The Bratva Daddy's Secret Baby

1. Sofia

SOFIA

"Comfortable?"

The word left him unhurried, low enough to feel more than hear, like laughter he'd decided against letting all the way out, and he still hadn't let go.

The chain gave out with a shriek like a gunshot, and before the sound had even finished registering, I was airborne, boots skidding on wet concrete, headed for a faceful of pavement I never actually got to meet.

I hit six feet three of ruined wool suit instead, one arm hooking around my waist so fast it felt less like being caught and more like being confiscated.

My hard hat clipped his chin on the way down, and my knee found somewhere it had absolutely no business finding.

My coffee thermos, apparently done being loyal to me, hit the pavement, popped its lid, and launched sixteen ounces of gas station coffee straight up the front of his shirt like it had been aiming for him the whole time.

For one long, suspended second, neither of us moved, the forklift shuddering to a stop a few feet away, its load still swinging, crisis apparently handled by everyone except the two of us.

I was plastered against a stranger who smelled like cedar and very expensive laundry, one hand still fisted in his lapel without my permission, my mouth roughly level with his collarbone, my hips somehow flush against his in a way no HR seminar had ever once prepared me for.

Behind us a dockworker made a sound that had stopped even pretending to be a cough, and somebody else muttered something in Polish that didn't need translating to land.

"Working on it," I said, before my brain caught up with my mouth, and I felt the low rumble of his laugh against the top of my head, warm and entirely too pleased with itself.

I shoved back off him hard enough that we both stumbled, my hard hat sliding sideways, one boot catching on a loose pallet strap, and went down half a step before I caught myself against a shipping container, thoroughly undignified and thoroughly unwilling to admit it.

I looked up. He looked down, coffee soaking dark through pale gray fabric, and he didn't so much as blink, like ruining a suit was simply the price of admission for whatever this was turning out to be.

"You always dive into strange men's arms on your first shift?" His mouth had eased into something not quite a smile, and he said it like the answer already amused him more than the coffee did.

I scrambled up the rest of the way, my cheeks burning hot enough to blame on exertion, my hard hat sliding half off and my dignity going with it.

"You always let your crew start fires before HR does the paperwork?" I shot back. "That forklift just tried to kill me."

"It tried to kill several thousand dollars of cargo. You were incidental."

"Comforting."

"I try."

He straightened his cuffs, glanced down at the coffee spreading across his chest like it belonged to somebody else's problem, and didn't look bothered in the slightest, which was somehow more unsettling than if he had been.

Six hours into the job, and this was already how the night was going.

Calumet Harbor Terminal ran on floodlights and diesel at two in the morning, cumbia leaking out from behind a wall of stacked containers, and I was three weeks into a cover identity held together by a fake résumé and a hard hat two sizes too big.

None of my training had covered what to do once you'd ended up chest to chest with the one man you were supposed to be watching from a careful, professional distance.

My father used to say a room without an exit is just a trap with better lighting, and eleven years after he died I still counted every exit in a room the way other people counted their own heartbeat, automatic and impossible to switch off. I'd counted four just walking onto this dock tonight.

Not one of them had accounted for the exit problem currently standing several feet away in a ruined suit, looking entirely too pleased with himself for a man wearing someone else's coffee.

My training caught up with my instincts three full seconds too late, which was three seconds longer than it had ever taken me to read a stranger before tonight.

Dark hair, cut close and precise, and a jaw that never fully relaxed, even standing still, like he'd forgotten how somewhere around age thirty.

His green eyes, pale under the floodlights, tracked me with a stillness that had nothing to do with the coffee and everything to do with him deciding, right then, exactly what kind of problem I was.

I knew that look. I'd been trained to spot it across a crowded room, and it belonged to a man who noticed everything and forgot nothing.

"You're bleeding," he said.

I glanced down at the thin red line tracking along my forearm where the concrete had caught me on the way down.

"It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. Hold still."

He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, actual cloth, monogrammed, the kind of thing nobody under sixty carried anymore, and pressed it to my arm before I could decide whether to let him.

His hands moved careful and sure, too careful for a man built like he could put someone through a wall without trying very hard.

"You don't know me," I said.

"I know you almost died under my forklift ten seconds ago. Feels like enough of an introduction to at least stop the bleeding."

"It's not your forklift."

"Everything on this dock is my forklift."

That landed different than the rest of it had, not a joke but a fact, stated plainly, the way some men state the weather.

"And who exactly are you?"

Behind him, the dockworker who'd choked on his laugh went quiet, and a second man near the crane pulled his hat off like church had just started.

The stranger smiled, warm and easy, the kind of smile that probably worked on everyone who'd never once seen what sat underneath it.

I had a feeling I'd just seen it.

Behind the containers, the radio dropped into static, and the whole yard seemed to hold still, waiting to hear his name.

"Maxim Kuznetsov."

Three weeks of studying that name had given me grainy surveillance shots and a decade-old license photo, none of it anything close to enough to prepare me for green eyes at close range, or a voice that made my own name sound like it already belonged to him.

"Sofia Reyes." I had to say something. "New hire. Logistics."

"I know who you are, Miss Reyes."

My pulse did something wildly unhelpful.

"Is that supposed to be intimidating?"

"Call it honesty. I read every file that crosses this dock. Yours included."

"Should I be flattered?"

"I'd worry less about flattery and more about spilling coffee on the man who owns the building you work in."

