Page 7 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
I was not safe. I was not unsafe. I was in a room with three people who knew exactly what they were and who were letting me catch up.
When the plate was halfway empty Daniil set his cup down.
"I will take you home," he said.
I nodded.
Lily walked me back up for my shoes. She did not ask if I wanted company on the climb. She put her hand under my elbow again and took the part of my weight my legs were still negotiating. At the door of the room I had woken in she paused, one hand on the frame.
"You'll find his number in your bag," she said. "Don't make him wait three days to use it."
She kissed me on the side of the head, quick, the way an older sister might, and went back down.
The couch was empty. The jacket was gone. The blanket I had been under was folded at the foot of the bed in a square so neat it had been done by hands that never did anything halfway.
I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I went down.
He was waiting by the front door with a coat over his arm. Not his. Mine, the thin one I had not been wearing the night before because the club had been warm. He must have asked Lily where it lived. He held it open and I turned my back to him andlet him settle it onto my shoulders, and his hand did not linger, and the not lingering was its own kind of touch.
Outside, gravel. A long low car, dark, the kind of dark that ate its own reflection. He opened the passenger side for me himself. There was no driver. He went around to his own side, dropped into the seat, and the engine came on so quietly I felt it through my hip before I heard it.
We pulled away from a house I had not gotten to see the front of properly. Trees. A gate. A road between two stone walls, and then one without.
He drove with one hand low on the wheel. He did not put music on. The cabin was leather and quiet, with a thin clean smell of him under it, the cedar I had woken to, the soap I did not own.
After a mile I gave him my address. Brooklyn. The cross street. The buzzer number, because I always said it without meaning to.
He nodded once.
His mouth shifted then. A small private smile, set at one corner, gone before it finished, the kind a man wears when he has been told a thing he already knows.
"What happened?" I asked. "At the club."
He did not reply right away. He let the question sit in the cabin until I could hear myself ask it, and then he gave me an answer at the volume of a man who had decided in advance how much of the truth he would give a woman the first time she asked.
"A man put something in your glass," he said. "My brother and I were there. We got you out. A doctor checked you. You slept the rest off upstairs. That is all of it that matters this morning."
It was not all of it. I could feel the rest sitting in the space behind his teeth, neatly folded the way the blanket had been. He was not lying. He was choosing.
"Thank you," I said.
"Do not thank me for that."
He said it as if he had been waiting for permission to.
The city came up around us in the slow way it does when you are coming in from somewhere quieter. Trees thinned. Houses thickened. A bridge. The river under us, then the river behind us. He took the streets I would have taken, the small ones, the ones a driver who lived here used instead of the avenues.
He pulled up at my building. He did not double park. He found a length of curb that fit his car as if it had been measured for him.
He turned the engine off.
I sat for one breath with my hand on the seat belt. My fingers were not quite mine yet, but they were closer.
"Chloe," he said.
It was the first time I had heard him say my name. He pronounced it like a word he had practiced alone and saved for a moment like this.
"Yes?"
