Page 103 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
"It is not on you. Did you call?"
"Yes. They are coming."
"Good." I bent and kissed her forehead, once, hard, the way you set a seal. "Stay down. If anyone else comes up, do not hesitate. You shoot. Do you hear me?"
She nodded. The fear sat all over her face but the nod was clean. "I hear you."
"Good girl."
I was gone again before the words had finished landing.
It took another two minutes. Maybe less. The remnant fell apart from the inside, the way scared crews do once two of theirs go down badly. Two threw their weapons down and put their hands behind their heads. We zip-tied them face down on the centerline. The rest stayed where they had fallen.
Sergei walked the line of bodies in low ready, kicking each weapon out of reach with the side of his boot. Anatoly was already on the radio. The cold smelled of cordite and wet leaves and copper.
Tires up the road. Three vehicles in close formation from the direction of the compound. Alek's car, then Mikhail's, then Ivan's. They came onto the scene with the choreography of twenty years doing it together. Doors opened in sequence. They moved in.
Alek had a long coat open over a charcoal sweater. He was not running. Alek does not run. He covered the distance between his car and mine in a smooth contained stride, his eyes doing the work as he came, taking in the bodies, the zip-tied two, my men, me, the open door of the SUV where Chloe was still inside with Rhea.
He nodded at me. Small. Brother to brother.
Then he looked down at the two on the asphalt with their wrists behind their backs.
"This is the remaining hand of their association," he said, calm, as if he were reading a weather report. "We will clean every one of them. They are weak. They will not last the week."
Mikhail had come up on his shoulder with a shotgun loose at his hip, the muzzle pointed politely at the ground. He looked down at the bodies in the road with his head tilted. "Cesare's bench warmers." He nudged one with the toe of his boot. "Lucia is scraping."
"Lucia is for tomorrow," Ivan said. He had not raised his voice. He never does. He was already crouched by one of the zip-tied men, a hand on the back of the man's neck the way you handle a dog that has not decided whether to bite. The body under his palm had gone very still.
I let myself look back at my SUV.
Chloe had not moved from the doorway. The pistol was still in her hands but pointed at the floor now. Rhea was tucked against her side, face still pressed into Beom-Beom. Chloe's eyes were on me.
I went to them.
The drive home was quiet. Anatoly took the wheel again, calm, as if the broken window over his shoulder was a small inconvenience. Sergei had taped plastic over the worst of it. The wind whistled through anyway. I sat in the back with Rhea on my lap, her head under my chin, her braids smelling of Halmoni's kitchen. Chloe sat against the far door with her hand on Rhea's back. She did not say a word for thirty miles.
I watched her in the rearview when Anatoly's eyes were on the road. I knew the look. I have worn it. The first time I had killed a man I had been a boy, and I had walked the rest of thatnight with my hands in my pockets so I would not have to look at them.
The gates of the compound came up out of the dusk. Gravel under the tires. The big doors opened before we had stopped. Mikhail had run ahead and was already on the front step. He came down and took Rhea out of my arms without asking. Rhea let him. He murmured something low and gentle, the side of him almost no one outside the family ever sees, and started up the stairs with her on his hip and Beom-Beom dangling from her fist.
From the upstairs landing came Lily's voice, soft and bright and already moving toward them. "Oh my sweet girl, come here, come here, we have warm bread and a fire, come to me, sweetheart, come here."
Chloe walked past all of it. She did not look at Lily. She did not look at the housekeeper already moving to take her coat. She walked straight through the foyer and up the stairs and down the corridor to my room.
I followed her. I did not push. I closed the door behind us with the back of my heel.
She stood in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped around her own ribs, the way a person stands when she is holding something inside her chest she does not have a name for. She was not crying. Her eyes were on the rug.
I went to her slow. I stopped a foot away. I did not touch her yet.
"Chloe. Come here."
She moved into me on autopilot. I folded her against my chest. Her arms stayed around her own ribs for a beat. Then they loosened. Then her hands came up and closed in two small fists at the back of my shirt.
I held her. I did not speak for a long time. I let her body decide what it needed. Her cheek lay against my sternum. Herbreath ran shallow and high. I kept one hand flat between her shoulder blades and the other at the back of her head, fingers spread wide into her hair, the weight of my palm anchoring her. I could feel the small tremor that had been living in her since the shot. It was in her shoulders. It was in her ribs under my forearm. I did not shush it. I let the heat of my body do the talking.
Eventually her breath went out of her in a long uneven line. Then it came back in. She turned her face and pressed her forehead into the muscle of my shoulder.
