Hungry Bratva Daddy (Ruthless Bratva Daddies #13)

1. Daniil

DANIIL

Ihave watched Margot Ellis lock the same door three hundred and eleven times, and tonight I have been ordered to make one of them her last.

She's behind the glass now, thirty feet and a narrow street away, moving through the shop in a sweater the color of oatmeal that swallows her past the knuckles.

The light in there is the color of weak tea, and it finds the copper in her hair and hands it back warmer than it has any right to be.

She's shelving. As she does at this hour every night, she's talking to no one at all.

I have her voice in my ear. Eight months ago I paid a locksmith his ransom to seat a listening device in the belly of the shop's old radiator, and since then her evenings have come to me thin and clear, threaded through the tick of cooling iron.

"Absolutely not," she says. "You had dinner. I watched you eat it. Don't stand there inventing some tragic backstory where you're starving."

Hemingway, the gray cat who owns the register and most of the shop, says nothing back. He's the only creature in this city with less to say than I have, and I have made a whole profession out of silence.

"Here's the deal," she says, crossing the floor with an armful of paperbacks.

"I finish this shelf. Then I write eight hundred words, and they're allowed to be terrible, because that is what first drafts are for.

And in exchange, we never again mention the cold pasta I ate over the sink like a woman with no people. "

She keeps up a running broadcast to the empty air, an unwitting program with an audience of one, and that one is a man who has killed for less noise than she makes on a slow night.

If she knew I was here, she would stop. That's the best argument against ever telling her, and I have made it to myself so often that it has worn smooth as a river stone.

It should trouble me more than it does, this listening.

I have told myself it's only surveillance, and surveillance is the work, and the work has always been the reason they let me live.

But no one above me has asked to hear these evenings.

There are no recordings. I keep her nights the way other men keep a photograph folded in a wallet, and I take them out when the street goes quiet, and I have never found an honest word for what that makes me.

The car stays cold because a running engine is a lit match on a dark street, and I didn't reach forty-one by being comfortable.

So I sit with my hands loose in my lap, my breathing shallow, my eyes doing the only thing I trust them to do.

I can tell you which cars on this block arrived after me and which belong to the curb.

I know the woman three floors up waters her plants when the news ends, and the man below her drinks until the blue glow of his television fades.

None of it matters. It's all the same old reflex, the one that has kept me breathing, and for eight months I have aimed it at a girl, a bookshop, and a cat.

It began as a file. That's the truth I keep close when the rest of it threatens to close over my head, and lately it often does.

A paperback with a black cover and an invented name on the spine reached a desk it had no business reaching, and a man who has put better men than me in the ground turned to a page near the middle and forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.

There was a phrase on that page. There was a route that moved money through this city before Margot Ellis was born, and a name that three men died to bury.

She had set it all down between a kiss and a knife, decoration for a story about a dangerous man and the woman who loves him past all sense.

They handed it to me because I'm what you reach for when something needs watching and not yet touching. I was to find the leak, name the source, and tell them what she was. I said two weeks. I'm very good at short work.

The first time I saw her in the flesh, she was on her hands and knees in the front window, coaxing the cat out from behind a display of poetry and cursing him with a tenderness I couldn't place.

I sat across the street with her photograph on the seat beside me and a plan in my head that ran fourteen clean days.

I watched her win the argument with the animal and then apologize to him for raising her voice, and something in my chest turned over that night.

I haven't been able to turn it back since.

I know how she takes her coffee. She uses two sugars and stirs it far too long, as though apologizing to the cup.

I know which bench she chooses in the park, the one beneath the leaning elm, and that she always sits on the left of it, leaving the right side open for someone who has never once come.

I know that when the cold sets in she takes one particular novel down from the shelf and reads it slowly, the way a person visits a grave.

I know the small hum she makes when a sentence finally lands, pleased and private, and I have started sitting through the long quiet just to catch it.

Two weeks became a season. There was no source, because there was no plot.

There was no enemy feeding her secrets, no clever hand using a shop girl for a mouth.

There was only a woman with a borrowed name and an imagination that had, by the worst luck in the world, dreamed its way too near the truth.

I wrote none of it down. A closed file is a door that shuts for good, and on the far side of it lies a street I'm no longer allowed to sit on.

