Page 5 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
The dining room sat off a wide arch at the bottom of the stairs. A long table, set at one end only, three places. A woman in the middle chair, hands wrapped around a mug, shoulders set the particular way shoulders set when a woman has been arguing with her husband in her head for an hour and has not finished.
Small, dark, a braid pulled forward over one shoulder, a face that looked like it had a Mexican abuela in it and a frown that had nothing to do with us.
Lily slid me into the chair beside her with the same hand she had used on the stairs.
"Jade," she said, mild. "What's that face for?"
"Ivan being Ivan," Jade said, without lifting her eyes from the coffee. "He forgot his grumpy pills again."
Lily laughed, quick and bright, the kind of laugh that does not warn you it's on its way.
Jade looked up at the sound and her eyes caught on me, and the frown fell off her face by half. The other half stayed because it was not for me.
"You're up," she said, warmer. "Color's coming back. That's something."
She pushed a small plate at me with two fingers.
"You're lucky the good Sorokin's the one who found you."
The name landed slow. It sat on the surface of the table for a second before it sank.
Sorokin.
Metal in my mouth again, the thin taste of fear that came back any time the floor under me moved. I had heard the name. Not in my own life. In the way you hear a name in a hallway atwork, in a corner of a coffee shop, in a low sentence between two men at a register who go quiet when they notice you can hear.
"Sorokin," I said, slow, the word fitting itself to my mouth one syllable at a time. "You mean the bratva?"
"Exactly," Lily said, plain. No softening. No lift at the end. As if I had asked her whether the bread on the board was sourdough.
It stood all the way up.
My hand on the table forgot what it was for. My chair was a chair, and then my chair was a thing I needed to be on the other side of. I pushed back and made my legs do their job. They did half of it. The room tilted at the edges.
Jade's hand caught mine across the corner of the table, light, not a grip. Just a hand. Steady.
"Sit," she said. "Those legs aren't carrying you out of here yet."
I sat. The room steadied.
"They're not going to hurt you," Jade said. "Daniil least of all."
Daniil.
The name went into a slot in my chest I had not known was empty. I did not have a face yet to set to it that did not include the wing of a couch and a hand open on a stomach, but the slot took it anyway.
"Look at us," Lily said, easy, and she lifted her own mug as if to count herself. "Still breathing."
She set the mug down.
"Their family has a name people whisper. I won't pretend they don't," she said. "But the day a Sorokin decides he's keeping you safe is the day you stop being afraid of anything else."
I sat for the length of one breath with my hand under Jade's.
Then I pulled it back. Slowly. So neither of them would mistake it for a flinch.
I picked up the fork. I put a small piece of melon on it. The fruit was cold and clean and tasted like a thing a person grows on purpose. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I only knew I was going to do it with food in me.
A footstep arrived in the hall.
