Obsessed Bratva Daddy (Wicked Bratva Daddies #4)

Chapter 1

DANIIL

She came in at nine forty-two, two minutes later than the last three times I had clocked her walking into any room.

Coat over her arm, hair down, that small hesitation at the threshold that told me she had never been inside a place like Krov before.

She paid for the coat check with a folded twenty, took the ticket with both hands, and tucked it into the inside pocket of a black bag that did not match the rest of what she was wearing. Borrowed bag. Borrowed nerve.

I watched from the upper booth on the mezzanine, where the rail let me sit above the floor without sitting in it.

Cedar from the wood panels at my back, smoke and bergamot off the bar candles below, the low pulse of the bass running up through the soles of my shoes.

The bartender she did not know yet had already poured her a glass of the cheap white she ordered when her hands needed something to do.

Tea with two sugars when she was tired. Black coffee, no room, when she was working. White when she was scared.

Her friend left her at ten ten. I caught the goodbye at the bar, the quick hug, the friend's mouth at her ear, some line about an early shift and a cab already pulled up at the curb on Lafayette.

Chloe nodded the way polite people nod when they are being abandoned.

She held the smile until the door swallowed the other woman, and what was left on her face when nobody was watching cut me in the chest.

I did not let myself look long. I read her the way I read every room: the whole of it at once, her inside it, the men at the bar who had not noticed her yet, the camera in the far corner that fed into the office Mikhail kept upstairs.

I knew what time the back hallway emptied.

I knew which of the bouncers tonight had a daughter at home and which one did not.

The first time I had seen her was at a coffee shop on Mott.

Three months back. The sleeve of a gray sweater pushed past her wrist, a pinch of coins counted out on the marble counter, one penny short.

She had laughed at herself instead of going red.

I put a dollar down behind her before I knew I had moved. She left before she could see me do it.

I had not stopped knowing things about her since.

"You are going to wear a hole in that railing, brother."

Mikhail. Stoli on the rocks already in his hand, jacket off, sleeves pushed to the elbow because he had been on the floor talking somebody out of a stupid decision and had not bothered to roll them down before he came up.

The Glock rode the small of his back where it always did.

He set the drink in front of me without asking.

"I am working."

"You are watching. Those are not the same thing." He slid into the booth across from me, all easy mouth and tired eyes. "Get her, brother."

"She is not for this room."

"I never said she was." He picked up the Stoli, looked at it, set it back down. "I said the watching is all you get if you only watch. Do not doubt yourself, Daniil." He waited a beat. "You are the only one of us our father did not ruin. You deserve a slightly normal life. Take it."

I said nothing. I kept my eyes on her. I let the silence do what silence does between men who have shared rooms with bodies in them.

Mikhail let it sit. He always did, once he had said the only thing worth saying.

He was the one who saw the man before I did, because I had been busy with her hand on the stem of the glass. Mikhail's chin lifted half an inch, the smallest tell, and my eyes tracked.

The man was tall, mid-thirties, in a suit that cost more than the rest of him deserved.

He came up on her left side, where her bag was not, where her attention was not, the way a man comes at a woman who has never been in a room like this before.

He said something. She turned, polite. He raised a hand to the bartender.

The bartender, who was not stupid, glanced once at the upper booth before he poured.

I gave no sign. I wanted to see what the man would do with his hands.

He did it with his hands.

A second glass came across the bar and was set in front of her.

The man's wrist crossed the rim of it as he pointed at something behind her, easy, charming, a magician's flourish.

A nothing. A small white nothing into a glass of cheap white wine.

My jaw locked so quietly that the muscle did not move.

She took the glass because she was polite. She drank because he was watching her drink. She set it down half empty and lifted her hand to her hair the way women do when they want a moment of distance and do not know how to ask for one.

Two minutes. Three. I counted them on the inside of my wrist.

Her hand on the bar slid an inch. She caught it and considered it as if it belonged to somebody else.

The line of her shoulders went soft in a way shoulders do not go soft on their own.

Her smile turned uneven, the corner of her mouth not catching up with the other corner.

She blinked at the man, and the man smiled wider, and his hand went to the small of her back, low, proprietary, and I was already moving when Mikhail said it.

"I take the man. You take the girl."

"Go."

We came down the stairs together and split before the floor. Mikhail went wide, around the long side of the bar, past the DJ booth, hand in his pocket where his phone lived next to the Glock. I came straight. The crowd opened the way a crowd opens for men who are not asking.

The man had a hand on her waist and was steering her, slow, smiling, toward the mouth of the hallway that ran past the restrooms and dead-ended at a service door I had walked through myself a hundred times.

Her feet were not refusing him. They had stopped knowing what feet were for.

Her head tipped against his shoulder at an angle that belonged to a doll, and something in my chest went very still.

Mikhail stepped in front of them three paces from the hallway. He laid a hand on the man's forearm, light, the way you greet an old friend at a wedding.

"You have your hand on Daniil Sorokin's girl." Mikhail's voice was the voice he used with banks. "Are you sure that is the last decision you want to make tonight?"

"I... I did not..." the man began.

Mikhail's other hand went into his stomach, short, low, the kind of punch that looks like a hug from any other angle in the room.

The man folded over Mikhail's shoulder. Mikhail caught him under the arm, smiled at someone passing, and led him toward the back the way you lead a friend who has had one too many.

