18. Dmitri
DMITRI
I woke before her, which had become a habit over the last few months, though usually I woke in my own apartment with its wide, silent rooms and not in a bed barely large enough for two people who liked each other this much.
Cora slept curled toward the window, hair a disaster across the pillow, one hand still loosely closed around a fistful of my shirt like she'd caught it in her sleep and decided not to let go.
I lay there longer than I meant to, just watching her breathe, and felt something settle into my chest that I did not have a name for and was not entirely sure I wanted one.
Eventually I got up, careful not to wake her, and went looking for coffee.
That was where the morning started going wrong.
Cora's kitchen had been built, as far as I could tell, for a single occupant who was considerably smaller than I was.
I found this out the hard way, cracking my elbow on a cabinet door I hadn't accounted for, and then again when I discovered the counter space amounted to roughly one cutting board's worth of usable surface, most of it currently occupied by a French press I did not recognize and a bag of coffee beans with a label so aggressively artisanal it listed the farm, the altitude, and what I could only assume was the goat that had grazed nearby.
I am not, generally speaking, a man who loses to small appliances.
I have negotiated with men who considered losing a personal insult worth killing over.
I have stared down a warehouse full of armed strangers at twenty-four and made every one of them back down.
A glass cylinder with a metal plunger did not strike me, on first inspection, as a serious opponent.
The French press disagreed with that assessment almost immediately.
I ground the beans, or attempted to, in a hand grinder that required more torque than seemed reasonable for something meant to sit on a countertop, and then poured water that had not quite finished boiling, because her kettle apparently operated on some private schedule of its own.
When I pressed the plunger down, it resisted in a way that suggested I had done something categorically wrong, and then gave all at once, sending a fine spray of coffee grounds and hot water across the counter, the front of my undershirt, and, for reasons I still cannot explain, the ceiling.
"Impossible," I said, to the kitchen, since there was no one else awake to hear me say it.
The kitchen did not respond. It rarely does, in my experience, which is usually a comfort.
I was still standing there, surveying the wreckage, coffee grounds drying on my forearm like some kind of punishment, when I heard her laugh from the doorway.
"You're fighting my French press."
"I'm losing to your French press."
"Everyone loses to that French press the first time.
It's basically a hazing ritual. I should have warned you.
" She came in wearing one of my shirts, which did something to my chest I was not prepared to examine before coffee, and surveyed the damage with the calm, practiced eye of a woman who had clearly cleaned up worse. "You didn't let it bloom."
"Bloom."
"The grounds. You pour a little water first, let it sit, then the rest. If you don't, it fights back. It's basically a metaphor for something, I just haven't figured out what."
"I have run an entire criminal enterprise for twenty-three years without once being defeated by breakfast."
"Well, congratulations, today's the day. Welcome to the losing team." She kissed my jaw on her way past, entirely too pleased with herself, and reached past me to right the French press with the ease of long practice. "Sit down before you injure yourself further. I'll make it. You can supervise."
"I don't like supervising."
"You're extremely good at it, though. I've seen you do it to Nik.
Same energy, smaller kitchen." She measured grounds into the press with an ease that made it look like nothing at all, no torque, no argument, the water going in slow and patient exactly the way she'd described it.
"You want to know the actual secret? You have to let it want to work.
You were fighting it like it owed you money. "
"Everything owes me money. It's a very reliable worldview."
"Not this kitchen. This kitchen owes you nothing and owes me everything, and it knows it.
" She glanced back at me, eyes bright with the specific delight of a woman watching a very large, very dangerous man lose comprehensively to a piece of glassware.
"You're welcome to try again tomorrow. I'll even coach you. "
"I don't need coaching."
"You need extensive coaching. I watched you lose to a kettle."
I sat, because there was no version of this argument I was going to win, and watched her work with an ease that made the entire process look insultingly simple, water poured in careful stages, a patience to it that had nothing to do with the impatience I'd just demonstrated so thoroughly.
She hummed while she did it, off-key, unbothered by that fact, and I found myself watching her the way I usually reserved for watching a room for exits, except there was nothing here I wanted to leave.
That thought landed harder than I expected it to.
"You've gone quiet again," she said, glancing back at me. "Is this a pattern now? Am I going to spend the rest of my life reading your silences like tea leaves?"
"Probably."
"Great. Very healthy foundation for a relationship."
"I'm happy," I said, and the word came out flatter than I intended, more confession than statement, because it was true and because saying it out loud in her kitchen at an hour I usually spent alone felt like handing her something I hadn't fully examined myself yet.
