Page 18 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

The room barely resembled the one I had walked into months earlier with sawdust in my shoes and nine weeks between me and disaster. The scaffolding was gone. The gold molding gleamed the way it was always supposed to. Someone had finally fixed the wiring in the corner, and the chandeliers that used to hang under dust sheets like ghosts now threw soft gold light across a floor that had been sanded and waxed until it looked like something out of a different century entirely. Every table sat exactly where I had once fought a total stranger about sightlines, and I still hadn't decided whether that felt like closure or just a very expensive coincidence.

"If you drop the votives any lower, we lose the head table sightline for the back three rows," I called to the technician, mostly out of muscle memory. He adjusted without argument, the way vendors had started doing lately, ever since word got around about exactly whose account this was.

Naomi's phone buzzed again, and this time she actually looked at it, and her whole face changed in a way I recognized from three years of watching her handle other people's emergencies without ever losing her composure over her own, right up until the emergencies started belonging to her.

"I have to take this."

"Everything okay?"

"My aunt has opinions." She said the word like it belonged in quotes. "Priya's aunt, technically, but she has adopted me as a target with genuine enthusiasm, and apparently the seating chart I sent last week has offended her on a personal level she would like to discuss at length."

"You're getting married in eight months. You do not have time for a seating chart discussion tonight."

"Tell that to a woman who once made a caterer cry over the definition of the word garnish." She glanced at Dmitri, then back at me, something calculating flickering behind her eyes for exactly one second before she smoothed it over. "You two will be fine here without me for twenty minutes. Try not to burn the place down."

"We're not going to burn the place down, Naomi. Probably."

"I said try. I have faith in you specifically. Him I've met twice." She was already walking toward the door, phone pressed back to her ear, voice sliding into the same flat, deadly calm register I had watched her use on venues twice her size. "No, I hear you, but cousin Marcus cannot sit within four tables of his ex-wife, that is not a suggestion, that is a structural requirement of this wedding."

The door swung shut behind her, and the sound of the latch catching seemed louder than it should have in a room that size.

Dmitri stood near the far wall, hands in his pockets, watching the candlelight the way he watched most things, carefully, like he was checking it for something before he let himself simply see it. He had shown up an hour ago for what I had called a final walkthrough, though we both knew there was very little left on the actual checklist that required his presence.

"She's getting married," he said, when the technician had gone quiet enough for anyone to hear anything.

"In the fall. It's been theoretical for two years and suddenly extremely real in the last three months."

"You didn't mention it."

"You never asked." I crossed toward the head table, running a hand along the edge of it out of habit, checking a seam that did not need checking. "Also, in my defense, most of our conversations have involved a folder neither of us opens, so there hasn't been a lot of room for small talk."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile but wanted to be one. "Fair."

We stood there for a moment in the kind of quiet that used to make me talk faster to fill it, and I noticed, almost without deciding to notice it, that I didn't feel the urge tonight the way I usually did.

"Can I ask you something?" I said instead.

"You can ask."

"That's not a yes."

"It's an invitation to find out."

I sat on the edge of the head table, which Naomi would have yelled at me for if she'd been in the room, and looked out at four hundred empty chairs waiting for people who didn't exist yet. "Why does everyone in this industry go quiet when I say your name? Actual quiet. Like I'd said something that needed a lawyer in the room before we kept talking."

"You already know why."

"I know the version people whisper. I don't actually know anything." I pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them, and let myself say the next part before I could talk myself out of it. "You want to know something true about me instead? Since we're apparently doing honesty tonight."

"I'd like that."

So I told him. I told him about the loan, the actual number, forty thousand dollars, my mother's signature on a piece of paper that meant her house belonged to a bank's patience more than it belonged to her, two years running now, because my company hadn't turned a profit its first year and barely scraped one its second.

He didn't say anything. He just watched me with the same stillness he'd watched the candlelight with a few minutes earlier, like he was giving the fact its full weight instead of rushing past it toward something more comfortable to say.

"I told her not to sign it," I added, because the silence made me want to fill in the parts I usually skipped. "She did it anyway. Said that's what mothers are for, which is a nice sentence until you're the one who has to live inside it every month when the payment's due."

He nodded, once, and let me keep going.