Page 85 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"You did not lose anyone tonight."

"I know. That is the part I am trying to explain. I almost did, and it did not feel like a professional setback. It felt like the actual end of the world, and I have never let myself feel anything that big about a person before, because feeling it meant admitting how much it would cost me to lose it." I exhaled, and it came out shakier than I meant it to. "That is the honest version. I am aware it is not funny."

"I did not ask for funny."

"No. You didn't." I looked at him properly then, at the scrape on his knuckle, at the exhaustion sitting behind his eyes that he was clearly too disciplined to let show anywhere else. "What happened with Kirill? You said later. I think later is now."

He told me plainly, without softening any of it, the deal he had made instead of the one every instinct in him had wanted to make, the evidence going to the federal task force, the exile, the debt Kirill had been carrying alone for years before it finally caught up to all of us in one very expensive ballroom. I listened without interrupting, and when he finished, I did not tell him he had done the right thing, because I was not entirely sure that phrase meant anything to a man who had just given up the version of justice he had believed in for two decades.

"I think it cost you something to choose that," I said instead. "It should have. That doesn't make it the wrong choice."

"It is the first time in a long time I have made a decision that did not feel like the man I already knew how to be." He turned my hand over again, studying it like it was the only steady thing left in the room.

"Do you regret it?"

"No. Only that it took me this long to become someone capable of it." He looked up, and something in his expression eased, just slightly, the tension of the last hour loosening by one visible degree.

"I keep thinking about that headline. Federal raid, multiple arrests, my name nowhere in it." I watched our fingers instead of his face, because the truth came out steadier when I was not looking directly at him. "Three months ago that would have ruined me. I would have spent a year trying to fix my reputation, prove I still belonged in rooms like this one. Tonight I honestly could not care less what they write about it, and that unsettles me more than anything that happened in the stairwell, because it means I have already decided what matters, and it is not the version of my life I spent three years building."

"What does matter?"

"You are going to make me say it out loud."

"I would like to hear it."

I finally let myself look at him without flinching, at the exhaustion he kept tucking somewhere out of sight, and decided that if tonight was the night for honesty, it might as well be the complete version. "You matter. This matters, whatever this actually is. More than the write-up, more than the client list, more than being known as the woman who never drops a ball."

"That is not nothing, what you built. I would not ask you to think it is."

"I am allowed to want both. I just did not know that until tonight." I let out a breath I had been holding since the lights first went out, hours and a lifetime ago.

"Which brings me to the part I actually came over here to say."

"That sounds ominous for a man holding my hand this gently."

"I have to go back to Chicago and take the whole thing apart and put it back together without him in it," Dmitri said. "Nik, the accounts, the men who are going to need convincing that I am not the soft version of my father everyone assumes I will become the moment I show mercy once. It is going to take months. It is not going to be clean, and it is not going to be quiet, no matter how carefully I try to keep it that way." He paused, and his expression turned deliberate in a way that looked unfamiliar on him, a man weighing each word before he let it out. "I'm not asking you to wait. I'm asking if you want to."

Somewhere behind us, close enough to catch the last of it, Mrs. Alvarez's voice rose over a paramedic's protests, informing him with total confidence that she had survived worse than a stairwell and fully intended to say so in her retirement speech, and for one unsteady second I almost laughed, almost reached for the joke that would have let both of us off the hook for how large his question actually was.

I didn't answer that night. I wanted to mean it properly when I did.

47

DMITRI

The Chicago office looked exactly the way I had left it three weeks earlier, which was somehow the most unsettling detail of the entire homecoming. Every object sat in its usual place, the conference table polished, the ledgers squared at right angles on the credenza, as though the building itself had no idea how completely the man walking back into it had changed. The same view of the river filled the same window, gray and indifferent, and even the coffee in the corner smelled the way it always smelled, burnt at the edges from a machine nobody had ever bothered replacing. I lingered in the doorway, waiting to feel the old satisfaction of walking back into something that still fit, and it never came.

I called the meeting for nine, which meant Nik had everyone assembled by quarter to, chairs arranged around the table in an order that told me exactly who he had decided mattered most before I ever walked through the door. Twenty-three years of running this family, and Nik still managed to teach me something new about it every time I turned my back for three weeks.

"Effective today, Nik is second in command," I said, without preamble, because a family that had just watched one heir apparent sell it to Basile did not need a speech. It needed a decision it could see. "Anything that requires my signature when I am not in the building, his signature carries the same weight. Anyone with a problem can bring it to me directly, not to each other in a parking lot afterward."

Nobody spoke for a moment. Arkady, closest to retirement of anyone still seated at that table and the only man in the room old enough to have worked directly under my father, cleared his throat first.

"And Kirill?"

"Kirill sold this family's secrets to men who nearly got a woman killed in a stairwell three weeks ago. He is currently facing federal charges, his name on every page of the evidence that put him there, and he does not have a place at this table, in this city, or in this family, ever again." I let the silence hold, the way I had learned silence held better than volume ever did. "I did not kill him. Some of you wanted me to. I understand why. I am telling you plainly instead of letting you guess, because guessing is exactly what let him get this far in the first place."

"Some men would call what you did weakness," Arkady said, not quite meeting my eyes.