I caught her before she finished falling.

She was lighter than I had let myself imagine.

My arm went under her shoulders and my other hand to her waist, and she came against my chest with no resistance at all, every ounce of her nothing, her hair against my jaw, the smell of her coconut and something green, a cheap drugstore shampoo I would have bought a warehouse of right then if it would have helped.

Her cheek found the inside of my collar.

Her hand, the one that had been losing the glass, closed on my lapel with the last grip she had.

"It is all right," I said, low, against the crown of her head. "I have you. I have you, sweet girl."

She made a sound that was not a word.

I lifted her. Not the way a man lifts a body.

The way Mikhail had moved the other one through the room, easy, unremarkable, a friend helping a friend out of a bad night.

The bouncer at the side door did not look at me twice.

The cold of the street hit my face, and the Maybach was at the curb, Yuri behind the wheel, the back door open, no questions.

"Compound."

Yuri nodded once. The door closed. The car moved.

She did not stay on her side of the seat.

Whatever they had put in her wanted skin, wanted closeness, and her body went after it without asking her permission.

She turned into me. Her cheek found my shoulder again.

Her hand slid off my lapel and down. Her palm came to rest on my thigh, flat and warm and absolutely without intention.

Every muscle in my leg went to stone underneath it.

"Mm..." she said, into the wool of my jacket. "Smell... good..."

Sleep, ptichka, I thought, and did not say it.

I kept my hands where they belonged. The left on the seat beside me, fingers spread on the leather.

The right on the door handle, knuckles white enough that Yuri's eyes flicked to them in the rearview and away again.

I had taken apart a man last spring with less effort than I was spending on not moving my hand two inches to the left.

She murmured something into my collarbone. Half a name that was not mine. A breath of a laugh with nothing inside it.

I would have walked back into that club and broken every bone in the hand that had dosed her glass.

I would have done it with the same face I wore to family dinners.

And I was also the man who would sit in this seat with her weight against my ribs and not shift one finger, because what was happening to her was not a thing a man used.

That was the one line I had ever been sure of in my life, and I held it while she breathed against my throat for forty minutes of the parkway.

The gravel of the drive came up under the tires. The headlights washed the fieldstone wall, the willow Lily had planted her first spring here, the old oaks throwing their shadows long across the lawn. The house was warm in the windows. Somebody had left the lamp on in the front room.

Yuri got the door. I lifted her from the seat. She did not stir. She was not asleep so much as elsewhere. I took the steps two at a time with her against my chest and shouldered the front door.

Lily and Jade were on the couch, a throw between them, a movie I did not look at long enough to recognize. Lily saw me first and was off the couch before her glass was on the table.

"Help me," I said. "She has been drugged."

"Oh." Lily's voice went small and real, no performance in it. Jade was already moving.

They took her from me, one on each side, careful with her head, careful with her hair.

They turned for the hallway that ran to the guest rooms, and I followed with the phone already at my ear, the family doctor's line ringing once before he picked up.

He did not ask the questions I would have had to lie about.

He said twenty minutes. He made it in eighteen.

He worked over her for a quarter of an hour with the door half open. Pulse, pupils, the small light, the cuff, a few quiet questions to Lily about how she had come in and what I had seen drop into the glass. He straightened finally and pulled the stethoscope off his neck.

"Common sedative. Not a heroic dose. She will sleep it off and wake clear by sunrise. Water at the bedside. Someone with her until she opens her eyes."

"Thank you."

"Daniil." He paused at the door with his bag. He had known me since I was twelve. "Whoever did it..."

"Will not see morning."

He nodded once and went.

Lily and Jade stood in the doorway when I came back down the hall with a fresh glass of water. Lily had her arms folded. Jade had her head tipped, that physical-therapist look she got when she was reading a body that was not on her table.

"Are we meeting lover boy Daniil tonight, or are we still pretending you only saved her?" Lily said.

"Or do we have to say the word for you?" Jade said.

"I pulled her out of a bad room. Nothing more."

"Your eyes give you up, lesser devil."

"Do not lie to us, Daniil." Jade's voice softer than Lily's, which made it worse. "Whatever this becomes, we are with you."

"Then leave. She does not need an audience."

They went. Lily made it three steps down the hall before she turned back, hand on the doorframe, the smile she wore when she was about to draw blood.

"She is pretty, your bad-room girl. Try not to look at her like that when she wakes."

The door clicked shut behind them.

The room held one lamp on low, the bed turned down, her shoes already off and set neat on the rug. Somebody, Jade probably, had laid a blanket over her up to the collarbone. Her hair was spread on the pillow in a dark fan, one strand caught against the corner of her mouth, lifting with her breath.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under me and she did not stir.

I lifted the strand of hair off her mouth with two fingers and laid it back along her temple.

I did it slowly, the way a man defuses a thing he does not want to break.

The pulse at her throat moved steady and small under the skin.

My thumb found the curve of her cheekbone before I had given it permission, and my palm settled along her jaw, and her face turned, in sleep, into my hand.

I had spent my life being the warm one. The joker. The lesser devil. The brother who laughed first so the rest of them could breathe.

I was not laughing now.

She is mine, I thought, and she does not know it yet, and I left my hand against her face, and I did not move it for a long time.