Page 3 of Bratva Bride
"Three days," Alexei said quietly. "Clara says you haven't eaten. The food she brought yesterday is still sitting on your desk, untouched."
I glanced at the desk by the door. Thai takeout containers, congealed. I'd completely forgotten they existed.
"Irrelevant to the crisis." My hands moved back to the keyboard. Started to type. Trembled instead.
Fuck.
I made fists. Tried to hide the shaking. Too late. They'd both seen it.
"I'm trying to work out how to mitigate this fucking disaster." The words came out harder than I meant them to. "Each scenario requires specific countermeasures. If the feds move on the construction company, we need offshore accounts activated. If they target the shipping routes, we need alternative channels established. I've identified forty-seven variables that need immediate—"
"You can't calculate your way out of everything," Dmitry said.
The gentleness in his voice broke something in my chest.
"I can try." I finally looked at them both. Saw my brothers—the only two people in the world who knew exactly what I was. What I'd always been. The anxious kid who counted everything, who needed patterns to feel safe, who'd built an empire of control around the terrified child still hiding underneath.
"If I don't try, people die."
The war room went quiet. Just the hum of monitors. The soft clicking of keys as algorithms ran on auto-pilot.
"People die anyway," Alexei said. "Four civilians died in that restaurant. You didn't plant the bomb. You didn't fail to preventit. Sometimes things happen that are outside even your ability to predict."
"That's not—" I started.
"You think I don't know what you're doing?" Alexei moved closer, leaned against the desk beside me. Close enough that I could smell his cologne, sandalwood and bergamot, the scent that meant safety when we were kids. "You're running every scenario where you could've stopped this. Every detail you might have missed. Every phone call you should've made or meeting you should've attended. You're looking for the pattern you failed to see."
My throat tightened.
"But Vanya, there are too many variables. Even for you. Even with seven monitors and three keyboards and seventy-two hours of no sleep. Some things are chaos. Some things just happen."
"Babushka said—"
"Babushka also said that you can't save everyone." Dmitry's hand landed on my shoulder. Heavy. Warm. Real. "She said that trying to control everything is just another way of being afraid."
I flinched. Dmitry's hand stayed.
"That's not—" I tried again. Failed again. My voice cracked. "I missed three calls from her. Three. If I'd just answered—"
"You were working," Alexei said firmly. "You were doing your job. You were twenty-three years old and negotiating a deal that kept fifty families employed. You didn't kill her. The stroke killed her."
"But I could've—"
"You could have answered and she still would have died before the ambulance arrived. You could have been standing right there and not known what was happening until it was too late. The doctors said it was massive. Instant. Nothing you could've done." Alexei's voice gentled. "You're not God, Ivan. You're justa man with anxiety and too many monitors and a desperate need to protect everyone you love."
The tremor in my hands spread to my arms. My whole body shaking now. The beta-blockers couldn't suppress this—the medication worked on physical symptoms, not the underlying terror that drove them.
"Have a break, brother," Alexei said.
Not a request. Not quite an order. Somewhere in between. The voice of a Pakhan who loved me. The voice of a brother who'd spent our entire lives trying to shield me from the world while I tried to calculate our way to safety.
"I’ll take two hours," I heard myself say. "Then we need to plan."
Dmitry's hand squeezed my shoulder. "Two hours. Food first. Then shower. Then we talk."
I forced myself to stand, my body protesting after seventy-two hours in the chair. My spine cracked in three places. My knees felt like someone had replaced the joints with broken glass. I steadied myself against the desk, waiting for the room to stop tilting.
It didn't.