"I don't entirely know what to do with that. "
She turned from the counter, coffee forgotten for a moment, studying me with an attention I had come to recognize as her full attention, the kind she gave floor plans and seating charts and, apparently, me. "That sounds like a strange thing to be unsettled by."
"It is the least familiar thing I have felt in twenty-three years.
Threats, I understand. I can read a threat from across a room before it opens its mouth.
This." I gestured at the kitchen, at her, at the disaster still drying on my forearm.
"I don't have a protocol for this. I built my entire life around never being caught without one. "
"Do you need a protocol for being happy?"
"I don't know. I've never needed one before, which is precisely the problem.
" My empty coffee cup got a slow quarter turn under my hand, the same restlessness that never seemed to need a reason.
"It's the most exposed I have ever felt, and nothing is actually threatening me.
That should be a relief. Instead it feels like standing somewhere with no cover. "
She crossed the small kitchen and stood between my knees, taking my face in both hands, coffee grounds and all, and looked at me with none of the deflection either of us usually reached for first. "For what it's worth, I don't think you have to have a protocol for this.
I think you just have to keep showing up and figuring it out badly, the way you did with the French press. "
"I lost that fight."
"You'll win eventually. Or you won't, and I'll just keep making the coffee. Either way, we're fine." She kissed me, brief and certain, and went back to the press before I could decide what to say to that.
While she finished it properly, I found myself thinking about the vendor thread Nik was still pulling on, the one that had put us both on a plane the night before.
I hadn't planned to think about business at all this morning.
I had planned, as much as I plan anything involving her, simply to enjoy an ordinary hour in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman who happened to also be the least ordinary thing that had ever happened to me.
But the thought of that vendor sitting unexplained on a guest list next to a hundred details Cora had built with her own hands kept surfacing anyway, insistent.
Somewhere in the middle of watching her pour water in careful stages, I realized I wanted to look into it myself, not as the man who solved problems with a phone call and let someone else handle the unpleasant parts, but as someone trying to be useful inside her world the way she had made herself useful inside mine: sitting through my meetings, catching what my own people had missed, asking exactly the right question at exactly the right moment.
"What?" she said, watching my face.
"Nothing. I was thinking about the vendor."
"On my one morning off from being terrified about my own event." She said it lightly, but something in her eyes sharpened. "Should I be worried?"
"I don't know yet. That's the honest answer.
" I reached out and caught her wrist before she could turn back to the counter, needing her to hear the next part directly.
"I want to look into it myself. Not send Nik to handle it and receive a summary.
I need to actually understand what's happening in your world, the same way you sat in that conference room and understood mine inside an hour. "
"You do realize you already have an entire team for this?"
"I have a team for everything. That's not the point.
" I turned my cup another quarter turn, searching for the right way to say the thing without making it sound like more than it was, or less.
"Everything in my life gets handled by someone else eventually.
Threats, logistics, even the parts of myself I'd rather not look at directly.
I want this to be something I actually did, not something that got done on my behalf while I stood somewhere safer. "
"That's a very roundabout way of saying you want to help."
"Then let me help. Simply, without a task force behind me."
Her expression softened, surprised and pleased in a way she didn't bother hiding. "That's either extremely sweet or extremely alarming, considering your usual definition of looking into something."
"Possibly both."
"I'll allow it." She patted my cheek, entirely unrepentant about the condescension in the gesture. "You've earned your coffee, technically. Blood, sweat, and ceiling casualties."
She finally poured two cups, and the coffee, when I tasted it, was good enough that I understood, briefly, what all the artisanal packaging had been promising.
I was still holding the cup, still watching her lean against the counter in my shirt looking more at home in her own kitchen than I had ever felt in any of mine, when my phone buzzed against the table.
I almost let it sit. For exactly one second, I considered simply not looking, the way she had done with her own phone the night before, choosing the kitchen and the coffee and the woman in front of me over whatever was waiting on the screen.
But old habits do not unlearn themselves in a single morning, however good the coffee, and I picked it up anyway.
Nik's text was short, and it emptied the warmth out of the room before I had even finished reading it. It read: "Shell company traces back to an address Basile's people have used before. Could be nothing."
I looked up and found Cora watching me, her own good mood already fading to match whatever she was reading in my face, the two of us standing in the wreckage of a kitchen I had lost a fight to less than an hour earlier, none of it feeling quite as funny anymore.
Neither of us believed that for a single second.