Page 42 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
"I'll make the call from the cruiser."
"Thank you."
He walked back up the steps. He bent and put the note into a small clear evidence bag a deputy held open for him. He sealed it. He carried it down past me without showing it to me again.
I stood on the porch with Rhea on my hip and the cold of the night coming up the steps at my legs. The radios in the squad cars were low behind me, the soft crackle of dispatch talking to a town a long way off. The neighbor in the robe had gone back inside her house. The willow at the edge of the property moved once in the wind.
The bear was crushed between Rhea's chest and mine. Her arms were tight around my neck. The name was turning over in my chest like a coin I had been carrying without knowing I had it in my pocket.
I know the name. I don't know the man.
12
DANIIL
The earth in front of me was still soft. They had finished filling the two graves an hour before, and the dirt had not had time to harden into anything that looked like a place. It looked like a wound. Two of them, side by side, the way they had slept.
I was on one knee. The cold was coming up through the fabric of my pants and into my shin and I let it. Rhea stood beside me with her small hand in mine. Her other arm held Beom-Beom under her chin. She had not let go of the bear once since the church.
The headstones were cheap. I knew it when I bought them and I had bought them anyway. Two slabs of pale stone, a brass plaque on Grandma's that was already going a little dull at the edges in the wind. I had paid for both in cash from a tin in the back of the kitchen drawer. There had not been enough for anything better.
"What do we do now, brother?" Rhea said.
Her voice was very small. She said it to the headstones, not to me.
"I don't know yet," I said. "Honestly."
She was quiet for the length of a breath. Then she said, even quieter, "I don't have a family anymore."
I turned my face up to her. Her braids were a little crooked. I had done them this morning in the bathroom mirror in the dark because the porch light had blown out and I did not want to wake her by turning on the overhead. She had not noticed they were crooked. Or she had, and she had not said.
"I am here," I said. "I will not let you be alone. Same blood or not. You are my sister, Rhea."
Her chin shook once. She held it.
"I'm lucky I have a good brother," she said.
I pulled her into the front of my coat. She let me. Her cheek pressed against the cold buttons and I felt the warm spot of her breath through two layers of wool. I held her there for a long count and watched the brass plaque go a little duller in the failing light.
Gravel moved behind me on the path.
It was a deliberate sound. The man making it wanted to be heard. He was not creeping. He was not hurrying. The steps were even, and they stopped at a distance that said he had picked the distance on purpose.
I turned without standing. My free hand went to the small of my back the way it sometimes did when I was startled, and I noted that my free hand did that, and then I let it drop.
He was tall. A long black coat that fell almost to his boots. A patch over his left eye. The working eye was a blue that had nothing soft in it. A scar ran from his temple down to the line of his jaw. He stood with his hand at his side and the kind of stillness that had nothing to do with respect for a grave and everything to do with not wanting to startle the small girl behind my leg.
He said one word.
"Daniil."
I stood up slowly. Rhea slid behind my knee and put the bear out in front of her like a shield. The man did not move closer.
"He looks scary," Rhea said into the back of my knee.
"Are you the one who killed them?" I said.
He took the question on the chin. He did not flinch. He shook his head once.
