Page 29 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
I was up out of my side of the booth before I had decided to be up. I came around the table. I put both arms around his shoulders and I held on. He folded one hand up around the back of my head the way he had done at eight, the way he had done at twelve, the way he had done at the airport the morning he had flown out for the contract.
The bell at the door tapped.
I felt it before I saw it. The same shift in the air I had felt on a park bench the first time a man had come up behind me with no sound. I looked up over Jacob's shoulder.
Daniil.
His coat was open. His collar was wet from a rain that had started again outside. The bell was still moving against the glass. The look on his face was a look I had not been shown. It was not the face he wore for me. It was not the face he wore for a room. It was a third face.
He crossed the restaurant in three strides.
The fist landed before I had finished saying his name.
Jacob went back against the booth. A glass tipped on the table and rolled and went over the edge. The room around us went quiet in a single beat the way a room does when a chair scrapes the wrong way. Daniil's arm was cocking again. I was between them with one hand flat on his chest before his elbow had finished its rise.
"Stop! Daniil. Outside. Now."
The owner was already out from behind the counter, a phone in one hand. I did not look at him. I shook my head once. He stopped where he was. He did not love the choice. He let me have it.
Daniil's hand closed around my upper arm. He was walking me toward the door before I had agreed to walk. His grip was too tight. He did not know it was too tight. We passed the host stand. We passed the door of a back kitchen with the steam coming through the slats. He pushed the front door with his free hand and the bell tapped again and the wet of the sidewalk was at my feet and the awning was running at the edge.
I tried to twist my arm out of his hand. His fingers tightened on the bone of my arm before they eased, and the half second they eased he looked at my face.
"You're scaring me."
He stopped.
I watched it cost him. His chest dropped a half inch. His hand let go of my arm the way a man lets go of a thing he has just realized he is holding the wrong way. He stepped back a half step. He stood in the rain.
"You have never said that to me."
"I'm saying it now."
He looked at me. The rain ran past his temple down into the collar of his coat.
"Is that why you are dating another man? Because I am scary?"
"Are you serious right now?"
"I told you nobody touches what is mine. Chloe, I will not let this happen. I will put him in the ground if you choose him."
"Listen to yourself."
"I am listening."
"You are obsessed."
A beat. Two. The thing he had been holding back since the first night at the club came up the back of his throat, and it cost him to give it up.
"Yes. I am."
"I knew. I knew, and I made my peace with it." I let the air come back into me. "But this." I lifted one hand back toward the door of the restaurant behind me. "You hurt my cousin. My family. Without asking who he was. You decided. How did you know I was here?"
He did not answer. He looked at the wet of the sidewalk between his shoes. He looked at the back of his right hand, the knuckles split clean. He looked at the awning. He looked anywhere I was not.
"You still have someone following me."
He did not answer.
