Page 70 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
It took him forty. He turned the phone toward us. Contacts opened, scrolling slow. The names came up in a Cyrillic shorthand I recognized at a glance. Tomasz K. Dario M. A burner labeled with only three letters. Another marked by a single asterisk.
"Call log," Ivan said. "Last call placed at five forty-one this morning. Six minutes, eleven seconds. Tomasz K." His thumb moved. "Outbound calls last night at twenty-two ten, twenty-three forty, and zero two seventeen. Three different burner numbers. He was reporting in waves."
He flicked over to the messages.
"Texts to Dario," he read. "Two days ago. He says, and I quote, the older brother left the compound at nine, came back at eleven, one car, two men in front, no rear chase." He scrolled. "And here. The middle brother went to Krov until two in the morning. Drove himself."
Mikhail snorted softly. "That's me. He clocked me, the little rat."
Ivan was not done. He swiped again. A screenshot. A bank app. A transfer received three weeks ago in numbers that would make a normal man swallow.
"Money," Ivan said. "From an account routed through a shell I recognize. Marchetti's bookkeeper uses it. I have seen the prefix before."
Alek leaned forward. The blue eye moved over the screen and registered everything in a single sweep. He said nothing for a long moment. Then:
"Chloe is a lucky charm."
The words landed. Affection, from him, is a thing he allows himself once a year, maybe twice. I should have been proud. I was proud, somewhere underneath. But on top of the proud sat a hot small splinter I could not pluck out, and the splinter looked like a smug guard getting a kiss on the side of his face in a back hall.
"I am not sure I am happy about this," I said.
Ivan did not look up. He did not even blink.
"She is using her brain more than you are right now, Daniil."
Mikhail made a sound I refused to dignify by calling a laugh. I held the line of my mouth and looked at the wall behind Alek's head. The wall was, helpfully, neutral.
"Bring him," Alek said. "Now."
Mikhail pushed off the back of his chair and was out the door before the word finished.
I gave it twenty minutes. I gave Mikhail's men time to dig Pyotr out of whatever corner of the compound he had been pretending to do honest work in, and I gave myself time to put the cold back where it lived. Then I went down.
The holding room sat past the side stair, through the steel door, under a single hard light that washed everything flat. The walls were unpainted concrete. The floor had a drain. One chair was bolted into the center, and Pyotr was in it.
His face was wrong already. His left cheekbone was sitting where his eye should have been. One of his front teeth had relocated. A slick of red ran down his shirt, already going tacky at the edges. He was breathing through his mouth, wet, ragged. Two of Mikhail's men stood by the wall, knuckles scuffed, facesempty. Mikhail himself leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded, watching me come in like a man at a play.
I walked up to the chair. I did not speak. The room waited with me. Pyotr's good eye, the one that still tracked, dragged up to meet mine, and I saw the moment he understood who had just arrived.
I punched him.
A clean right, square into the soft place under the cheekbone. His head snapped. The chair creaked.
"That is for ruining my car."
I shook my hand out once. Set my feet. Came at him from the other side, a left this time, lower, into the rib. He made a noise that was not quite a word.
"That is for being a traitor."
I let the third one build. I pulled it from the floor. It went into his jaw and his teeth clicked and a fine spray of red dotted the concrete by his shoe.
"That is for helping kill the old people."
I meant the grandparents. He knew which old people. I saw him know. Rhea's last home before us. Two soft, gray, gentle people who had raised her through the worst year of her small life, who had fed her and braided her hair and read her stories, and who had been put in the ground because a man like the one in this chair had told a man like Tomasz where their door was. My blood ran through Rhea. Their love had walked her to me. He had touched both ends of that line with dirty hands.
I stepped back. I rolled my shoulders. The men by the wall thought I was finished. Mikhail thought I was finished. I thought I was finished.
Then a small clean thought walked in late and sat down in my chest.
