Page 1 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
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 arethe 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 theirown. 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.
