Page 14 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

Dee:Before noon. Or I’m calling your mother.

That's Delilah forI love you.I put the phone face down on the nightstand and breathe out slowly. For the first time since what I saw last night, I feel something that isn't fear. It sits in my chest like a coal. I decide to build a fire around it.

Which is how I end up in the kitchen at six fifteen in yesterday's leggings and the spare sweatshirt Eduard handed me last night, a soft gray thing that comes to mid-thigh and smells faintly of what I imagine burning wood smells like. This is a fact I have decided not to have feelings about. The city outside the windows is barely awake, all long shadows, and the kitchen is a sea of black marble containing almost nothing. So I do what I do. My hands find the coffee machine. A new model that takes pods.

I'm improvising a pour-over with a dish towel when I hear him.

I don't know how I hear him. He moves like a rumor. But some part of me has apparently already tuned itself to his frequency, because I turn before he's fully into the room, and there he is.

And oh, that's not fair.

I've only ever seen him assembled. Suit, shirt, cufflinks, the whole armored perimeter. The man standing at the edge of thekitchen is in dark sleep pants and bare-chested, barefoot, and his hair is wrong on one side, and there are shadows under his eyes that match mine. Something about the sight of him unarmored does a thing to my chest that I have no time to process because his gaze has already found me and stuck.

He looks at me. At the sweatshirt. His sweatshirt. Something crosses his face, fast, there and controlled and gone, and the back of my neck goes warm.

"You're awake," he says.

"So are you." I turn back to the coffee before my face can file a full report. "Bad night, too?"

A pause. "Yeah."

"Sit," I say, nodding at the island stools. "I'm making coffee. The dish towel is load-bearing, don't ask."

He doesn't sit. He comes around the island instead, and leans against the counter an arm's length away, arms crossed, watching me work with that assessing stillness he does. An arm's length is suddenly a very small unit of measurement. I'm acutely aware of my hands. I'm acutely aware of his forearms, and his broad chest that my eyes keep flickering to. I pour water in slow circles and the kitchen fills with the smell of coffee. Neither of us says anything.

"You didn't sleep because of what you saw," he says finally. His version of gentle.

"Partly." I pass him a cup. Black, no sugar, because I've made his coffee twenty times and my hands don't need consulting. He takes it, and his fingers brush mine on the handover. The sensation travels up my arm like the building's wiring runs through me now. "Partly just, new ceiling. I kept doing the math on how far away my whole life is. Eight blocks. It felt further in the dark." I wrap both hands around my own cup. "Why couldn'tyou sleep? You must be used to all this. The, you know." I wave a hand vaguely at the penthouse, the situation, the concept of organized crime.

He looks into his coffee for a moment. When he answers, it's in the tone I've started to recognize, the one where he's decided to say a true thing and is saying it plainly because he doesn't know another way.

"It's been a long time since anyone stayed in this apartment."

I blink. "What, like, guests?"

"Anyone."

"I thought you had a housekeeper."

"Rosa leaves." He says it without self-pity, a man reporting the weather in his own country. "Everyone leaves by evening. That's how it's built. Last night there was someone on the other side of the wall, and I found I was listening." He sips his coffee. "I'm not accustomed to listening for someone."

I stare at him. My heart is doing something complicated. "Hang on. Sorry. I need to reorganize some assumptions." I set my cup down. "You're telling me this apartment doesn't have a, a rotation. A procession. I assumed there was a procession."

His brow does the almost-frown. "A procession of what?"

"Of women, Eduard." My face is going warm but I've started the sentence so I'm finishing it, that's always been my policy and it's ruined me before. "Look at you. You're all," I gesture at the entire length of him, which is a mistake, because now I'm looking at the entire length of him, "that. Tall and carved and terrifying in a bespoke way. Men who look like you have a different woman on this floor every night of the week. It's practically municipal law."

Something shifts in his expression. He sets his cup down too, slowly, and turns to face me fully, and the arm's length loses another few inches without either of us visibly moving.

"There's no procession," he says. "There hasn't been anyone in a long time. Not because of lack of opportunity." His voice drops lower, quieter, and the morning is very still around it. "Because I stopped wanting. Somewhere along the way it switched off, and I assumed that was permanent, and it was efficient, so I let it be permanent. I can't remember the last time I wanted a woman."

I should not ask. I'm going to ask.

"Can't remember at all?"

"I can now," he says. "It has a timestamp. Four days ago, mid-afternoon, in your café, when a woman with flour on her wrist knelt in front of me and dabbed cold hot chocolate off my crotch without realizing what she was doing." His gray eyes hold mine, steady, unhurried, letting every word land. "You were mortified. You made a sound like a quiet version of a smoke alarm. And I stood there holding your wrists and realized the switch wasn't broken after all. It had just been waiting."

The kitchen has gone airless. Somewhere thirty-two floors down, the city is honking and hurrying, and up here there is no sound at all except my own pulse, which has relocated to my ears.