The clean phone wakes against my thigh. It's not the burner but the encrypted line, the one only Luka uses.

"You're still parked outside the bookshop." He gives me no hello. Luka has never once wasted one on me.

"Yes."

"Your pin hasn't moved in four hours. I assumed you had finally died, and I let myself enjoy the thought for a while."

"You didn't call to mourn me. Say it."

His keyboard clatters to fill the pause.

Luka lives inside other people's machines the way I live inside their blind spots.

"Someone pulled your file today. The Sablewood one.

They opened it, read it, and set it back crooked.

" The play goes out of his voice. "It was not me, and it was not you.

It came from up high, and it landed with Grigori. "

The name settles at the base of my spine like cold water. "You're sure?"

"I don't deal in maybe. It is the one flaw I allow myself.

" The keys stop. "Grigori has been asking around, very quietly, why the best eyes in the city spent most of a year on one girl and produced not one page.

He hates a question he cannot answer. So he answers it himself, and he answers it with people. "

Across the street she climbs the little rolling ladder after a high shelf, books stacked against one hip, her free arm thrown wide for balance, and my whole body leans a degree toward the glass before I catch it and set it back.

"Daniil." He has heard me hesitate, and hesitation is a thing he reads as well as I do. "Close the file. Write the two words. Then walk, while walking is still a sentence you are allowed to finish."

"I will handle it."

"That is not the same as yes."

"No," I tell him. "It is not." I hang up before he can talk me into being wise.

For a moment I let myself run the arithmetic he wants me to run.

It comes out to two words and a closed door.

Beyond that door waits a flight under a new name, a city with a different alphabet, and a life in which I never again learn how a woman on Damen Avenue takes her coffee.

The math is clean. It has one flaw, and she's standing in a lit window across the street, losing a debate to a cat about pasta.

The burner rings before the first phone has touched the seat. Grigori has always known how to arrive one breath after you understand that he's coming.

I answer and give him nothing. Silence is a language, and he taught me half of its words.

"Daniil Alekseevich." His voice comes warm down the line, warm the way a stove is warm, right until it takes the skin off your palm. "You are a hard man to reach, for one whose whole craft is sitting still."

"I am working."

"You are watching. There is a difference, and it has begun to interest the men who sit above us both." His chair creaks as it takes his weight. "Eight months. Tolstoy wrote a whole war in less. Tell me what you have found, so that I can carry it upstairs and keep myself in one piece."

A lie would go here, if I thought he would take one. "A writer," I say. "There is no source. There is no handler. She wandered into the truth by accident and does not know she is holding it."

"By accident." He turns the word over and finds it too light to hold. "Accidents can be tidied away, Daniil. It is the only thing they are good for."

"She is not a threat."

"Then she will not be a loss." The warmth doesn't leave his voice, and that's the unbearable part of him.

It never leaves. "You have gone quiet in your work, Daniil.

A man goes quiet for one of two reasons.

He is very sure of himself, or he is badly compromised.

I have known you since you were a boy who could not hold a blade without opening his own hand, and I would hate to learn which one you have become. "

She fits the last book into the high shelf and steps down from the ladder, her mouth moving around some small victory I can't hear, because I haven't switched the earpiece back on. I'd trade a year of my life for the words she just spent on an empty room.

"The Pakhan wants it finished," Grigori says, soft as a hand laid against the back of a neck. "You have until the thirtieth. Assess her to the bone. And if the answer is the one I already suspect, you are the one who ends it. You opened this door, Daniil. You will be the one to close it."

The word he won't say sits in the middle of the car, patient, waiting for me to pick it up.

I look at it, and then I look at her, and something in me that has spent thirty years obeying without a sound lies down across the doorway and refuses to move.

I don't tell him that. Refusal is one more thing best kept behind the teeth.

"Understood," I say.

"Good boy." There's a smile in it now, and it's the worst thing he has shown me all night. "Clean by the thirtieth, Volkov. Don't get attached."

The call cuts out.

I set the phone face down on the seat. Across the street she steps back from the finished shelf, sets her fists on her hips, and admires her work, and whatever the cat says to her must be a masterpiece, because she laughs.

Her head tips back, one hand pressed flat to her chest as if to hold the joy in.

I watch her laugh at nothing through the glass and understand that the warning has come eight months too late.