"Five more minutes?" I bargained, curling deeper into his chest.
"Five more minutes," he agreed, pressing a kiss to the top of my head.
But five minutes turned into ten, then fifteen, and when I started listing sideways, Dmitry made the executive decision.
"Come on, baby girl. Time for teeth brushing and bed."
I whined but let him help me to my feet, swaying slightly as blood rushed back to my legs. The fort looked even more magical from the outside, glowing softly in the dark apartment. Bear hadfallen completely asleep, sprawled across the fairy tale book with his tongue poking out slightly, snoring in that whistling way that meant he was deeply unconscious.
"We should clean up," I said, looking at the takeout boxes and plates.
"Tomorrow," Dmitry said, hands on my waist to steady me. "We'll leave the fort up too. Maybe add more blankets, make it even better."
"Tomorrow?" The casual assumption that there would be a tomorrow, that we'd improve on what we'd built rather than tear it down, made my throat tight.
"Tomorrow," he confirmed. "And the day after that, and the day after that. We can have a fort whenever you want one, little one. It doesn't have to be special occasion."
The promise of continuity—of forts and fairy tales and Chinese food whenever I needed them—was almost too much to process. I'd spent so long in survival mode, never planning beyond the next meal or safe place to sleep. The idea that I could want something as frivolous as a blanket fort and have it, not just once but whenever, scrambled my understanding of how life worked.
"You mean it?" I asked, hating how small my voice sounded but needing the confirmation.
"I mean it," he said simply. "This is your home now, Eva. Our home. Forts included."
I stood there in my pajamas, swaying slightly with exhaustion, looking at this man who'd built me a fort and read me stories and fed me Chinese food like it was communion. This man who saw me in little space and met me there without judgment, who promised tomorrow like he had the right to guarantee futures.
This was normal for other people. This assumption of safety, of continuity, of someone caring whether you ate dinner or had a soft place to sleep. For me, it was a miracle wrapped in stringlights and blankets, proof that sometimes broken people could build something beautiful from their sharp edges.
"Okay," I whispered, taking his offered hand. "Bedtime."
Chapter 14
Dmitry
Comingtoseemybrothers for the weekly meeting felt a little bit like waking up from some beautiful dream. For the first time in what felt like years, there was a genuine warmth and happiness in my heart.
Not the thrill of violence.
Not the love of power.
Just the true, genuine, freeing happiness that love brings.
I pushed through the reinforced door at 11:58, my body still loose from the morning with Eva—the way she'd wrapped herself around me when I left, mumbling about five more minutes into my chest. The sweetness of that moment felt incongruous with the industrial brutality of our Brooklyn compound, all concrete and steel and bulletproof glass.
Ivan was already hunched over his laptop, three additional monitors arranged in a semicircle that made him look like some kind of financial wizard summoning profit from digital chaos. His fingers flew across the keyboard without lookingup, numbers cascading down one screen while surveillance feeds played on another. This was Ivan in his element—cold, calculating, turning data into power.
"Morning," I said, settling into my usual chair, the leather creaking under my weight.
He glanced up briefly, those ice-blue eyes cataloging something in my expression before returning to his screens. "You're almost cheerful. Disturbing."
Before I could respond, Alexei entered at exactly noon. Not 11:59, not 12:01, but noon precisely, because Alexei treated time like another soldier to be commanded. He moved with that controlled grace that made people forget he could kill them with his bare hands, settling into the head chair like a king taking his throne.
"Territory reports," he said without preamble, and we fell into the familiar rhythm of our weekly operations meeting.
I updated him on collections from our construction sites, a minor territory dispute with some Irish crew trying to muscle in on our concrete suppliers. Ivan detailed the week's financial movements, legitimate profits mixing with less legitimate ones in the complex dance of money laundering that kept our empire running. Alexei listened with that perfect stillness that meant he was absorbing everything, filing it away in that computer of a brain.
We'd been at it for maybe twenty minutes when Ivan's typing stopped abruptly. The sudden absence of keyboard clicks was loud as a gunshot in the quiet room.
"What?" Alexei asked, sensing the shift immediately.
