Dominant Bratva Daddy (Ruthless Bratva Daddies #8)

1. Zoe

ZOE

My sewing machine had been running since before the sun cleared the lake, and Chicago still wore its gray morning coat.

Forty-eight floors down, the city moved the way it always did, fast and indifferent to everyone caught inside it.

Up in my glass studio there was only the hiss of the steamer and the soft scrape of shears through silk.

I pinned the last dart on the emerald gown and stepped back. Two boutiques in Paris wanted it by autumn, and a pop star’s stylist had already called three times about the hem. Forty-one messages sat unread in my inbox, and every one of them waited on a decision only I could make.

People assume the dresses come easy to me, that I sketch them between sips of champagne.

They never see the burns the iron leaves on my fingertips, or the nights I sleep on the studio couch because a seam refuses to lie flat.

I built every inch of this from nothing, and none of it has ever been free.

The phone had been buzzing since dawn. A countess in Milan wanted a wedding gown and would not say whose.

A film studio wanted twelve looks for a project I was forbidden to name.

Three designers I had never met were begging by email for an internship, a meeting, one minute of my time.

Everyone wanted a piece, and lately the pieces outnumbered the hours.

“Zoe.” Priya stopped in the doorway, hugging her tablet to her chest like a shield. Her knuckles had gone pale. “Before you say anything, set the coffee down.”

“I drink my coffee. I don’t throw it.” I took the tablet out of her hands.

The headline landed before the photo did. FASHION’S GOLDEN GIRL AND THE MARRIED MOGUL: A CANDLELIT NIGHT. Beneath it sat a grainy shot of me leaning toward a man across a table, my fingers a breath from his.

Something cold dropped through my chest, and a half second later it caught fire.

I had seen this picture a hundred times in a hundred forms, the same trick run with a different man each season. The lighting always turned something harmless into a secret. The frame always cut away the truth standing three feet to the left.

“That’s Gerald Honce,” I said. “Sixty-three years old, married to a woman I adore, and that dinner was a licensing signing with nine other people at the table. Every one of them got cropped out so a stranger could sell my face as a scandal.”

“Posted twenty minutes ago.” Priya kept her voice level. “It’s already everywhere.”

“Then we outrun it.” I dropped the tablet on the cutting table and counted the steps off on my fingers.

“Pull the reservation under the Honce Group account. Get me the private-room guest list with arrival times. Call the maitre d’, the one who loves my spring collection, and find out whether the cameras keep date stamps.

I want that whole evening accounted for, minute by minute. ”

Priya hesitated, the way people do right before they hand you something you won’t enjoy. “Last time you fought one of these, the legal threat just gave them a second story.”

“Then this time I write the ending.” I held her eyes. “I have never once let a lie about me stand because the truth was inconvenient. Go quiet in this business and it buries you. Get me Marcus.”

She had him on the line inside a minute. My lawyer answered mid-thought and already annoyed, which was the only way he ever picked up a phone.

“Zoe. I take it you’ve seen it.”

“Seen it, timestamped it, and lined up nine witnesses who watched me eat branzino and argue margins,” I said. “I want a retraction demand on their desk before lunch and a correction running tonight. Not a quiet line buried at the bottom. Same size as the lie.”

“You realize a fight keeps this alive another day?”

“Then let it live beside the truth for once, instead of the garbage.” I pressed my fingers to my temple. “Send me the draft. Nothing leaves your office until I’ve read every word.”

“You always do.” The line went dead.

My hands were steady, and that surprised me. The first time a paper pulled this, I cried in a bathroom for an hour. The tenth time, I threw a mug across the room. Somewhere along the way the anger cooled into something useful, a blade instead of a flame.

Priya watched me set the phone down. “They’ll say you only push this hard because you’ve got something to hide.”

“Let them. A guilty woman pays for silence. I pay for the truth, and I pay out loud.” I ran my palm flat over the emerald silk. “My mother always said a name is the one thing nobody can stitch back together once it tears. So I never give them the chance.”

She was already forwarding the calendar exports to legal, thumbs flying. I picked the shears back up because my hands needed something honest to do, and the hem still wasn’t finished. For a few minutes the studio fell silent enough to hear the cloth shift under the needle.

Then a name lit up the screen and loosened my jaw for the first time all morning. Elena Volkov. I answered on speaker so I could keep working.

“Hi, Zoe. I miss you.”

“You miss me, or you need me?” I slipped a pin between my lips.

“Honestly? Both.” That warm rasp crept into her voice. “There’s a gala, it matters, and you’re the only person I trust to dress me so I’ve made my point before I open my mouth.”

“You’d be a fool to trust anyone else with it.” I worked the pin into the fabric. “Send me the date, the venue, the guest list. And we both know that if I said no, your husband would find some quiet way to change my mind.”

“Hey. He’s not that bad.”

“Sure. And the ocean’s bone dry.”

She laughed so hard the line crackled. “I’ll email your assistant everything. I have to run before Nikolai notices his car is gone. But I mean it, Zoe. I miss you.”

