Page 15 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
I smiled into the steam off my plate.
He set the shrimp on my plate. He looked up.
"Do you like me?"
"I won't tell."
The two-note laugh slipped out of him, low. He set the next shrimp down half peeled. He leaned across the small table, slow enough that I could have stopped him and we both knew it, and he pressed his mouth to my forehead. Light. The way a man marks a thing he is already sure of. His breath moved a fine piece of my hair against my temple. He sat back.
"Does not matter," he said. "You are mine even when you do not say it."
"You're full of yourself."
"And you blush a lot for someone denying it."
I picked up the shrimp because my hands needed somewhere to be and put it in my mouth so my mouth would not give him another thing to read. He poured water into my glass. I watched his hand do it. The candle on our table had lit itself one more time tonight, by his hand or by the woman with the pencil, I had not seen which.
I watch him peel another. My hand stays where he put it. I do not answer his question with words. The answer is sitting on the rim of my plate, three pink curls deep, and he already knows it, and I think I am going to let him.
5
DANIIL
Two knocks. Soft. Polite. Spaced the way a person spaces them when they are trying not to wake the rest of the house.
I did not lift my head. My face was half down in the pillow and the dark behind my eyes was the heavy kind, the kind that lands after a stretch of nights spent moving men in and out of rooms and watching cameras and writing numbers into ledgers no one else is ever going to read. The compound had finally gone quiet around dawn. I had let myself fall the rest of the way only when the last car had cleared the gate. Now there was knocking and the inside of my mouth tasted like sleep and last night's coffee and I wanted whoever was on the other side of it to be somewhere else.
"Lily. Do not bother me this early."
It came out muffled into the pillow and rough at the edges. She knocks like that when she has already decided I am getting up. She does it to Alek too. She does it to her own children. She has done it to me since the day she married into this house and she will keep doing it until one of us is buried.
The hinge turned. I heard it. Of course she had let herself in. I cracked one eye open against the gray light leaking through the curtain and I prepared the look I keep for my sister-in-law, the one that says I am not a child and I am not your husband and you can leave the room now.
It was not Lily.
Chloe was in the doorway holding a bowl in both hands. A small white cloth was folded across the top of it. The bowl was steaming. The steam climbed past her face in a thin pale ribbon. Hair pulled back. Sleeves of one of the soft grey hoodies from the guest-room dresser pushed up and then sliding back down past the second knuckle of her fingers. She looked at me the way a person looks at a thing they are not yet sure they are allowed to.
I sat up too fast.
The sheet slid down to my waist. I was in a thin t-shirt and the boxer briefs I had fallen asleep in. My hair was doing something on one side I did not have to see to know about. My mouth was an embarrassment. I had let this woman see me in a suit. I had let her see me at a table with a candle on it. I had let her see me read a bad room and hold my hand still on a glass when it wanted to do something else. I had not let her see me like this. Not once.
Not like this. Not yet.
"Give me one minute."
I was off the mattress before the words had finished landing. I closed the bathroom door behind me with the side of my hand and got to the sink in two steps. Toothbrush. Paste. Water. I scrubbed my teeth at a speed I would have laughed at any other man for. I splashed cold water at my face and dragged a wet hand back through my hair until it lay down somewhere on purpose instead of off in three directions at once. One look at the mirror. The man in there looked like a man caught. I met his eye and gave him one quiet laugh under my breath, low, one note,because I was a grown man and I had just sprinted into my own bathroom over a bowl of soup and the woman holding it.
Get yourself together. She is the one who is brave today. Be worthy of it.
I came back out.
She was sitting on the edge of my bed. The bowl sat on the side table on a small wooden tray she had carried up with it. She had set the spoon beside it on the cloth, refolded into a neat square. Her hands were in her lap. Her shoulders were turned a quarter toward the door, as if she had not quite decided yet whether she was staying or just leaving the bowl and going. The hoodie sleeves were back past her knuckles. Her feet were in thick house socks that did not belong to her. Lily's, probably. Lily would have pressed them on her at the bottom of the stairs.
"What are you doing here?"
It came out softer than I meant it. I had wanted to ask it the way a man asks a question. It came out the way a man asks a thing he is afraid of the answer to.
"Are you mad?"
