Chapter Six
~ Braham ~
I was awake before the baby started screaming. Not a full hour before, but enough to count. Three a.m. by the Patek on my nightstand, and I’d been watching the city’s lights crawl the length of the river for a long, unbroken stretch.
Insomnia had stopped being a problem decades ago. Now it was more of a condition, like being left-handed or taller than average, something you accepted and weaponized when the rest of the world chose to sleep.
The suite was silent except for the pressure-differential hush from the window and the soft, irregular breathing of an infant. She hadn’t made a sound in six hours. That was an outlier worth noting. I mentally revised the predicted interval for next feeding: plus or minus twelve minutes.
The hunger-cry, when it came, hit like a round cracking off a frozen surface. One second the penthouse was the usual mausoleum of quiet luxury; the next, every cubic foot vibrated with need. It was the kind of wail designed to ensure the entire evolutionary chain snapped to attention.
I waited. Not out of laziness—out of respect. Thirty seconds and the next sound was the light, almost theatrical thump of bare feet to hardwood in the suite next door.
I tracked the route in my head: left, past the linen cabinet, quick detour to the bathroom for a warm wash cloth, then the direct line to the nursery niche.
A beat later, the baby’s cry dropped to a half-volume complaint, punctuated by the little “heh” sound Grace made when air hit the back of her throat.
Jai’s voice followed, not even pretending to whisper, “Okay. I hear you, bean. Give me a second.”
I let it play out. Counted another thirty. Sometimes, the best way to measure a man was to see how he handled waking crisis with no audience and no margin for error.
He never once raised his voice.
I threw on sleep pants, pulled my hair back, and stepped into the hallway just as Grace let out a second, more indignant wail. I tracked them by scent: powder, sweat, cherry blossom, and under it, the dense, animal certainty of a newborn in full distress.
The penthouse at this hour ran on two frequencies—blue and amber.
The city side was all dark glass and the sodium grid of streetlamps spiking up through the rain; the interior was low-lit, one cone of hood light illuminating the kitchen island in the far corner.
The rest was shadow, every detail rendered down to the high-gloss of the walnut and the matte of the tile.
Jai was already at the counter, Grace tucked in the crook of his left arm, her cheek mashed against the fabric of a cutoff Army t-shirt.
His other hand worked the formula scoop, measured and flat, into the bottle with the kind of precision I’d only ever seen in surgeons or bomb techs.
His movements were so clean that if you squinted, you could almost believe this was his hundredth baby, not his first.
She had one fist balled tight around his thumb, the other tangled in the collar of his shirt, and she kept up a steady, rhythmic fuss, undistracted by anything except the delay in her feeding schedule.
I watched from the doorway, leaning one shoulder to the frame, not making a sound. The floor under my bare feet was cold, but I didn’t mind it. The cold reminded me I was here, now, in a room where nothing could ever possibly surprise me again.
Jai didn’t turn. He never needed to look to know who was in the room. “You can come in. You breathe louder than you think you do,” he said, even, eyes fixed on the level of the bottle as he gave it one last, careful shake.
I stepped inside, crossing to the barstools at the island. I dragged one out, sat, and propped my elbows on the counter. “I’ll get that looked at,” I said.
“You do that.” He pressed the back of his wrist to the inside of his forearm, testing the formula’s temperature in a gesture so practiced it bypassed conscious thought.
He shifted Grace higher, then maneuvered the bottle into place and, with an ease that bordered on supernatural, coaxed the nipple into her mouth.
The room went silent.
He held her like she was both priceless and indestructible, his whole body curved to the shape of her hunger. The only sound was the tiny, ferocious suction of a baby draining half an ounce at a time.
I watched him watch her. In the half-shadow, he looked softer than usual, but only just. There was nothing tentative about how he held her, just a zeroed-in focus that reminded me, for a second, of the men I’d run with at war: calm in the kill zone, loose in every joint, but always, always ready for the move.
“You’ve never done this before her,” I said.
Not a question.
He shot a glance my way, lollipop-bright and biting as ever. “Nope. Turns out it’s not that complicated. She’s hungry, you feed her. She’s wet, you change her. She’s scared, you hold her. Basic mammal logic.”
I watched the lines of his arms, the precision of his grip. “You make it look easy.”
“I make everything look easy,” he said, deadpan.
