Page 18 of Claimed By the BRATVA Grump

The city hums below us. The early afternoon is warm for it, the sun going long and gold across the towers, and we eat, and shetalks, and I do the thing I apparently do now, which is listen to her the way other men watch fires.

I learn things. I learn that the café was her dream from being fourteen, a plan drawn on the back of a napkin and the savings from six years of managing someone else's restaurant. That the cats were an accident. One stray, Rhodes, who walked in during the renovation and declined to leave, then a second, then a rescue center's phone number, then a policy. That she named it Purr & Pour at eleven o'clock one night and woke up regretting it but by then Delilah had already ordered the sign.

"And your father?" I ask.

"Left when I was seven." She says it lightly, but I've spent my life reading the weight under light voices. "It's fine. We were better for it. Mom is currently on a cruise, living her best life." She picks up a dumpling, examines it. "Your turn. Family. Go."

"That's a broad question."

"I'm a broad question kind of woman."

So I do, and I hear myself doing it, giving away information I've spent a lifetime rationing. Valeria is my sister, younger, sharper than all of us, the only person alive who shouts at me. Jasper, Natan, Mechislav and Demyan are my cousins. Jasper raised alongside me and Valeria after their father, my uncle, died badly and early. I tell her our grandfather built what we have, that my father expanded it, that my father has been dead nine years and I've run it since I was twenty-six. I don't dress any of it up. She asked the question knowing what I am. She watched what I am get a man killed across the street from her front door.

"Twenty-six," she says quietly. "That's so young to inherit a whole, um." She waves her fork. "Empire? Syndicate? What's the preferred term? Is there a style guide?"

"Business."

"Business," she repeats, solemn. "Of course. And the business has been your entire life since."

"Yes."

"No wonder your cupboards are empty." It should sting but it doesn't, because of how she says it. Without judgment, the way she'd note a plant that needed water. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, her thumb moving across my knuckles, across scars she hasn't asked about. "For what it's worth, the balcony looks good on you."

The sun gets higher. I top up her glass of water. Lucifer would be asleep in the front window by now, she tells me, and Rhodes will be holding his vigil on her cardigan, and I watch homesickness move through her face like weather and pass, because she doesn't let things settle on her, she keeps everything moving, light on water.

And I make the decision final, the one I sent to Jasper while she slept. Because she belongs eight blocks east, in a warm room full of cats with her name on the deed, and every day she spends locked in my beautiful, unused museum is a day of her running on borrowed light. I'll end the Popov problem. Quickly, completely, whatever it costs, and I'll put her back in her world.

The part I haven't solved is the part where I've stopped being able to imagine mine without her in it.

"You've gone quiet," she says.

"I'm listening."

"I stopped talking five minutes ago."

"I know," I say. "I was listening to that too."

She laughs, startled and bright, the whole-body laugh, the one that arrives before she can prepare for it, and it goes up off my balcony and out over the city, thirty-two floors of glass and steel and not one thing on any floor of it worth more than that sound.

"Okay, Mr Grumpy," she says, standing, moving around the table to me.

I push my seat back to give her the room to sit on my knee.

“So you haven’t had a procession of women…but have you ever had sex on this balcony?”

I look around, it would be private enough. “No, I haven’t.” I say, my cock already hardening at the thought.

A grin breaks out over her face.

“Would you like to change that?”

Sammie

I’m not wearing anything beneath his sweater, which he wastes no time pulling over my head.

We stand for just long enough for him to undress and pull his chair into a better position, then he sits and I straddle him, his hard length between us.

“I knew you were big,” I say, stroking him, enjoying the way the head of his cock flushes the more I stroke him. A drop of precum beads at the tip, and I stroke over it with my thumb. “But not this big.”