Eternal Bratva Daddy (Ruthless Bratva Daddies #10)

1. Claire

CLAIRE

The first thing my new neighborhood taught me was that a sofa, given enough rain and enough self-pity, can fly.

Mine cleared the fence at nine in the morning, and I was the genius who launched it.

The day gave no warning. It started like all the recent ones, with me awake on a bare mattress in a house that still smelled faintly of the family who'd left it, the spare room painted a beige so tired it looked sorry for itself.

My phone lay dead on the floor, the charger buried somewhere in the cardboard stacked against the far wall.

Forty boxes, give or take, each labeled in a system I'd been proud of three days back and could no longer crack.

Sixteen days until the shop opened. The thought rose the way it always did now, half thrill and half nausea, and I pushed it back down with everything else.

Outside, an engine grumbled. Then a fist hit the front door hard enough to rattle the glass.

“Donovan?” a voice called. “We've got a window, lady, and it's closing.”

I found shoes. I found the door.

Two men waited on the porch in matching shirts gone see-through with old sweat, a truck idling at the curb with its ramp already down. Last night's rain still beaded on the railing and dripped from the gutters in a slow, sarcastic applause.

“You're early,” I said.

“We're late. Same thing.” The taller one cracked his knuckles. “Where do you want it?”

They worked fast and without warmth, the way men handle a thing that is only weight to them. I pointed, they hauled, and for a while it almost soothed me, my whole life filing past in pieces. The bookshelves. The kettle. The crate of stock for the shop.

“Easy with that one,” I said as the taller man hoisted the book crate onto his shoulder. “That crate is the entire reason I moved here.”

He didn't slow. “Books.” He hefted it like evidence. “Heavy as bricks, half the use.”

“Spoken like a man who's never once been saved by one.”

He had no comeback, and I took the point.

Then the shorter one came down the ramp with the armchair, gripping it by a single wing as if he meant to drag it.

“This one's done, by the way. Springs are shot, fabric's split underneath.” He tipped his chin at the curb. “We can drop it out front, save you the bother.”

“No.”

“It's held together with hope and lint.” He grinned at his own line. “A chair like this, you don't move it. You bury it.”

The word dropped through me and kept going.

“Front room,” I said. “By the window.”

“Just saying, the dump's on our way.”

“My husband read in that chair every night for nine years.” My voice went flat and level, the way it does when I mean a thing all the way down. “So you'll set it by the window like it matters, and you won't say one more word about it.”

He held my eyes a beat. Whatever crossed his face answered a question he hadn't asked. He carried the chair inside and set it down without a sound.

Grief isn't a flood for me, not anymore.

It's a trapdoor. You walk the same floor you always walk, a board gives, and you fall somewhere dark and familiar for exactly as long as it takes to climb back out.

Two years in, I knew the route by heart.

I climbed out. I signed their form. I tipped them better than they'd earned, because I can't seem to help it.

Then they did the thing that turned a bad morning into a legend. They rolled the sofa halfway up the walk, set it on the wet grass, took one look at the narrow doorway, traded a glance, and decided it had stopped being theirs.

“Won't fit,” the tall one announced. “Goes around the back, or you pull the legs off. Either way, that's a different job. Different rate.”

“You cannot leave it on the lawn.”

“Sure we can.” He was already folding the ramp. “Take care, now.”

The truck pulled off. The sofa sat marooned in the middle of my new yard, soaking up the last of the rain, mine and nobody else's.

Up and down the block the maples were just leafing out, porch lights still burning from the night. Not a curtain twitched. The street held the kind of hush that makes you lower your voice without deciding to, and I had the strange sense of being the only thing happening for miles.

That was when the cat arrived to supervise.

He slid out of the overgrown hedge along the side of the house, a gray tom with one eye and the air of a landlord who'd approved none of this.

He studied the sofa. He studied me. Then he sprang to the soaked cushions, turned a slow circle, and settled dead center, as though he'd been waiting his whole feral life for the throne to arrive.

“That's mine,” I told him.

His one yellow eye held me, and he kept his opinion to himself.

“Fine,” I said. “Ours.”

I circled the sofa twice, hunting an angle that didn't come down to brute force and finding none. The cat followed my deliberations with the flat patience of a creature who already knew how this ended.

“Some help you are.”

He yawned.

A smarter woman lets the sofa sit, calls a friend, waits for muscle.

I didn't have a friend inside five hundred miles, which was the whole point of Chicago.

Nobody here knew to soften their voice around my name.

Nobody read the word widow off my face in funeral-home script.

Here I was only the new woman with the bookshop and the terrible parking, and I meant to keep it that way, even if it cost me a sofa, my dignity, and the cooperation of a cat.

So I set my shoulder to the arm and pushed.

It moved, and it moved well, gliding over the slick grass with a grace it had never managed indoors. It rolled so easily that I leaned in to keep it going, the cat bailed with a screech of betrayal, the front legs snagged the low chain of the garden border, and physics took the wheel.

The sofa pitched. I lunged. We toppled together, a knot of damp upholstery and poor judgment, straight into the fence between my yard and the next.

The fence, as it turned out, had limits.

A whole section let go with a crack like a snapped rib. The sofa kept traveling, and I had one clear, ridiculous second to watch my furniture sail through the gap and out of my life.

It landed in the most beautiful garden I'd ever seen.

I hadn't known it was there. From my side, the fence was only a fence, gray boards and the dead vine of whatever the last tenant had failed to grow.

