Page 12 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

She stares at the mug. "They killed him because he knew too much."

"Probably. He was inept at best. He got caught up in something much bigger than him. I’d been watching him to try and get some intel on what the Popov’s are actually doing."

"And the man who saw me-" She stops. Works through it. "He saw me see them."

"That's the presumption."

"Which means I know too much."

"Which means you're a variable," I say. "And they'll want to close it."

She's quiet for a moment. Outside, the city is turning dark, the kind of night that envelopes everything at this height. The moon comes through the east windows and finds her, catching the loose hair at her temple, and the line of her throat when she swallows.

She takes a slow breath. "Okay," she says. "I understand that part. I hate it, but I understand it." She looks up at me. "What I don't understand is why here. You could have taken me to a hotel. You could have called the police. You could have—"

"The police can't protect you from this."

She twists her face into a look of disbelief. "You don't know that."

"I know exactly that." I don't say it harshly. "A patrol unit and a report won't stop the Popov’s. They have people in most of the precincts that touch their territory. A hotel has too many points of access that I don't control. This building has three. I control all three."

She absorbs this. I watch her do it, watch the bright, open quality of her face work through something that doesn't want to be worked through.

"So I'm here because it's a fortress," she says. "Not because—" She stops herself.

"Not because what?" I ask, not following her train of thought.

"Nothing," she says too quickly as she sips her water. Sets it down. But the sentence she didn't finish stays in the room.

"How long do I need to stay here?" she asks.

"I don't know yet. A few days. Possibly more. My cousin is tracing the man who saw you. Once we know who he is, we’ll know how much of a problem exists."

She nods slowly. She's doing that thing she does, the thing I've watched her do across the counter when a customer brings her something difficult, gathering herself back to the surface from wherever the difficult thing sent her. Taking a beat. Choosing to be okay before she's actually okay. It works better than she probably knows. It's also, I'm discovering, very difficult to watch from four feet away without wanting to cross to her.

"My cats," she says.

"Someone will go to the café this morning. Check on them. Make sure the building's secure."

"Someone?"

"Yes, probably Natan."

She blinks. "Who's Natan?"

"One of my cousins. He's reliable."

"Is he good with cats?"

I think about Natan. Six foot four, two hundred and thirty pounds of deliberate stillness, hands that have done things I've asked them to do and never complained. "He has a certain kind of patience," I say.

She looks at me with the expression I imagine she wears when she suspects I'm being precise in a way that's technically true and practically useless. "That's not an answer."

"He won't frighten them."

"Rhodes is sensitive. And Lucifer has a special diet.”

"I'll tell him."