Page 10 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

"Are you hurt?" he asks.

"No." My voice comes out surprisingly steady, which honestly surprises both of us. "I saw. Through the window. I wasn't trying to. I was just closing up, and I saw, and then he looked at me, the one who stayed, he looked right at me."

Eduard crosses to the window in four strides. He stays to one side of it, shoulder against the wall, and looks out without putting himself in front of the glass. A thing he does automatically. He scans the street, and something in his jaw tightens, and he pulls out his phone.

"Jasper." Flat. Immediate. "The café. Now." A pause. "Bring Demyan."

He hangs up and turns back to me.

The café feels very small all of a sudden. It always feels warm and snug when it's full of people and cats and coffee smells. But right now it just feels small. Eduard is very tall, and I am standing here with a cleaning cloth in one hand and genuinely no framework for this situation.

"You told me to lock up properly tonight," I say, and I hear my own voice arrive somewhere new. "This morning. You said it on your way out. You knew."

He doesn't flinch. He doesn't look away either. "I knew something was scheduled. Not here. Across the street. You were never meant to see it."

"That's not the comfort you think it is, Eduard. What was that?"

He looks at me for a moment. Not the way most people look when they're about to lie or soften something. More like he's deciding exactly how much truth fits the moment.

"A conversation that went the only way it was going to go," he says.

"That is possibly the least helpful sentence I've ever heard."

"His name was Gerald Finch. He'd been laundering money for a crew that operates against my interests." He says it the way someone else might say Gerald Finch left his lights on. Even. Factual. Like he's reading from a document. "Only he got sloppy."

I stare at him. "Your interests."

"Yes."

"And Gerald."

A beat. "Gerald made his choices, his boss cut his losses."

I look down at the cleaning cloth in my hand, then back up at him. My brain is doing several things simultaneously, none of them fully successfully. The one that's loudest is pointing out that Mr. Grumpy, my corner table regular, the man I accidentally molested, is apparently the reason Gerald Finch is dead on the pavement across the street.

"I need to sit down," I say.

"Don't." Eduard moves away from the wall. "Stay on your feet. Sitting down shuts the body off. I need you moving."

That's not what I expected him to say. I expected calm. I got command. There's a difference, I'm learning, and right now the difference matters.

"Okay," I say. "Okay. Moving."

Lucifer appears from somewhere and winds around my ankles, because apparently the universe has opinions about comic timing, and I shuffle forward without tripping and focus on the specific sensation of my sneakers on the tile and my hands and the cleaning cloth I'm still holding for absolutely no reason.

Eduard is watching me. Not the window. Me.

"The man who looked at you," he says. "Did he move toward the café?"

"No. He just stood there."

"For how long."

"I don't know. Seconds. I stepped back. Then I turned around, and you were here."

Something shifts in his expression. Not much. A fraction of a degree of tension that wasn't there when he walked in.

"You just became a loose end," Eduard says.