“Same here,” I said. “You, and your money.”

The grin outlasted the call by a good while, which told me how thin the morning had worn me. I threaded the needle and bent back over the hem.

I sank into the work completely, the world shrinking to a needle and a hand’s width of cloth. The retraction could fight its own war for an hour. This seam couldn’t wait, and there was mercy in that, in a problem my own two hands could solve without a single lawyer.

By the time the light outside turned the color of weak tea, the emerald gown was finished, two fabric orders were approved, and Marcus’s draft had passed under my eyes twice. I changed three words and sent it back. My shoulders ached in the exact spot they always find by evening.

The phone buzzed against the table, and one word on the screen pulled me clean out of the deadline. Mom. I propped it up so she could read my face, since she never trusted a voice to tell her the whole story.

“Hi, Mommy.”

“There she is. How’s my baby?”

“Buried. The good kind of buried.” I pushed a loose curl off my forehead. “More to do than there are hours in a day.”

“And do you ever stop to breathe?”

I gave the camera my most wounded look. “Why, do I look like I’m falling apart on you?”

She laughed, and the sound loosened a knot I hadn’t noticed I was carrying. “You look perfect, baby. You always do. It’s only that every time I call, you’re working. Where are the friends? The nights out? You’re young, Zoe.”

“Friends. In this industry.” I propped my chin in my hand.

“They’re all painted on, Mom. They need me, so they smile to my face, and behind it they’re already choosing which man to pin my name to next.

I get linked to anyone I’m photographed beside.

A client. A driver. A waiter who pulls out my chair.

It never lets up, and there’s no explaining it to anyone who hasn’t lived inside it. ”

The teasing drained from her voice. “Then don’t give those people one inch of room in your head. Your father and I know exactly who you are. You’re nothing like the girl they keep inventing.” A pause. “Come home tonight. Let me feed you.”

I went quiet. Beyond the window the skyline was lighting itself one square at a time, and my penthouse waited at the top of one of those towers, beautiful and empty. The hush up there had stopped feeling like peace a long while back.

“Okay,” I said at last. “I’ll come. The place is too still anyway, and I miss your cooking more than I miss sleeping.”

“Then drive safe. I’m putting the rice on now.”

The road south stripped the city off me block by block. Glass towers gave way to brick two-flats, then to bungalows with chain-link fences and hoops bolted above the garage doors. By the time the streetlights thinned out, my shoulders had dropped a full inch from my ears.

The house I grew up in sat on a leafy street where the porch lamps came on at dusk and nobody aimed a lens at anybody. The smell reached me before I was through the door, garlic and browning onions and something richer underneath, and my whole body remembered how to breathe.

“Shoes off. You’re not in a magazine,” my mother called from the kitchen, which from her meant welcome home.

My father was already out of his chair, arms open before I crossed the room. He held me the same as he had when I was small, one broad hand flat between my shoulder blades, as though he could press the whole day out of me.

“There’s my girl,” he murmured into my hair. “Half the city chasing her, and she still turns up for dinner.”

“The city can wait. Mom’s making short ribs.”

We ate at the same scarred table where I’d done my homework and sketched my first ugly dresses.

Nobody mentioned the headline. My mother told us about the neighbor’s dog, a church bake sale, a movie she’d walked out of halfway through, and my father argued the ending with her even though he’d dozed through most of it.

I laughed until my cheeks hurt, and this time the ache felt earned.

“You’re eating like a sparrow,” my father said, sliding the bread basket closer. “A sparrow with a magazine cover. Eat. The internet will hold together an hour without your opinion.”

“An hour? It wouldn’t last ten minutes,” I shot back, and tore off a piece just to watch him grin.

He folded my hand inside his across the table, the rough warmth of it as familiar to me as my own name.

My mother dropped another rib onto my plate without asking, because asking was never how she showed she cared.

For one long moment the headline and the lawyer and the strangers trading on my face shrank to something happening to a girl in some other city, a place too far away to reach this kitchen.

When the plates were cleared, my father did not sit back down. He drew a small velvet box from his shirt pocket and set it beside my water glass.

“Dad, what is this?”

“Open it before you cross-examine it. You get that from your mother.”

Inside lay a fine gold chain with a single pendant, a small star, the same gift he’d given me every year since I was six, back when the stars were plastic.

“Always remember, baby,” he said, his voice going rough at the edges, “your daddy is proud of every single thing you do. Not the magazines. Not the money. You. I’ve been proud since the day you were born, and I haven’t stopped once.”

My eyes filled before I could stop them. I stood and wrapped my arms around his neck, and he held on as if he had the whole night to give.

Then my mother’s arms closed around the both of us from the side, her cheek against my hair.

“Me too,” she whispered. “There is no one on this earth prouder of the woman you’ve become.”

We stayed like that in the warm kitchen, the three of us folded together while the dishwater went cold, and not one camera on earth knew where to find me.

I let myself stay in it. Tomorrow the headlines could have me back.

Tonight I belonged to the two people who had named me, and who would never want a single thing from me but this.