“It’s a gift.” He kept one hand at the base of Grace’s head, two fingers flexed to keep her jaw from going slack, and it occurred to me that every movement he made, even the ones he’d never practiced before, was engineered to keep something smaller than him alive.
Her eyes were half-closed, lashes almost translucent in the cone of amber light. I tracked the rise and fall of her chest, the steady hand feeding her, and the thin, sharp slice of Jai’s profile as he watched her drink.
He shifted her, thumb working a lazy, absentminded circle on the back of her neck. Grace’s grip tightened on his finger, and she made a greedy, satisfied grunt.
I catalogued it all. The faded ink on his left bicep—regimental, but amended. The way his jaw locked when he was holding in a laugh. The deliberate tension in his feet, which never quite rested flat, as if he was always expecting a call to move.
“What time is it?” he said, without looking up.
“Three-fifteen.”
He exhaled through his nose. “That tracks.”
The city below was running at full burn. I glanced out the glass wall—orange and white, bridges shining like bone, the river gleaming with rain and a sliver of moon.
If I listened, I could almost catch the throb of nightlife at the street level, but up here the only pulse was the baby’s heart and the soft, persistent hum of the refrigerator.
The kitchen smelled like formula, detergent, and, faintly, the aftertaste of whatever expensive scotch I’d poured before I gave up on sleep.
Under that, the unmistakable signature of my own territory, cedar and heat.
It was in the paint, the grout, the fibers of the furniture.
Every wolf I’d ever brought into the apartment had clocked it in the first second.
Jai seemed immune. He just fed the baby, like she was the only variable left in the equation.
Grace’s eyelids fluttered, the weight of milk and midnight catching up to her. Her grip softened, but she didn’t let go.
I spoke, because the silence was close to unbearable. “She trusts you. Instantly.”
He looked down at her, and for the first time since I’d met him, there was something like awe in his face.
“She trusts anyone who can hold a bottle and keep her upright.” He said it with his usual fatalism, but I saw the crack in the mask: a sharp, involuntary tenderness, gone as quick as it appeared.
“She doesn’t relax with me,” I said, just to test it.
He snorted. “You’re three million times her size and you have a stare that could intimidate a brick. She’ll get used to you.”
I watched the side of his mouth curl, just for a second, and let the moment hang.
Grace slowed, then stopped. Jai extracted the bottle with surgical efficiency, wiped her mouth, and braced her against his chest, palm at the center of her back. She burped, loud and astonishing, and the noise hung in the air like an accusation.
He grinned, proud and resigned. “That’s my girl.”
I thought of saying something trite, like you’re good with her, but that would’ve landed like a grenade.
Instead, I just watched, memorizing the geometry of the scene: the sine wave of his spine bent to cradle her, the contrast of bare muscle and infant soft, the way he never seemed to be aware of how closely I watched him.
I catalogued everything about him, down to the ragged edge of the shirt collar and the powder residue on his hands. I could taste his pulse from across the counter, a restless, high-frequency want that had nothing to do with hunger or fatigue.
I filed it away, because I could.
The baby, now drifting, pressed her face into the hollow of his collarbone and let out a low, uncertain whine. Jai ran his palm down her back, slow and even. “Shh. I got you,” he said. His voice wasn’t soft, but it was the closest he got.
I wanted, very badly, to cross the gap between us and do something—anything—other than watch. But the rules of this standoff were set, and neither of us was ready to call a draw.
Instead, I leaned forward, knuckles white on the edge of the counter, and asked, “What are you thinking?”
He flicked his eyes at me, then away, then back. “I’m thinking if she falls asleep now, she’ll wake up again at six, and then you’re on deck.”
“Deal,” I said. It was the first thing we’d agreed on without an argument.
He stood there, baby in arms, unmoving for a long, slow minute. The hood light cast everything in a ring of false gold, and the city—unwitnessed—kept spinning outside the glass.
He finally said, “You ever sleep?”
“Not often,” I answered.
He nodded, like that was the right answer. “I get it.”
The refrigerator kicked on, the motor noise a background drone. The bottle, half-empty, sat next to his hand on the counter, the ring of formula at the lip catching the light.
“You always do the after-action review before you sleep?” I said.
He grinned, more with his eyes than his mouth. “Only when I think the night might get weird.”
“Does it?”