Page 8 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"He's in the yard?"

"Since seven this morning. Probably still is."

"Figured." I closed the ledger. "I'll talk to him. Quietly."

On the way through the warehouse floor we passed the kitchen Rosa had run since before I could grow a beard convincing enough to need a razor, and I heard her before I saw her, a voice sharp enough to cut through two closed doors and a stack of pallets.

"These are not ripe," she was telling a delivery driver, who stood holding a crate like it might defend itself. "They are green. You brought me green tomatoes and you're calling them ripe to my face."

"Ma'am, they'll ripen on the counter in a couple days. That's just how tomatoes work."

"I did not ask how tomatoes work. I have fed this family for thirty years on tomatoes that were already tomatoes, not tomatoes with potential. Take them back."

The driver looked at me, apparently hoping for reinforcements. I offered him none. He loaded the crate back onto his truck without another word, and Rosa turned back to her stove as if the entire exchange had already left her memory. He would come back in a few days with riper tomatoes, and the whole argument would happen again anyway, because it always did.

"She's undefeated," Nik said, not quite under his breath.

"She's been undefeated since before you worked here."

"That's what worries me. I've seen her make grown men apologize to a head of lettuce."

"Once. It only had to happen once."

We reached my office, and Nik peeled off toward the loading floor to collect Kirill, leaving me alone with a ledger I had already read twice that morning and did not need to read a third time to know what I would find.

Kirill knocked before entering, which told me something before he said a single word, since he hadn't bothered knocking in over a year.

"You wanted to see me?" he said.

"Sit."

He sat, spine a little too straight for a man who did this every week. I turned the ledger around so it faced him and tapped the relevant line with two fingers, no theatrics in it, the way I would have pointed out a typo.

"Forty three cases logged out of Milwaukee. Thirty nine logged in here. Where'd the other four go, Kirill?"

"There was a damage report. Two crates got wet in transit, we wrote them off at the dock."

"That accounts for two. Where are the other two?"

He didn't answer right away, and I let the silence sit there long enough to do the work I didn't need words for. Nobody in that room needed me to raise my voice. I had learned a long time ago that men remembered a quiet correction longer than a loud one. Volume gave them somewhere to put their shame, a way to tell themselves later that they'd simply been yelled at. Silence left them alone with the actual mistake, with nowhere to hide from it.

"I'll find them," he said finally.

"You'll find them by tonight, and you'll bring me a reconciliation that actually reconciles, and we won't have this conversation again." I closed the ledger. "This is the third time this year your numbers haven't matched the truck. I'm not angry. I'm telling you I'm keeping count, because eventually counting turns into something else, and I'd rather it not."

Something moved through his jaw before he answered, a tightening he covered fast, the kind of thing I would have missed if I hadn't spent twenty-three years learning to read men for a living.

"Understood," he said.

I read the tightness in his jaw as pride taking a hit it would recover from by morning. Every man I had ever corrected wore that same expression walking out of this office, and every one of them had come back the next day steadier for it, so I let it pass without comment.

"Good. That's all."

He stood, nodded once, and left without another word, the door clicking shut behind him with more care than a man usually gives a door he isn't trying to make a point with. I watched him go and thought, not for the first time, that I had been more patient with Kirill than was strictly reasonable, and that patience like that only holds up until someone decides to test what happens when it runs out.

The warehouse itself did that to me sometimes, standing in a building with the same kind of floor plan as the one where my father had bled out twenty-three years ago, though this one was newer, cleaner, nothing on the concrete that shouldn't be there. I had rebuilt three times over on three different sites since then, always the same layout, loading doors on the south wall, office in the northeast corner with a window facing the yard, and I had never let myself examine why I kept building the same room.

I remembered the drive more than I remembered the two men who made it, their voices flat with a grief they had clearly rehearsed on the way to my door. I remembered the cold coming off the concrete through the soles of my shoes before I had even reached him, the particular smell of a warehouse in winter, diesel and cardboard and something colder underneath both. I remembered walking into that first warehouse and seeing him on the floor near the loading doors, one arm bent under him at an angle no living body settles into on its own.