softer. "I won't do that, Dmitri. Not even for you. Especially not for you, because you'd let me. You'd let me disappear into the version of this where I'm safe and useless, and you'd call it love, and I would spend years wondering what I'd traded away just to keep you comfortable."

"I trust you with my life," I said. "I don't trust this world with yours."

"That's not trust," she said. "That's a cage with a nicer coat of paint."

She left. I let her.

34

CORA

I made it exactly as far as my own couch before the anger ran out of places to go and started looking for somewhere to land instead. The apartment was dark except for the lamp by the window, the one I never remembered to turn off, and I sat down still wearing my coat because taking it off felt like admitting I planned on staying in this particular version of myself for a while. The radiator clicked somewhere behind the wall, the sound old buildings make when they're deciding whether the night is cold enough to bother with, and a car alarm went off twice down on the street and then gave up, and I sat there letting all of it wash over me because noticing sound was easier than noticing what I actually felt. Somewhere in the kitchen sat the bottle of wine I kept meaning to open and never had, waiting for an occasion good enough to justify it, and I looked that way for a long moment before looking away again, because opening it now would mean admitting that occasion was tonight, and tonight did not deserve that kind of ceremony yet.

I trust you with my life. I don't trust this world with yours.

I could still hear him say it, that flat certainty he used when he'd already made a decision and was only informing me of it as a courtesy. I had said something back, something about cages and coats of paint, and I had meant every word of it, and I still meant it now, sitting alone in the dark replaying a fight that had ended an hour ago and somehow was not finished happening inside me.

The furious part came first, loud and simple and almost a relief in how uncomplicated it was. He wanted to fold me into a drawer somewhere safe and shut it until the danger passed, the way you'd protect a document, not a person, and some old, stubborn part of me had spent my whole life promising I would never again let anyone do that to me without a fight. That part of the anger made sense. I understood it completely, and I let it burn as hot as it wanted to for a good twenty minutes, pacing my own living room in my coat like a woman who had somewhere else to be and no idea where that was.

It was the second layer underneath it that actually stopped me.

Because underneath the actual, unflinching honesty, the brutal kind I generally saved for spreadsheets rather than for my own life, this fight had started long before tonight. It had started years before Dmitri Zolotov ever existed in my life, in a kitchen with peeling linoleum and a table where my mother used to sit across from men in cheap suits who explained, gently, patiently, exactly how much of her own life she was no longer allowed to make decisions about. She had needed help. The help had come with terms. I remembered one man in particular, a loan officer with a soft voice and a folder full of paperwork. He slid a pen across the table and told my mother, gently, that it would simply be easier if he handled the account directly going forward, so she wouldn't have to worry about the details. She had thanked him. I was twelve, sitting on the stairs where I thought no one could see me, and I remembered wanting to walk in there and tell him my mother had run a household on nothing for years and did not need a stranger's definition of easier. I did not move. I only watched her thank him again on his way out, and I promised myself, sitting on those stairs, that I would never thank a man for taking something away from me and calling it help. Somewhere in that kitchen, watching her nod along to a stranger explaining her own finances back to her like she hadn't lived them, I had made a promise to myself that I never fully said out loud until right now, alone, in the dark, with a bottle of wine I still hadn't opened. I promised I would build something of my own, entirely my own, so that no one would ever again get to decide for me what I could handle.

Every single time in my life since then that someone had tried to protect me by managing me instead of trusting me, I had heard the same sentence underneath it, no matter how kindly it was meant. You can't handle this. Let me carry it instead. And every single time, some part of me had quietly, permanently filed that person under the same heading as the men at my mother's kitchen table, whether that was fair to them or not.

It was not entirely fair to Dmitri. I knew that even as I sat there refusing to feel it. He had buried people. He had built an entire structure of control because the alternative, in his experience, had a body count. His fear was not manufactured. It was not even wrong, exactly. It was just aimed at me the way a spotlight gets aimed at whoever happens to be standing closest to the danger, and I was so tired of being lit up that way I could have screamed into my own empty apartment, and very nearly did.

The knock at the door came twenty minutes later, three sharp raps and then the sound of a key turning before I'd even answered, because Naomi did not believe in waiting to be let in once she'd already decided she was coming inside.

"I come bearing wine," she said, holding up a bottle with a label so aggressively modern it looked like it had been designed by someone actively hostile to the concept of readable text. "I panicked at the store. This was the only bottle with a cool label. I have no idea if it's good. I have no idea what grape it even is. I saw the label and thought, that looks like the kind of bottle a woman drinks while deciding whether to burn something down, and here we are."

"How did you even know to come?"

"Beckett called me the second you left the building looking like that. His words, not mine. He said, and I'm quoting directly, 'she had the face.'" Naomi shrugged out of her coat and dropped onto the couch beside me without asking if she could, which was exactly the right amount of asking. "I didn't come to fix anything. I want to be extremely clear about that up front, because I know you, and if I try to fix this you will politely dismantle every single thing I say within four minutes and then apologize for it later. I came to sit here and drink wine with an ugly bottle and a good label."

That got the first real laugh out of me all night, small and surprised, like my body had forgotten it still had that available. "It's a terrible bottle."

"It's an aggressively mediocre bottle with excellent branding, and honestly, some nights that's exactly the energy I'm looking for." She poured two glasses without waiting for permission, handed me one, and settled back into the couch cushions with the easy comfort of someone who had sat on this exact couch through more of my disasters than either of us cared to tally. "So. You can tell me outright, or I can guess badly on purpose until you correct me into telling me anyway."

"You always guess badly on purpose."

"It's a very effective technique. Don't ruin it for me."

I turned the glass in my hand, not drinking yet, watching the lamp light move through it. "He wants me to stay away from the venue tomorrow. Entirely. Not just cautious, not just careful. Gone. Somewhere he can't picture me while he's running the plan."

"And you said?"

"I said no. I said it's my event, my team, my name on every contract, and I'm not disappearing into a version of myself he can stop worrying about." I took a drink, finally, and let it sit before continuing. "He said he trusts me with his life. He just doesn't trust the world with mine. Like that's supposed to be romantic instead of exactly the same thing my mother heard from every man who ever decided he knew her limits better than she did."