SEVEN YEARS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

She didn't sit down. She stood there with her arms crossed like the posture alone could keep her upright through whatever came next, and after a moment Dimitri stopped asking her to.

"Seven years ago," he said, "your father came to me. Not the other way around. I want you to understand that first, because everything after it changes shape depending on who walked through whose door."

"Why would he come to you?"

"Because Calder Mace had already approached him. I wanted to use the restaurant — the location, the foot traffic, the fact that nobody looks twice at deliveries going into a busy kitchen. Your father said no. Mace doesn't take it well." Dimitri's jaw tightened, an old anger surfacing that had nothing to do with the room they were standing in now. "Your father knew what saying no would cost him if he didn't have someone bigger standing behind that no. So he found me."

"And you just — agreed? To protect a stranger?"

"I agreed to an arrangement." His voice had gone precise now, the way it did when he was choosing words like they mattered, which, Lyra was beginning to understand, they always did with him. "He fed me information. Small things at first — who came asking about the property, who paid in cash and never ordered food, patterns that told me where Mace's operation was moving. In exchange, I made sure Mace's people understood that the restaurant wasn't available to them. Not without consequences neither of us wanted."

"So he was your spy."

"He was my friend." The word came out rougher than she expected, and something in his face shifted with it — not the careful mask he wore for men like Anton Reyes, but something closer to grief, unguarded and startling on a man built so entirely out of control. "I know that's not the word you want to hear right now. But it's the truth."

Lyra's arms loosened slightly, some of the fight draining out of her posture without her permission. "You said the restaurant's survival wasn't luck. That night, when you told me about the debt. You already meant this."

"I meant that it survived because I made sure it did. Every health inspection that came back clean when it shouldn't have. Every supplier who didn't jack up prices during the bad years. Every time the competition tried to open two blocks over and mysteriously lost their lease." He said it plainly, without pride, like a man reciting a debt he was still paying off in his own head. "That wasn't luck, Lyra. That was seven years of a man keeping a promise to your father because your father kept his to me."

She sat down then, not because he'd asked her to, but because her legs had finally stopped agreeing to hold her up. The chair was cold. The whole room felt cold, like the truth had let winter in through a door she hadn't known was open.

"I ran that place thinking we survived on nothing but stubbornness and bad coffee," she said, quiet now, almost to herself. "Turns out my father had a mafia king watching the door the whole time."

"He never wanted that word used. Mafia. He hated it." A ghost of something almost like a smile crossed Dimitri's face, there and gone. "Said it made things sound simpler than they were."

"Were they simple?"

"No." He came around the desk again, slower this time, and lowered himself into the chair across from her instead of standing over her the way he usually did — meeting her at eye level for what she realized was the first time since she'd walked through his gates. "Nothing about your father was simple. He fed me information for seven years and never once asked for money. Never asked me to forgive a debt, never asked for protection beyond what kept that restaurant standing. I offered more. He refused every time."

"Why?"

"I asked him that once." Dimitri's eyes went somewhere distant, some memory he was turning over carefully before he handed it to her. "He said the day he took something from me beyond what he needed, he'd stop being a father who happened to know dangerous men, and start being one of them. He wanted to stay on the right side of that line. For you. For June. For Theo."

Lyra pressed her fingers against her eyes, hard, trying to hold back something that had been building since the first ring of the burner phone. "He never let me see any of it. Not one piece."

"He wanted you to have a life he didn't get to have," Dimitri said. "Ordinary. Untouched by any of this. He talked about it — more than you'd think, for a man who didn't talk much."

"You keep saying that. That he talked about me."

Dimitri was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice had changed entirely — lower, rougher, stripped of the careful precision he used for everything else. "I came to the restaurant once. Years ago. Not for business. Your father didn't know I was there. I sat in a car across the street because I wanted to see the place he wouldn't stop talking about, and instead I saw you."

Lyra went very still.

"You were closing alone that night. Late — past eleven, I think, and every other server had gone home, and you were running the whole dinner service by yourself, wiping down the last table, singing something to yourself that I couldn't hear through the glass." His eyes hadn't left hers. "You looked exhausted and completely unbothered by it, like it was just what the night required of you and you'd already decided to give it. I sat there longer than I meant to."

"Why?"

"Because I understood then why he wanted out." His voice had gone almost quiet enough to lose. "Not out of the arrangement with me. Out of the life that made you run a restaurant alone at eleven at night at twenty-three years old instead of living something easier. He wasn't protecting a business, Lyra. He was trying to buy you time to become something other than what this world does to people who stay in it too long."

Lyra sat with that for a long moment, the room silent except for her own breathing, unsteady now, the anger she'd walked in with rearranging itself into something she didn't have a clean name for yet.

"Tell me the rest," she said finally, quieter than before, but not softer. "I know there's more. I can feel it, the way you're still holding something back even now."

Dimitri looked at her for a long moment, and something in his face told her he'd been waiting for her to ask that exact question, dreading it and needing it in equal measure.

"There's a ledger," he said. "And your father's

name is in it. So is yours.”