9. Viktor
VIKTOR
“You said I could pick,” Ginger says, arms crossed, standing her ground in my kitchen like she’s negotiating a treaty. “I pick pizza. The kind with the stuffed crust.”
“That’s what you picked yesterday.”
“I like it.”
“You’re allowed to like more than one thing, you know. There’s an entire menu of things you haven’t tried yet.”
“I know what I like.” She says it with total conviction.
Harper appears in the kitchen doorway right as Ginger says it, hair still damp from a shower, wearing a robe she clearly grabbed without thinking too hard about it. I have to look somewhere else for a second before I trust myself to speak normally.
“That’s such a direct echo of the woman who just walked in,” I say, “that I have to fight not to smile outright.”
Harper laughs, crossing to the counter, not bothering to hide it, and I find myself giving in without much of a fight, because arguing pizza with a six-year-old feels like the easiest decision I’ve made all week.
“Stuffed crust it is.”
Ginger nods once, satisfied, like she expected nothing less, and goes back to the drawing she’s been working on at the table, tongue between her teeth in concentration.
Four days in this house and she’s already figured out exactly how far she can push me, which is somehow more reassuring than if she’d stayed cautious with me forever.
“You’re supposed to be the intimidating one,” Harper says, low enough that Ginger doesn’t catch it over her own humming. “The scary club owner. Instead, you just lost a negotiation to a first grader over crust.”
“I have a reputation to maintain elsewhere. This kitchen isn’t it.”
Harper moves past me to get the plates herself, close enough that I catch the smell of whatever soap she used. I busy myself with the pizza box instead of doing anything about the fact that my whole body’s suddenly very aware of exactly how little distance is between us in this kitchen.
“Thank you,” she says. “For giving in on the pizza thing. You didn’t have to.”
“It’s pizza. I think I can survive it twice in one week.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She leans against the doorframe, and the robe shifts slightly, and I keep my eyes exactly where they belong through pure effort of will. “You’ve been doing that a lot. Giving in on the small stuff. It matters more than you probably realize.”
“I’m aware it matters.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to, and it makes her go quiet for a second, studying me. I look away first, busying myself with plates I don’t actually need to arrange.
It would be easy to close the distance between us right now, kitchen, low light, both of us tired enough to stop pretending the last few weeks haven’t rearranged what this was supposed to be.
I don’t. Not with her daughter twelve feet away drawing something that looks like it might be a cat, not with the memory of a courthouse hallway still sitting unresolved between us.
But it doesn’t get easier, wanting her like this, under my own roof, in a robe she has no idea is doing to me exactly what those photographs did the first night I saw her face.
Dinner passes easier than I expect, Ginger narrating her drawing in exhaustive detail. A cat, it turns out, riding what she insists is a dragon and not a horse, an important distinction she repeats twice.
Harper asks questions I can tell are genuine and not just performed patience, and for a stretch of forty minutes I forget entirely that any of this started as a transaction.
At one point Ginger asks me if I have a favorite animal, and I tell her wolves, mostly because it’s true and partly because I want to see what she does with it.
“Wolves are pack animals,” she informs me, with the total authority of someone who read this fact recently and has been waiting for a reason to share it. “They don’t like being alone.”
“No,” I say. “They don’t.”
Harper catches my eye across the table for a second before looking away.
By the time Ginger’s ready for bed, she asks for me specifically, which still catches me off guard every time it happens.
“Two chapters,” she says, holding up the book with the dragon on it, an old negotiating tactic she’s clearly used successfully before. “Not one.”
“We’ll see how tired you get.”
“That’s not a no.”
“No,” I admit. “It’s not.”
I sit on the edge of her bed and read, doing the voices badly, worse than Harper does them by her own admission, and Ginger corrects my dragon voice twice before agreeing it’s close enough to be acceptable.
“That’s not how he sounds,” she informs me, halfway through the first chapter.
“How’s he supposed to sound?”
“Bigger. And kind of sad, because nobody likes him even though he’s nice.”
I adjust accordingly, dropping my voice lower, and she nods, satisfied, and settles back against her pillow like she’s just successfully directed a very important production.
By the third chapter her eyes are heavier, blinking longer each time, and she doesn’t seem bothered at all that I’m not Harper.
She’s asleep before the chapter ends, one hand still resting on the page like she’s trying to hold the story in place even unconscious.
I sit there a minute longer than I need to, watching her breathe.
I’ve spent fifteen years building a life that runs on distance, on making sure nothing matters enough to be used against me.
But I’ve let a child into the one place I always kept empty on purpose.
It should worry me more than it does.
Dimitri’s waiting downstairs when I come back down, a beer already open on the counter, and the look on his face that means business, not personal business.
“Kazan,” he says, before I even ask.
“How’d he take it?”
“About like you’d expect. Denied everything for the first ten minutes, then folded the second I put the actual invoice numbers in front of him.” Dimitri takes a pull from the bottle.
“He’s paying back the difference over the next two deliveries. No more creative math after that, or we find a new distributor and make sure every other supplier in the city hears exactly why.”
“Good. Any pushback from his people, or was it just him?”
“Just him. His crew didn’t even know he was skimming, from what I could tell. Man’s got a gambling problem he’s apparently been trying to solve one short case of vodka at a time.” Dimitri shakes his head. “Almost feel bad for him. Almost.”
“He’ll survive it.”
“He’ll survive it broke and embarrassed, which is probably the point.” Dimitri sets the bottle down, and his voice shifts, careful in a way I recognize immediately. “He also mentioned something else. Might be nothing.”
“Go on.”
“Said he’s had a couple of new buyers sniffing around asking about our numbers particularly. Not fishing for a deal. Fishing for information.”
“Whose crew?”
“He didn’t know, or he’s smart enough not to say. Could be nothing, could be somebody doing homework before making a move somewhere down the line.”
“Keep an ear out. Anything more specific, I want to know immediately.”
“Sure thing.” He studies me for a second, a question sitting behind his eyes that he doesn’t ask outright. “How’s the kid settling in?”
“Better than I expected.”
“And Harper?”
“Also better than I expected.”
Dimitri doesn’t push further. He just nods and finishes his beer. After he leaves, I stand in the quiet kitchen a while longer.
Thinking about buyers asking questions they have no business asking, and about a girl asleep upstairs who trusted me enough tonight to fall asleep mid-sentence, and about her aunt somewhere down the hall in a robe that’s going to be the reason I don’t sleep well tonight either.
Two very different kinds of danger, sitting in the same house, and only one of them I actually know how to fight.
The other one I’ve been losing since the night she walked into my club and mistook me for someone I’ve never once been.