“Cooper.”
Ivan looked the same as ever, in the brief glance Cooper caught before he looked to his own feet again. Handsome in a scary, icy way, all white-blond hair and pale-blue eyes. He looked just like his father, whereas Cooper was connected to him by his mother’s side. She and Cooper’s father had been siblings.
Now they were both dead and gone, and somehow Cooper was still here, working for mobsters.
“You needed me?”
“We have two people who need identification,” Ivan told him, tapping at his desk.
“Fake IDs?” Cooper asked, a little disappointed. That was quick, boring work and could have easily been a phone call.
“Not enough. We need thorough documentation of their existence. Enough for travel, residency…whatever they might require. And it needs to come from nothing.”
Now that was more interesting. A lot of paperwork was required to create a whole legal human out of nothing. Cooper looked up from his feet. “Social security cards, even?”
Ivan nodded at him. “Can you do it?”
“Uh…sure.” Of course he could. Cooper nibbled at his lip, already going through the logistics in his head. “I need approximate ages,” he told Ivan. “Photos.”
“I can get you those.” Ivan pushed a fat stack of old-fashioned ledgers on his desk toward Cooper. “And I need these digitized.”
There was the boring busywork he’d feared. But Cooper didn’t mind so much now—creating the false identities would be kind of fun, at least. And he needed to earn his spacious apartment and ample salary somehow. He stepped forward to the side of the desk and gathered the ledgers.
He was startled to find the pretty stranger at his side in the next instant, knocking his hip against an open desk drawer Cooper had missed, revealing another book. “You missed one.”
“Oh. Um, thank you.” Cooper grabbed for the thing blindly, trying not to flinch at the stranger’s close proximity. He held all the ledgers close to his chest as Ivan cleared his throat, for some reason radiating disapproval.
“This is Nix, my new assistant. He’s one of the ones needing ID.”
Surprise had Cooper glancing up and meeting Nix’s purple eyes. Assistant? Surely not. But Cooper wasn’t going to go around contradicting Ivan. “You, um, have a preference for your birthday?” he asked Nix instead.
Nix winked at him. Cooper had never met anyone who winked at people in real life. “Whatever you think best, Cooper, darling.”
“Don’t flirt with Coop,” Ivan reprimanded. But it was weird, because even though his voice was harsh, he sounded almost…fond? “He can’t handle your teasing.”
Nix’s voice lowered into a croon. “Not like you, Vanya.”
Okay, sothatwas real flirting, not the flirting-on-automatic Nix had been doing with Cooper. Cooper’s eyes widened as he glanced between the two of them. What the fuck was going on? Was Ivaninvolvedwith this guy? With a man?
It was the most unlikely thing Cooper had ever heard, considering Ivan’s history, but then Ivan actually tugged Nix into his side, pulling him onto the arm of his chair. It was an act of intimacy if Cooper had ever seen one.
Everyone’s getting laid but you, loser.
Thank you, brain, that’s very helpful.
Ivan cocked his head pointedly toward the door. “That’ll be all, Coop.”
Nix waved at him. “Bye, Coop. So lovely to make your acquaintance.”
If Cooper kept staring at them like this, Ivan was going to give him something to stare at, he was sure. Like a gun in his face. So Cooper pulled his hoodie up and walked out of the room quickly, the ledgers tucked against him, feeling more than a little dazed.
He’d thought he was going to be acclimating himself back into the real world slowly after a week locked in his apartment, but instead he felt like he’d just entered topsy-turvy land.
If Ivan—one of the most emotionally repressed representatives of toxic masculinity Cooper knew—was experimenting with bisexuality with what might just be a literal supermodel…
Well, what other strange things might the world have in store for Cooper today?
2
