Page 81 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"I am a little too busy to workshop my knees right now."

"There is always time to workshop your knees."

He recovered faster than I wanted him to, straightening off the railing with blood on his mouth from where he had bitten it, and for one terrible second I understood exactly how much bigger than me he actually was, how little the lid and the wine case would matter if he simply decided to stop being careful about it.

He lunged instead of swinging, both arms wide, clearly intending to close the fight the way men his size usually did, by making it smaller and closer and impossible to escape. I ducked under his reach and felt his hand catch my hair instead of my shoulder, a sharp yank that brought tears to my eyes and a sound out of my throat I did not recognize as my own.

"Behind you, dear, the railing!" Mrs. Alvarez shouted, and even though there was nothing actually behind him but empty stairwell, the sudden noise did exactly what a distraction is supposed to do. He flinched, a small involuntary jerk, enough to loosen his grip.

I twisted free, stumbled two steps down, and came back up swinging before he had finished deciding the warning was fake.

"Kirill's finished," he said, breathing hard. "Doesn't mean I walk away with nothing."

"You are going to walk away with considerably less than nothing." I could not have explained exactly what that meant if pressed, but it came out with enough conviction that he hesitated for half a second, and half a second was all I needed.

I swung the lid again, aiming lower this time, and caught him hard across the knee instead of the hands, a strike I would never have thought to try if three years of loading and unloading banquet equipment hadn't taught me exactly where a person's balance actually lived. His leg buckled. He went down onto one knee on the narrow landing, close enough now that I could smell the chemical residue still clinging to his vest, and I did not hesitate, did not think about it as anything other than the next item on a very short list, and swung the case of wine into the side of his head with the last of whatever strength I had left.

He went down completely, sprawled across two steps, not moving except for the slow rise and fall of his chest.

For a moment the stairwell just breathed around us, quiet and strange.

"Well," Mrs. Alvarez said finally, into the silence, "I have worked four decades of events, and I can say with total confidence that this is not even the worst thing that has happened to me in a stairwell."

"I really do not want to know what beats this."

"A groomsman, a raw oyster bar, and a fire code violation in Nineteen Ninety One. Ask me again when we are both safely outside."

I stood there shaking, the chafing dish lid still raised, adrenaline draining out of me so fast it left something hollow and shivering in its place, and it was in that exact unsteady moment that I heard the sound of someone hitting the locked door from the other side, not knocking, hitting, the kind of impact that meant a shoulder or a boot rather than a knuckle.

"Cora!" Dmitri's voice, raw and completely unguarded, tore through the metal like it weighed nothing at all.

"In here! We're okay!"

The door gave on the third hit, the frame splintering somewhere I could not see, and Dmitri came through it moving faster than I had ever watched a person move, already scanning the stairwell, already finding the man sprawled across the steps and closing the last distance between us before I had finished lowering the lid.

He had the man by the collar and pinned against the wall in under two seconds, a single controlled motion that ended with a fist that landed somewhere between a crack and a thud, and the man who had spent the last five minutes trying to hurt me dropped the remaining distance into unconsciousness without another sound.

"Is he breathing?" I asked, because apparently even now, even like this, I still needed to know the answer before I could let myself feel anything else.

"He is breathing. He will wish he was not when he wakes up." Dmitri did not look away from me while he said it, both hands finally free to reach for my face, checking it the way I imagined he checked a room, methodically, like he needed the data more than he needed the reassurance. "Are you hurt? Tell me the truth."

"My scalp is furious with me and my arms are going to hate me tomorrow. Otherwise I am fine. Better than fine." I glanced past him at Mrs. Alvarez, who had settled herself onto the bottom step like a woman waiting for a bus that was running only slightly late. "Mrs. Alvarez, are you all right?"

"Never better, dear. Though I will say, this is the first time in my career a client's security detail has broken down a door for me personally. I intend to mention it in my retirement speech."

"He was already down," I said, surprised by how level my own voice sounded. "Mostly."

Dmitri turned, and whatever composure had carried him through breaking down that door disappeared entirely the moment he actually looked at me, at the lid still in my hand, at the case of wine tipped open on the stairs with two bottles broken and leaking sparkling wine down toward the man's unconscious feet.

"You did this."

"I had help." I glanced toward Mrs. Alvarez, who gave a small, satisfied nod, like a woman accepting a compliment on her signature dish. "And a chafing dish lid. And I am extremely proud of both."

He crossed the space between us in two steps and pulled me into him so hard the lid clattered out of my hand and down the stairs, his arms locking around me like he needed to confirm with his whole body what his eyes were already telling him.

"I thought," he started, and could not finish it, his voice breaking partway through the sentence he had clearly meant to say calmly.

"I know. I'm here. I'm all right." I felt him shaking, actually shaking, this man who normally let nobody see anything move through him at all, and I held on just as tightly, because apparently we had both been terrified in entirely different rooms at the exact same time.