Page 19 of Bratva Daddy
Her fingers traced the dark circles under her eyes, cataloguing damage in the unforgiving bathroom light. She tried to smooth her hair, to restore some semblance of the put-together woman she'd been trained to be. But her hands shook too badly to manage it.
"I'm so tired," she whispered to her reflection, and the words carried through the monitor straight into my chest.
I closed the monitor feed with a sharp click, returning to the contracts that still made no sense. But the image of her burnedbehind my eyes—young, scared, alone, whispering to herself in a bathroom with no lock because I'd decreed she deserved no privacy.
This was Viktor Petrov's fault. He'd forced this situation with his betrayal, his greed, his inability to honor basic agreements.
But my hand still ached from gripping the doorknob, from stopping myself from going to her.
The contracts could wait. I pushed them aside and poured myself vodka, though it was barely noon. The alcohol burned away the sound of her crying, or at least muffled it enough that I could pretend not to care.
Iinsistedweeatdinnertogether, though I told myself it was strategy rather than need. A prisoner's mental state affected their value as leverage. If Clara broke completely, became catatonic or hysterical, Viktor might write her off as a loss rather than pay. I needed her functional, coherent, present enough to matter but not strong enough to cause real problems.
Those were the lies I fed myself while instructing my housekeeper to set two places at the dining table that usually hosted only my solitary meals.
Clara emerged from her room at eight sharp—obedient to the schedule I'd established even if every line of her body radiated resentment. She'd changed clothes again, trading the black turtleneck for a gray sweater that was somehow even more conservative. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun that belonged in a library, not at dinner.
She took the chair at the opposite end of the table without being told, maximizing the distance between us. It felt as though this was something she’d done a million times before.
The lamb my housekeeper had prepared sat on her plate like a picture—perfectly pink, garnished with rosemary. She picked up her fork with mechanical movements, cutting tiny pieces she moved around the plate without eating.
The hollow look from the bathroom mirror had settled into her features. Not the fierce woman who'd destroyed my kitchen or the terrified girl who'd been dragged into my penthouse. This was something else—resignation maybe, or just exhaustion so complete that even defiance took too much energy.
We ate in silence for a few minutes. Or rather, I ate while she performed an elaborate theater of eating that involved no actual consumption. Cut, move, arrange, repeat. Building tiny pyramids of lamb and vegetables like a child playing with food they'd been ordered to finish.
"How did you know about the Kozlov deal?" The question escaped before I could stop it, genuine curiosity overriding my determination to maintain distance.
She looked up, surprised by the break in silence. Those hazel eyes studied me like she was trying to determine if this was a trap, another power play in our unwilling game.
“Do I have to answer? Is that one of the rules?”
“It is.”
"Well. I know because my father is an idiot," she said finally, setting down her fork with a soft click against the china. The bitter laugh that followed contained years of frustration. "He monologues about his corruption over dinner while I sit there like furniture. I’m just a sounding board for his criminal confessions."
My eyes narrowed.
“He talks at you?”
"He just . . . talks," she continued, staring at her untouched lamb. "About bribes and construction contracts and which Russians are paying him this week. Like I'm too stupid tounderstand or too irrelevant to matter if I did. Two weeks ago, he spent an entire dinner explaining how he was going to destroy your permits while taking Kozlov money. Drank a bottle of wine and detailed every aspect of his betrayal while I sat there eating salmon and pretending not to exist."
"You could have gone to the authorities," I observed, though even as I said it, I knew how naive it sounded.
Her laugh this time was sharp enough to cut glass. "With what proof? My word against the deputy mayor's? And even if they believed me, then what? Destroy my own life in the process? End up testifying in court about my father's crimes while the media painted me as either a traitor or too stupid to know what was happening in my own home?"
She met my eyes directly, and I saw intelligence there that Viktor had been too blind to recognize. His daughter had been cataloguing his crimes for years, storing information she could never use, watching him betray everyone who'd ever trusted him.
"Besides," she added, voice dropping to barely above a whisper, "who would I turn to? The FBI who take bribes from men like you? The NYPD who are on three different payrolls? The judges my father has dinner with every Sunday? There's no clean authority in this city. Just different levels of corruption wearing different uniforms."
She was right, of course. The system was rotten from foundation to penthouse. Men like me and Viktor Petrov had made sure of that, buying loyalty and silence in equal measure. There was no white knight to save her, no higher authority that wasn't already compromised.
"So you said nothing," I said.
"I said nothing." She picked up her fork again, stabbed a piece of lamb with unnecessary force. "I smiled and shopped and went to charity galas and pretended my father wasn't a monsterselling the city to whoever paid best. At least in his house, I could pretend to have a future. Save money, plan events, imagine that someday I'd escape to something better."
She gestured around my penthouse with her fork, encompassing the luxury prison I'd created for her.
“Looks like I hit the jackpot.”
