Page 3 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

The accountant, whose name is Gerald Finch, sits at his usual bench and unwraps his sandwich.

Gerald is not a complicated man. Mid-fifties, soft around the edges, the kind of soft that comes from years of sitting at a desk believing numbers are the most dangerous thing in the room. He's been moving money for the Popov crew for approximatelyeight months. Small amounts at first. Careful amounts. But Jasper flagged a pattern three weeks ago, and Jasper doesn't flag things unless he's certain.

I take another sip of coffee and watch Gerald eat his sandwich.

Across the café, something falls off a shelf, and the blond woman, Sammie, is already moving toward the sound before it's finished landing. She says something I can't hear and laughs at her own response. One of the cats, a small tortoiseshell, winds around her ankles while she crouches to pick up whatever dropped, and she pauses to scratch it behind the ears before she does anything else.

I've been watching people for a long time. You can learn most of what you need to know about a person in the first two minutes, if you're paying attention to the right things.

She's kind. That much is obvious. But it’s a careless, automatic kindness. She pets the cat the way most people breathe, without choosing to.

She moves through the café like she belongs to the light itself, not the room. When she delivers fresh drinks to the next table, the late morning sun catches the curve of her hip beneath a faded denim apron, the fabric pulled taut in a way that draws my eye before I can stop it. She is twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, and the complete opposite of the people I deal with on a daily basis.

Her laugh carries across the room, bright and unguarded, and I find my gaze tracking it back to her mouth without authorization. I know the eye color of every person in this café except hers; I keep looking and forgetting to record the shade, distracted instead by the warmth that seems to radiate from her in measurable degrees, a direct contradiction to every environment I have ever occupied.

Lucifer, for his part, is still settled across the back of the seat beside me, a warm, solid weight that has no interest whatsoever in moving. He moved once since he settled, to shift his back legs to a more comfortable angle, and then he looked at me as though daring me to comment. I didn't. It seemed like the correct response.

I'm not accustomed to cats. My apartment is not a space that accommodates living things beyond myself. My sister, Valeria, has pointed this out on more than one occasion, usually while standing in the doorway of my kitchen and noting that the only thing in the refrigerator is water and leftover takeout. She finds this funnier than I do.

My apartment functions. That's what it's for.

Gerald finishes his sandwich, crumples the paper bag, and misses the trash can by eight inches. He walks over to pick it up, which tells me something. He's not careless. He's cautious. A careless man leaves the litter. A cautious one can't afford to be remembered.

I note it and look back at my coffee.

The problem with surveillance is the waiting. I've done enough of it over the years that I've made my peace with it, but the waiting requires your eyes and your patience, and leaves the rest of you unused. When I was younger, I'd fill that space with planning. Running scenarios, tracing consequences, following each chain of outcomes to its end. Now I simply wait. I've already run the scenarios. There are only so many ways Gerald Finch's story ends, and I know each of them.

Lucifer shifts. A deliberate repositioning that ends with his head against my forearm, and he exhales through his nose with a sound adjacent to a sigh.

I look at him.

He closes his eyes.

I've negotiated with men who had armies behind them and nothing left to lose. I've sat across tables from people who wanted me dead and kept my hands still and my voice level the entire time. I’m not, as a rule, a man who is managed by other people or things.

The cat doesn’t appear to have received this information.

I leave my arm where it is.

Gerald stands, straightens his jacket, and checks his watch. He'll go back inside in the next sixty seconds. He always does. The pattern is so consistent it borders on compulsion, and compulsion is a vulnerability I've learned to take seriously. A man who can't break his own routine can't adapt when the routine is broken for him.

Jasper would have a plan ready. Running three or four steps ahead of a problem before it's finished forming. That particular talent had saved the family more than once and had also, on several notable occasions, gotten Jasper into situations where he was very pleased with himself for reasons nobody else fully understood until later.

Natan would want something more direct. He always does. He's not wrong to want it. There's a simplicity to Natan's approach that I've always respected, the kind of clarity that comes from knowing exactly what you are and making no apologies for it. He'll get his turn with Gerald eventually. Not yet.

Gerald disappears through the door of his building.

I look back at my coffee.

The café settles around me. It does that. I've noticed it happens in waves, brief patches where every customer is occupied and the sound drops to something low and constant, coffee machine, muffled street noise, the slow rhythm of Luciferbreathing against my arm. It's not quiet. But it's the kind of noise that doesn't demand anything.

My phone stays dark on the table. I positioned it face-up out of habit, so I see alerts without reaching. No new messages. Jasper is on the east side this afternoon. Natan is dealing with a supply issue that should have been handled last week, a delay I've made clear I won't tolerate twice. Valeria has a lunch with a gallery director who has been circling her consultancy for two months, and she texted me this morning to say she doesn't need my security detail, which means she's already arranged her own and is preemptively ending the argument.

Lucifer makes a sound. Low and continuous. It takes me a moment to identify it as a purr because it's deeper than I would have expected, less delicate, more mechanical, like something running correctly after years of not being serviced. He doesn't open his eyes. He simply purrs, with great authority, against my arm.

I look at him for a long moment.

Then I look out the window.