Past the boards lay another world. Roses climbed a tall trellis in deep reds and a white so clean it looked lit from within.

Raised beds ran in tidy rows. Herbs reached me on the wet air, rosemary and something green and sharp beneath it.

A stone bench sat under an arbor. Not one weed in the whole of it.

The kind of garden that takes a decade and a patient, stubborn love, and my sofa had just face-planted into the heart of it, crushing a stand of young tomatoes on the way down.

The trellis swayed. An arch of roses leaned, tipped, and started down toward the wreck.

A hand caught it.

He'd come from somewhere near the bench, and he took the falling trellis one-handed, no rush in him at all, the other hand wrapped around a coffee cup that didn't so much as ripple.

Tall. Broad enough through the shoulders to shrink the garden around him.

Silver hair, a trimmed silver beard, and when he lifted his eyes from the ruin of his roses to find me sprawled in the breach of his fence, they were a green so direct I felt it land beneath my ribs.

He stood the trellis up. He drank his coffee.

“Good morning,” he said.

“I'm so sorry.” I scrambled up, mud to the elbows. “I'll pay for it. The fence, the roses, whatever those green things were.”

“Tomatoes.” He regarded the flattened plants without a flicker of grief. “They were going to disappoint me anyway.”

“That's a charitable reading of vehicular tomato-slaughter.”

Something stirred at the corner of his mouth and didn't quite become a smile.

He stepped across a bed of low shoots without bruising a leaf and considered the sofa where it lay belly-up among his roses, legs in the air like it had given up on living.

Then he set the cup on the bench, took the frame in both hands, and turned it right side up in a single motion, the way you flip a book to read its cover.

Waterlogged, it weighed what I did. He didn't strain.

He didn't perform. He moved it because it needed moving.

His weren't a gardener's hands. The nails sat clean and blunt, the knuckles thick, a pale seam of old scar crossing one of them. They handled the sofa the way they probably handled everything, as if the object had been asked and had agreed.

Something in me came awake and wary, the way it does on an empty street for no reason you can name. I waved it off. A man who coaxed roses like these out of the ground was surely nothing worse than lonely.

“You'll need help getting that inside,” he said. “Through the door. Not the wall. The wall is less forgiving.”

“I'm starting to get that about a few things around here.”

He glanced past me. “Mind the edging behind you. It catches ankles.”

I looked down. A low stone border sat a thumb's width from my heel. “You could have opened with that.”

“You were busy apologizing.”

He lifted the coffee again. That was the sum of his reaction, and somehow it felt like winning a small war.

“How long does a garden like this take?” I asked, because I couldn't not.

He looked at the roses instead of me. “Longer than you'd guess to start. Less time than you'd want to keep it.”

It was an answer cut to the shape of small talk with something heavier set underneath, and I filed it away with the rest of him.

“You're the bookshop,” he said. Not a question.

That stopped me. “Yes.” I blinked. “How did you...”

“Small street. Anything new gets talked about, and there's little enough that's new.” His glance went once to my house, to the boxes crowding the window, then back to me, and I had the clear sense of being read end to end and shelved before I'd said anything worth knowing.

“Claire,” I said, and offered a hand, then saw the mud and withdrew it. “Donovan. I'd shake, but I appear to be made of your garden now.”

He inclined his head, a small and serious courtesy, like a man carried over from an older, harder century. He gave me no name back.

A phone buzzed somewhere inside his coat. He drew it out, read the screen, and the ease went out of him between one breath and the next, traded for something colder and more watchful.

“Leave the fence,” he said, already turning. “I'll see to it.”

“You don't have to. I broke it, I should...”

“It's mine to mend.” He said it gently, and gentleness from him left no room to argue.

He crossed the garden toward the back of the house, easy even now, the green and the roses folding shut behind him, and then a door closed and he was gone, and I stood in the wreck of somebody's beautiful, hidden life with no idea whose.

For a moment I only looked. Up close the garden was almost unfair.

Every bed sat squared and dark and freshly turned, a watering can placed exactly where a hand would find it without looking.

Along the edge of the stone bench ran a carved line of something, letters or leaves, too far to read.

Someone had built this with nowhere else to put a great deal of care.

“You've met him, then?”

I turned. An older woman had paused on the sidewalk past my yard, a small terrier straining toward the cat, who'd reclaimed the sofa the instant it touched grass and now studied the dog with royal contempt.

“Sort of,” I said. “He never told me his name.”

“He wouldn't.” She said it without malice, almost tenderly, her gaze drifting to the roses showing over the broken boards.

It went soft there. “Forty years on this street, and those are the finest I've ever seen. He leaves cuttings on porches. Never knocks. You just find them by the door one morning.”

“And the rest of him?”

She let a beat run a little too long. The terrier whined. “Everyone knows him,” she said at last. “Nobody knows him.” She tugged the leash. “Welcome to the block, dear. Mind your fences.”

She moved on.

I lingered out there past any need for it, the morning cooling on my damp skin, the cat purring like a small engine, the boxes and the dead phone and the armchair by the window where he would never sit again.

Then I looked at the gap in the fence where the silver-haired man had stood, at the green spilling through it, and I let myself think the one thing a woman starting over should never think on the first day, about the first man.

I'd crossed half the country to feel nothing much at all, and a stranger had undone it in under ten minutes, without trying, a cup of coffee in his hand.

Well. He's a problem.

I had no idea.