Page 35 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
I did not get to deliver any of it.
The front door opened before I was up the top step. Sienna was on the other side of it in jeans and a soft cream sweater with the cuffs pushed to her elbows, a wide white mug of coffee held in both hands at the level of her mouth. The smile she gave me was the one she had given me in her kitchen the afternoon I had first sat at her island and let her feed me a piece of warm breadwith butter on it. It was the smile of a woman who likes you and is glad to see you and is going to make you sit down.
Then her eyes moved past my shoulder to the empty step behind me, and the smile rearranged itself.
"Where is Daniil?" I said.
The mug came down off her mouth a half inch. It did not make it to the side table by the door. It hung there in both her hands.
"He is not with you?"
"He hasn't answered me in three days."
"He left here last night to drive to you."
"Are you sure?"
She did not answer me in words. Her face did the arithmetic instead. The eyes narrowing. The mouth going thin. The mug coming down the rest of the way, set on the small console without her looking at where she was setting it, the coffee jumping once against the inside of the rim.
She turned and was already moving through the front hall before I had finished the breath of the last question. I followed her. My coat was still on. The pendant was still in my pocket.
She went the length of the long hall past the sitting room and the open archway of the dining room and the tall narrow painting of a black horse, and she stopped at a closed door at the far end. She knocked once with the flat of her hand and pushed it open without waiting.
Mikhail was at a wide dark desk in a button-down shirt rolled to the forearms, two folders open on either side of him and a third in his hands. He looked up at the door with the small wash of irritation a man gets when his work is interrupted, and then he saw his wife's face, and the irritation went out of him in the same blink.
"What is it, wife?"
"Daniil. He never made it to her."
"Fuck."
He was up out of the chair before the word was all the way out. He came past us in the doorway in two long strides and he had a phone at his ear before he was back into the hall.
Three calls in a row. Alek first. Two words and a question. Then Ivan. Two more words. Then a man whose name I did not catch, something short and Russian, and the call to him was longer and lower and in a language I did not have. By the time he came back to the hall table by the staircase, Sienna had pulled a folded map out of a drawer and spread it flat. She had a phone of her own in her left hand and was already speaking into it in Korean, short flat sentences, the kind of voice she would use in a courtroom.
The house had been a quiet house thirty seconds earlier. It was a war room now.
Lily came down the wide front staircase first. She was in soft black leggings and a long gray cardigan and her feet were bare on the runner, and she came down the way a dancer comes down stairs, no weight on any one step, both hands on the banister only because she was making herself slow down. Her dark eyes were already wet. She had heard. The house had told her in some way I had not seen.
Jade was two steps behind her in jeans and a Henley, a glass of water in one hand and the other hand already reaching out for me from the third step. She did not stop coming until she had me.
They put themselves on either side of me in the hall the way the men were going to put themselves around a map in a minute. Lily took me by the elbows and turned me so I was facing her.
"We are with you. Breathe."
I tried to. The breath came in shallow and went out shallower.
Jade's hand was at the back of my neck, cool and steady. She brought the glass up between us.
"Drink."
I drank half of it. The water was very cold. It hurt going down, in the good way a thing hurts when it is making you remember you have a body. I gave the glass back to her and she set it on the console next to Sienna's coffee mug without taking her hand off me.
Sienna stayed in the hall with Mikhail. She made one more call in Korean and one in English and one in a language that was neither. Her free hand stayed flat on the map.
The brothers came through the front door together inside five minutes.
Alek first. Long black coat already on, the collar up, the leather eyepatch sitting where it always sat over the scarred side of his face. The working blue eye took the front hall in one pass. It found Mikhail at the table. It found Sienna with the phone. It found the three of us against the wall. He gave me one nod. It was not a soft nod and it was not a hard nod. It was the kind of nod a man gives a woman he has decided is going to be family. It went into me and stayed.
