Page 27 of Enforcer Daddy
"Propor-shun-al response," she was telling Bear, setting his food bowl down with exaggerated precision. "That's what the psycho calls it. You be good, you get good things. You be bad, you get corner time."
The puppy wagged his tail, waiting.
"Say please," she commanded, and Bear lifted one paw in what they'd decided counted as asking nicely.
"Good boy. See? We can play his stupid games."
She was playing house while plotting her escape, and the contradiction made something in my chest do things I didn't want to examine. This girl who'd spit in my face a week ago was now practicing table manners when she thought I wasn't watching. Setting napkins beside plates with careful attention to placement. Using the right fork for salad versus main course, knowledge she'd picked up from watching me.
My phone rang, Ivan's number flashing on the encrypted line. I'd been dodging him for three days, but there was only so long I could pretend to be handling business that didn't exist.
"You've been radio silent for a week," he said without preamble. "Alexei's asking questions."
"I'm working on something related to the Morozovs." Not entirely a lie. The USB was in my safe, its contents backed up to three secure servers. I'd been through every file, mapped every connection, built a comprehensive picture of Morozov operations that would be invaluable when we inevitably went to war with them.
I should tell them about the USB, so we could work on it together. But I couldn’t not yet—it was too risky.
"And this work requires you to be completely unavailable?" Ivan's voice carried that particular tone that meant he was running probability calculations in his head. "You missed the Thursday meeting. Alexei had to handle the Gorgonov situation himself."
The Gorgonov situation—a territorial dispute over the Queens waterfront that I should have handled. Would have handled if I wasn't playing whatever this was with a twenty-two-year-old thief who'd somehow rearranged my entire life in a week.
"I need more time," I said, watching Eva on the monitor as she practiced having a tea party with Bear, complete with proper posture and pinky fingers extended.
"Time for what, exactly?" Ivan asked. "Is there something you're not telling us."
There waseverythingelse.
"Just a few more days," I said. "I'm working on something."
"Dmitry." Ivan's voice softened slightly. "Whatever this is, be careful. Alexei's patience isn't infinite, and the Morozovs are starting to panic. Panic leads to violence."
"Understood," I said.
I hung up and returned to watching Eva, who'd moved on to teaching Bear to dance, holding his front paws while humming something that might have been a waltz. She was barefoot, my t-shirt hitting her mid-thigh, hair falling in her face as she laughed at the puppy's clumsy attempts to follow her lead.
I was working on something, alright. I just didn't know what to call it yet.
Onehundredlinesof"I will not attempt to pick locks with stolen cutlery" sat stacked on my kitchen counter, her handwriting deteriorating from Catholic school neat to angry slashes to tiny rebellious doodles of middle fingers in the margins.
The last twenty lines were barely legible, but she'd completed them. Every single one, because she'd learned that half-measures just meant starting over.
Now she sat across from me at dinner, eating her pasta like she'd been raised by wolves. Sauce on her chin, deliberately slurping noodles, chewing with her mouth open in a performance of defiance that would have been funny if it wasn't so calculated.
"Eat properly," I said, not looking up from my own plate.
She took a bigger bite, letting marinara drip onto the table I'd cleaned an hour ago. The splatter pattern was almost artistic in its deliberateness—she'd aimed for maximum mess without seeming like she was aiming.
"Corner," I said simply.
The word hung between us for exactly two seconds. Then she snapped.
The plate went first, sailing past my head with enough force to leave a red smear on the wall behind me. Her water glass followed, exploding against the kitchen cabinet in a shower of crystal that caught the light like expensive rain. She was up before I could react, grabbing the remote from the coffee table.
"Fuck your corner!" She hurled the remote at the TV with impressive force, the kind that came from genuine rage ratherthan calculation. The screen cracked on impact, spider-webbing from the center in a pattern that would cost three thousand dollars to replace.
But she wasn't done. She grabbed books from my shelf—the Russian novels I kept for appearance, the technical manuals I actually read—throwing them with mechanical precision. One caught me in the shoulder, leaving what would be a bruise.
"What kind of mob enforcer doesn't even hit back?" she screamed, reaching for one of my grandmother's music boxes—the only one I kept out in the open—on the high shelf.
