Page 49 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
The contact landed in my chest like the clapper inside a bell. He shook my hand once. The shake was the length of a shake for a stranger, polite and short. He let go.
My vision went soft at the edges and the tears came up before I had decided what to do with them. One slid down the side of my nose before I had my other hand up to catch it.
His face changed. The polite stranger's face went the careful worried shape of a man who does not know why a woman is crying in his hands.
"Hey. Hey, what happened?"
"Nothing. I am just happy to get the job. It is a good job. I am sorry."
He brought his free hand up and wiped the tear off my cheek with the side of his thumb before he had thought about doing it.The thumb knew the angle of my jaw. The thumb knew where the bone went up under the ear. The thumb had been here before and the thumb went the way it had always gone.
I stepped back.
"Don't! I am sorry. I mean. I am okay, sir."
He blinked. He dropped his hand. He looked at his own hand for a second the way a man looks at a tool that has just done something on its own without him.
"Call me Daniil."
"Daniil."
I said it the way a woman says a name she has never said. I said it the way a woman says a man's name when she has been saying it inside her own head for months without permission to say it out loud and the saying of it in the air for the first time costs something.
The girl at the table had a fry halfway to her mouth. Her dark braid was over one shoulder. Beom-Beom was on the chair beside her with his one ear up. She had been watching the whole thing without saying a word, the way kids watch the parts of grown-up rooms they know they are not meant to be in the middle of.
"Hi, Chloe. You want to eat? Join us please."
I made the smile come up onto my face because the kid deserved a smile and because there were no other smiles in the room for her right now.
"I would love to."
I crossed to the table. Lily was already at the chair on Daniil's left, sliding it back for me with her hand at the top of the wood the way a hostess does without making a thing of it. I sat. Daniil sat back down in the head chair one place to my right. Rhea pushed her plate three inches toward me, lifted three of her fries off the side of it with careful fingers, and put them on the bare wood next to me with the seriousness of an offering.
"You can have these. They are the long ones. The long ones are the good ones."
"Thank you. The long ones are my favorite too."
I picked one up. I would have taken a kidney from this child if she had offered it. I bit the end of the fry. I made my mouth chew. I made my throat swallow. The salt was a real thing in my mouth.
Lily and Jade were in the doorway behind me, not coming in, not going. Sienna stayed at Lily's shoulder a beat longer and then I heard her step move back down the hall. Rhea picked her fork up and went back to her chicken with the small careful focus of a kid who has decided the grown-ups are done being weird for the moment. Daniil was one chair away from me at the head of the table. His sleeve was pushed up to the elbow and the inside of his forearm was where it had always been.
He doesn't know me. He is here.
14
CHLOE
Rhea's room at the compound smelled like new paint and old crayon. Someone had taped her drawings to the wall at her own height, low enough that I had to bend to read the captions. A sun with eyelashes. A dog she did not own. A house with three chimneys and four windows and one heart over the door. The lamp on the dresser was a small ceramic owl with a paper shade, and it threw a warm circle out on the rug that ended at the edge of the bed.
The bed was pushed against the wall under a window. Bare trees outside, dark and thin. The throw at the foot of the mattress was that nubbly cream knit the wives put on every bed in this house. Beom-Beom was already on the pillow with his one ear pointed at the ceiling and his small black eyes on the door.
I set my duffel on the floor by the dresser. They had given me the guest room down the hall and I would sleep there later. For now I was here to put a small girl into a bed that was not the bed she had grown up in.
"Pajamas first," I said. "Teeth after. Then we read one."
Rhea took her pajamas off the corner of the dresser and changed in the bathroom across the hall while I pulled theblanket back and fluffed the pillow under Beom-Beom and pretended I was not noting every detail of the room for some private file inside my chest. She came back in pink flannel with a worn cuff and climbed up over the blanket and slid under it like she had practiced. She tucked the bear under her chin.
I sat on the edge of the bed and combed two pieces of her hair back from her face with my fingers. Her braids were soft at the ends where the elastics had given up.
