Relentless Bratva Daddy (Wicked Bratva Daddies #6)

1. Nina

NINA

The oven had been broken for three weeks, the walk-in for two, and my heart for five years. Only one of them was going to ruin service tonight.

My money was on the oven.

“Behind you,” I said, sliding a tray of black bread past Marco’s elbow into the one warmer that still worked, if you slammed it twice and asked nicely.

The kitchen at Vera’s was the size of a confession booth and ran hotter.

Most nights that heat felt like an argument I was winning.

Tonight it felt like the building leaning down to breathe on my neck.

Marco threw his shoulder into the oven door, banged it twice, and the burner caught with a sound like a small apology.

“She lives,” he said. He was nineteen and sure nothing bad outlasted a good shift.

“For tonight,” I told him. “Tomorrow she belongs to somebody else, and so do I.” He grinned like he hadn’t caught the second half. One of us should get to believe it.

For an hour the line had run like a live thing, tickets feathering over the rail, onions going to glass, dumplings turning in the pot like sleepers.

I cook the way some people pray, hands busy, eyes down, and when the rail is full I can lose the drawer and the ceiling and everything stacked above it.

Then the orders thin, the forgetting thins with them, and the room comes back.

The walk-in had quit two weeks back, so the night’s fish and beef sat on bagged ice in the prep sink, every plate a quiet race against the thaw.

I had called the repair number until it stopped being a number and turned into a recording of one.

You learn to cook around whatever is dying.

The oven, the cooler, the lease. You keep the knife moving and never let the dining room hear you count.

Oksana shouldered through the swinging door, four plates fanned up one arm, her order pad clamped in her teeth. She spat it into her hand. “Table six wants the goulash. Hold the paprika.”

“Goulash is paprika. Take it out and what’s left is beef and regret.”

“That’s more or less what I told him. I left out the regret. I’m saving that for his tip.”

I plated two orders of pelmeni, wiped the rims, pushed them onto the pass. “Make him a stew with no pepper and charge him for the goulash. I’m not rewriting my grandmother’s menu for a man who thinks cumin is a threat.”

“You’re a gift to this neighborhood.”

“Tell it to the landlord.”

She let it go, because we both knew what lived in the register drawer, folded so the red ink faced the wood. I had read it enough times to recite it in my sleep. I kept it where I could see it and the customers couldn’t, in the same drawer as everything else with teeth.

Through the porthole window I took the count.

Six of twenty tables had people at them.

The rest wore clean cloths and the battery candles I’d bought when real wax started eating a margin I no longer had.

Above the register my grandmother watched the floor from her photograph, one hand on her hip like she was a breath from telling God to lower his voice.

Vera. The name over the door, the name on the soup, the reason I still held a key to anything worth keeping.

Two floors up, through one thin ceiling, my daughter slept with the hall light burning and the monitor feeding its soft hiss into my apron pocket.

Every plate I sent out laid another brick in the wall between her and that drawer.

It was the math I lived by, and tonight, for one good hour, it had almost come out even.

The monitor crackled, and my daughter’s voice came through it, thick with sleep.

“Mama.” Not a question, not a problem. A check, the way she ran it three or four times a night to be sure the world hadn’t moved while she wasn’t looking.

“I’ve got you, bug,” I said into my collar, under the noise of the line.

The sound settled. She wouldn’t remember asking.

I would remember answering. That, as far as I had worked it out, was the whole of the job.

A regular at the window lifted two fingers for his check.

I sent it over with a square of honey cake I wouldn’t be charging him for, because he came every week, tipped on the full total like it was 1980, and ate alone in a way I knew from the inside.

You come to know a room by who keeps returning to it.

Mine was small, stubborn, and mostly grey at the temples, and I would have burned before I let it close.

Marco had started scraping down the flattop.

Eddie, the dish kid, was murdering the same four notes under the spray nozzle he’d been murdering since March.

The last real table lingered over coffee they had quit drinking.

The floor went soft the way it does at the tail of a service, edges blurring, voices dropping, and for a few minutes the place felt like nobody had a claim on it but me.

Then Oksana set a water pitcher down too hard at my elbow and lowered her voice. “The back room hasn’t ordered a thing. Not water, not bread. It’s been an hour.”

“Maybe they ate before they came.”

“They paid cash for the whole room and counted it out on the host stand like a hand of cards. Six men. No coats off, not a glass touched.” Her eyes cut to the swinging door. “One of them just watches the front like he’s waiting on the second feature.”

I looked. The back room had its own short hallway, and from the pass I could see into the mouth of it, men crowded into the booth and standing around it.

Nobody ate. Nobody talked the way men talk when they have nowhere better to be.

They sat like they had been set down and told to wait, and the one nearest the hall watched my front door with the patience of a man being paid by the hour.

One of them kept a phone face-down on the cloth and turned it a quarter turn every minute, like a man minding a pot that refused to boil.

Another sat with his back square to my grandmother’s photo, which told me all I needed to know about the courtesy on offer.

They hadn’t picked my back room for the borscht.