"Duly noted. I'll aim better next time."

"There won't be a next time. I don't usually get coffee thrown on me twice by the same person."

"Give me a week."

Something shifted across his face, not quite a laugh, closer to surprise, like he hadn't expected to enjoy this nearly as much as he clearly was.

Denny reappeared at the edge of my vision, toothpick gone, the color drained clean out of his face in a way I hadn't seen from him all shift.

"Mr. Kuznetsov. Didn't know you were out here tonight."

"Clearly." Maxim didn't look away from me. "Your forklift almost killed my new logistics coordinator."

"Mechanical fault, sir. We're pulling the maintenance logs now."

"Pull them faster."

Denny vanished like the yard had erased him.

Noted, filed, worth remembering: one word from this man, and grown dockworkers moved like they'd been struck.

Maxim looked down at his ruined shirt, seeming to notice it again for the first time since I'd hit him with it.

"This was a good suit."

"I'll send you a bill for the thermos. It was a good thermos."

"Deal."

"Why do you drink gas station coffee at two in the morning?"

"Same reason you're out here doing inventory checks in a suit that costs more than my car. Bad decisions go down easier with caffeine."

"Fair," he said, and looked like he meant it.

He held out a hand, and I shook it before I'd fully decided to, the warmth of his palm lasting a beat longer than any handshake needed to.

"You're at Calumet now," he said. "I run domestic operations here. Questions go to Kirill, my foreman. The ones that actually matter, you bring to me."

"How will I know the difference?"

"Trust me. You'll know the second it matters."

He tucked a strand of hair back from my face before I could stop him, the gesture so casual it took me a full second to register how far past professional it landed.

"Welcome to the docks, Miss Reyes." A beat, his eyes still on mine. "Try not to die on my watch."

He turned and walked toward the office block without looking back, coffee stain and all, ruining a three thousand dollar suit like it was simply part of his evening now.

I stood under the floodlights, pulse still climbing, his handkerchief pressed to my arm, and watched him go. Behind me the cumbia station finally caught a clean signal, and the song came through whole for the first time all night, like the yard itself had exhaled.

I checked my watch out of habit, my father's, oversized on my wrist, the band held together with a strip of black tape where the leather had cracked years ago. Two fourteen in the morning.

Three weeks of prep behind me, ninety days on the clock, and one target whose face I already knew better than my own, studied in briefing rooms until it stopped looking like a person and started looking like a case file with green eyes and a reputation that made grown men go quiet when he walked past.

None of that had prepared me for the fact that I would remember his hands on my arm longer than I remembered anything from the file.

The photographs never mentioned how careful he'd be with a stranger's cut, or how his voice dropped a register when he told me to hold still, like the words mattered more than the situation did.

Nobody had briefed me on the smile either, the one that had my pulse acting like it belonged to somebody with far less training than I supposedly had.

I made myself a promise standing in that floodlit yard, coffee drying on my sleeve, a stranger's handkerchief still pressed to my skin.

I would not like this man.

I already didn't believe myself, and that was the part that should have scared me most.

"Reyes!"

Denny's voice cut through it, a fresh clipboard already waving at me from across the yard, and I made myself move, grateful for something else to look at besides a gray suit disappearing into the office block.

"You good?" he asked when I reached him, the color still not fully back in his face.

"I'll live."

"That's the boss. Owns half this operation. You don't want to be on his bad side."

"Wasn't planning on it."

"Everybody plans on it," Denny said. "Nobody manages it."

It sounded like a lesson learned the hard way, and I filed it onto a list already getting too long for one night.

"Special run." He handed over the clipboard before I could ask what he meant. "Get it loaded before the tide window closes. Manifest's already signed."

I scanned it anyway, old habit outrunning the sting still climbing my forearm.

Six pallets listed as industrial fasteners, dimensions all wrong, too tall, too narrow, nothing like the crates fasteners actually shipped in, the kind of detail that would have meant nothing to anyone who hadn't spent four years learning exactly what a lie looked like on paper.

Four years on the job had taught me one reliable thing: people who lied about cargo dimensions were usually lying about the cargo.

I kept my expression easy and let it go, for now. My hand twitched toward my hip, toward a badge that hadn't been there in three weeks and still wasn't, and I turned the reflex into scratching my wrist before anyone noticed.

"Copy that," I said. "No questions."

Denny grunted like that was the smartest thing I'd said all shift and stalked off toward the crane operator, already shouting about the tide window, leaving me alone with a signed manifest and six pallets of a lie I intended to spend the next ninety days unraveling.

The night shift had four more hours to run, and I meant to spend every one of them clocking exits, counting containers, and repeating the same lie to myself until it finally started sounding true.

It didn't work. That feeling followed me long after the night was over.

I looked down at the handkerchief still folded in my palm, fine linen, his initials stitched small into one corner, a coffee stain crossing the monogram like a signature of its own. I should have thrown it away. It was evidence of nothing, and I had no business keeping it.

I folded it instead and tucked it into my jacket pocket, careful, the way you handle something you already suspect you're going to regret keeping.

The tide window came and went, the pallets loaded without incident, and by the time my shift ended the sky had gone the color of old bruises over the water.

I walked out past the office block where he'd disappeared hours earlier, half expecting to see him there again, and felt something close to disappointment when I didn't.

Ninety days. One target. A handkerchief I had no business carrying home, and a version of myself I was going to have to build convincingly enough to survive whatever came next.