Page 32 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
He did not push. He reached and took the spare glass off the table, the one that had been clean since the housekeeper had been through this morning, and he poured himself two fingers and drank half of it without flinching and set the glass back onthe wood with a small wet ring around the base. He sat back. He waited.
I told him. Not all of it. He did not need all of it. I told him about the punch I had thrown at her cousin in the back booth of a restaurant in Brooklyn, the one I had not been able to call back into my body after it had left my hand. I told him about the print of my fingers on her arm in front of the same room. I told him what she had said to me on the wet sidewalk after, the line about the police, the boundary she had drawn with both hands. I told him about three days of not picking up the phone. I told him about four calls.
He listened. He did not move. When I was done he sat forward with his elbows on his knees the way our father had sat forward on a couch, the way I sat forward on a couch when a man across the table from me had said the wrong thing.
"I cannot give you advice about this."
"That is a first."
A small flat smile at one corner of his mouth. "Because I realized something while you were talking. All four of us are wired the same way. Sorokin men are possessive as fuck."
I laughed. The two-note laugh our mother had given both of us came out of me one time and went flat in the middle of the second note. It was not a real laugh. It was the shape of one. He heard the difference and he did not say anything about it.
The door opened again.
Sienna came through with a mug of tea in one hand and a book under her arm and the look she wore when she had already been listening from the hall for longer than was strictly polite. She did not pretend otherwise. She crossed the room and she sat herself on the arm of the couch on Mikhail's side, and Mikhail put a hand at the small of her back without looking at her, the way a man does with something he has been holding onto for years. She fit her shoulder against his.
"I agree."
"Are you both here to gang up on me?"
"We're here to keep you from drowning. Has she contacted you?"
I waited a beat. I did not want to answer the question. I answered it.
"Yes."
"And?"
"I have not picked up."
She drew a small sharp breath in through her nose. The kind of sound a lawyer makes when a client has just told her the wrong thing in a deposition.
"Why?"
"She may want to end it."
"Are you out of your mind, Daniil?"
I did not have anything to say to that. I sat with the glass in my hand.
"A woman who is done with you does not call you four times in three days. She moves on. She blocks the number. She does not keep dialing the man who scared her." She softened. The softening was worse than the sharpness. "You're scaring her again right now, by the way. You know that."
"Yes."
"She's reaching across to the man who hurt her and she's getting silence back, and you're making her feel that all by herself. That's the second hurt. You're stacking it on the first."
"She is right." Mikhail was looking at the table, not at me. "You are making a different version of the same mistake, brother. You are still deciding for her without asking her."
"Fuck. Yes. I am."
"Go," Sienna said. "Right now. Stop sitting in this room. Stop drinking the rest of that bottle. Get up."
I got up. The room did the small slow tilt a room does when a man has been on a couch with a bottle for three hours and has stood up too fast, and I let it tilt and I let it stop tilting, and then I crossed to the chair by the door where I had thrown my coat the night before and I pulled the coat off the back of the chair and put it on. The wool smelled like the rain that had been on it yesterday.
"Good. At least you can see it. I'm proud of you."
"Do not be proud of me yet."
