Page 92 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
I leaned over carefully and put my head on her shoulder, on the side away from the bruised hip, and she made a small satisfied sound and did not move. The Korean drama played on, low. The woman in the snowy park was now arguing with a man in a long coat. The radiator clanked. The doenjang murmured on the stove. Somewhere outside a car horn went off and a kid laughed.
I had not been still like this in a long time.
By the time the late evening came, she had eaten a small bowl of soup, a small bowl of rice, and a small bowl of my insisting, and then she had drifted off on the couch with the blanket up to her chin and the drama still going. I turned the volume down another notch. I tucked the corner of the blanket under her foot where it had slipped. I kissed the top of her head, light, so I wouldn't wake her.
I took my phone and a fresh cup of barley tea to the tiny kitchen table. I propped the phone against a stack of paper napkins from the takeout place down the block. The chair creaked under me the way it always had. I was halfway through a long slow breath when the screen lit up.
I picked up on the second ring.
His face came onto the screen. He was in our bedroom at the compound. The lamp on his side was on. He was in a soft dark T-shirt, his hair a little messy in the way it got when he had run his hand through it more than once. His eyes were tired. They went soft the second they found me.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"How is she?"
"Good. Bruised. Cranky about it. She made me eat two dinners."
A small huff of breath. The closest he came to a laugh most days.
"Good."
"How was your day?"
"Long." A pause. "Alek and Ivan pulled something useful out of a warehouse on the water. Mikhail is restless. He wants the next piece to move tonight. I am making him wait until morning."
"Restrained of you."
"I am working on it."
I shifted the phone on the napkins so I could see him better. He did the same. His face filled the small screen. The lamp put a warm line along his jaw.
"And you?" he said.
"Tired. Happy. A little sad. The usual when I come here."
He looked at me for a stretch. Just looked. His face did the thing it did, the small softening at the corner of his eyes that almost no one else in the world had ever been allowed to see.
A notification chimed in the corner of his screen. He glanced sideways.
"Rhea has sent a sticker."
"What kind?"
"A bear hugging a heart. There is glitter on it. It is moving."
"Tell her I love it."
"I am forwarding it to your phone as we speak."
Behind him a door opened. A familiar voice shouted something I couldn't quite catch, except for my name, the word brilliant, and what was almost certainly Mikhail's idea of a joke.Daniil closed his eyes for a half second like a man trying to keep his patience.
"Did he just call me brilliant?"
"He called you a treasure. Then he called me an idiot for letting you out of the building. I am paraphrasing."
"He's not wrong about the first part."