They had picked it the way you pick a bus shelter, for what it stood beside, not for what it was.

“People have reasons,” I said. “Meetings. Card games. Sad little birthdays.”

“People order fries with their reasons.”

She wasn’t wrong. The trouble was, the only disaster I had budgeted for tonight was the oven.

“I’ll take their waters,” she said, because Oksana couldn’t leave a silence alone to save her life, and she filled the pitcher and went through before I could catch her arm.

I gave it a slow ten. Plated a fish. Gave it five more.

Then the pitcher came down too hard on the far side of the wall, and her voice came back through it wrong, bright and pulled thin. “All right. That’s close enough. You’re standing on my shoes, friend.”

I was through the door before I decided to be.

The hallway was narrow enough for one man to fill, and one did.

He had Oksana’s only way out blocked with nothing but his shoulder and the tilt of his body, easy, like he had all night and she was a door he hadn’t decided whether to open.

He was big the way men get when it’s a project.

When he turned to me his jacket fell open, and he let me see what he wanted me to see and pretend I hadn’t.

Black grip. Holster at the hip. Then the jacket swung shut, and he smiled, like we were all being so reasonable.

“Kitchen’s the other way,” he said.

“So is the food you never ordered.” My mouth has always outrun my judgment. I stepped in, putting myself where Oksana’s fear was, close enough to catch the cold coming off his coat and the cigarettes under it. “We’re shutting the back down. Whatever you came for can wait at the bar.”

“We’re comfortable.”

“You’re loitering with a reservation.”

From the booth, a younger one laughed, short, then killed it when nobody went along.

Oksana hadn’t moved. She held her tray to her chest like a breastplate, chin up, and in that second I loved her so much it ached, because she was scared to the soles of her feet and still standing there like she meant to bill these men for the trouble.

I found her wrist behind my back and squeezed once. Go. She stayed.

The big one didn’t move either. He looked at me the way you look at weather too small to change your plans. “You the owner?”

“I’m the chef. The owner is the woman in the photo by the register, and she’s meaner than I am. Take it up with her.”

He liked that, which was the part I hated. His smile widened like I had handed him something to play with later. “Go cook,” he said gently. “Be a smart girl.”

“Nice little place,” he added, not bothering to look at it. “Be a shame if it got loud in here.”

“It’s a restaurant. Loud is the point.”

“Not my kind of loud.”

Smart had never been my problem. Quiet was. I opened my mouth to prove it.

The bell over the front door rang.

Not the bright jangle it gave a family of four. One flat note, like the building had swallowed something the wrong way.

The big man’s eyes cut past me to the front, and his face changed before I could name how, the ease draining out of it. He came off the wall like a man who had just remembered he owned a spine and might need it.

I turned.

April came in first, wet across the shoulders of the men filling the doorway.

Four of them, and then four was the wrong number, because the four were only the edges of the one they moved around.

He came through the middle of them the way water finds a split seam, unhurried, reading the whole room in a single sweep.

Tall. A charcoal coat gone darker at the shoulders where the rain had found it.

He didn’t look at the food, the candles, my grandmother on the wall.

He looked at the men in back, and then he spoke, and he didn’t bother to lift his voice.

“Hands on the table. All of you.” A beat. “You picked the wrong block.”

The room obeyed him before I could. Six men who had been holding still turned into six men with their palms flat to the wood.

The big one in the hallway raised his hands slow and stepped back off Oksana like she had stopped existing, like the only thing in the building worth his attention now stood dripping on my threshold.

Somewhere a fork stopped against a plate and stayed there. The little candles shivered at nothing. Even the oven seemed to hold its breath, which was more than it had done for me in three weeks.

At the window, the grey-haired regular set his fork down, stood without being asked, and slid a folded bill under his water glass on the way out. He had already learned what I was still refusing to. The bell saw him out on the same flat note that had let the cold in.

I should have been measuring how much danger I was in. Instead I was doing a different sum, the stupid kind, the one that starts at the line of a jaw and ends somewhere I had sworn I would never stand again.

He finished with the back of the room and turned to take in the rest, the diners, the candles, whatever else didn’t belong to the thing he had walked in to do. His gaze crossed the floor, crossed the pass, and landed on the woman in the mouth of the hallway with a dish towel strangled in one fist.

And held.

I knew that look. I had stood inside it once, on a colder night, in a doorway a long way from this one, before I taught myself to fold a man down small enough to carry and put him somewhere I would never have to look again.

I had told my daughter he was a hero in the sky.

I had said it so often I had half come to believe the sky part myself.

He wasn’t in the sky. He stood eleven feet away with rain still in his hair and five years rising up the back of my throat.

I had run this moment a hundred times in the worst hours of the night, every word I would throw at him if the dead ever found the nerve to come back at all. All of it left me at once, and took my voice with it.

The towel dropped out of my hand. I reached for the tray on the stand, for anything to hold on to, and my fingers brushed the edge and missed.

I dropped a full tray of glasses. In a room packed with armed men, the only sound was breaking glass, and one impossible word, in a voice I had buried with my own hands. “Nina.”