Page 5 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Because you're interested in floristry."

"Because I said I would."

Nik laughed, short and genuine, a sound I had heard maybe a dozen times in twenty years and had learned to value accordingly. "All right. They're yours. I'll tell the team there's been a change in review protocol, which is a sentence I did not expect to say this month, or possibly this decade." There was a pause, and when he spoke again the tone had shifted: business folded back into business. "One more thing. The Sorokins are sending an advance team to walk the summit venue again. Third time this year. Twenty years of alliance and they still don't trust a door unless one of their own men has counted it personally."

"Twenty years of alliance is exactly why they still bother. Let them count."

"I'll have the schedule sent to you tonight."

"Goodnight, Nik."

"Goodnight, Dima. Try not to enjoy the florist's invoice too much."

I set the phone down before I could think of anything to say to that, because there was nothing to say to that, and because he would have heard the truth in my voice if I had tried.

The suite was quiet again, the particular quiet of a room built to swallow noise, and I stood in the middle of it doing nothing at all, which was not a thing I did. I thought about the photograph clipped to the vendor file, competent and unsmiling, and how little it had prepared me for a woman who narrated her own panic like a play-by-play and expected furniture to listen. Somewhere two floors below me she was probably still working, arguing with a lighting rig or a caterer, unaware that the man she had ordered around all afternoon had just told his second in command to hold every contract bearing her name.

I looked at the scotch I still had not touched, picked it up, and set it back down without drinking it, and told myself the fifteen years I had spent building this life were still standing, that a clipboard and an unfinished sentence about symmetry had not put a crack in anything that mattered.

I did not believe myself. I know when I am lying, and I was lying.

I told Nik to hold the vendor contracts, that I would review them myself, the first reckless thing I had done in fifteen years, decided in about four seconds flat.

3

CORA

Three days after a stranger with a clipboard turned out to be the man holding my company's entire future in one signature, I scrubbed our conference table down to bare wood and decided that counted as being prepared.

The Flatiron loft that housed Walsh Events was two rooms and a closet we optimistically called a supply room, all exposed brick and iron pipes and windows tall enough to make the rent feel almost defensible on the good days and utterly indefensible on the bad ones. I had cleared the contract table of everything except a single manila folder and a pen I had tested four times to make sure it actually wrote, because a dead pen felt like the kind of detail that could unravel a person's entire professional credibility in one silent, humiliating scratch across the signature line. Naomi had rearranged the two client chairs twice already that morning, muttering something about angles and light, before I finally told her to sit down and let the room be imperfect for once.

I had spent the three days since the ballroom convinced I would never see him again, not personally. Men like that sent lawyers. They had assistants with cufflinks who reviewed contracts over lunch and called with revisions in flat, bored voices, and I had built my entire preparation strategy around a lawyer named something like Whitmore or Ashford, someone I could out-argue on clause language without my hands shaking. I had googled Dmitri Zolotov exactly as many times as was healthy, which was to say considerably more than that, and found almost nothing: a shipping company, a charitable foundation that disclosed nothing beyond a tax filing, and two industry acquaintances who went quiet and changed the subject the second I said it out loud, one of them actually lowering her voice like the walls might report back.

None of that told me anything except that everyone who knew more than I did had decided it was safer not to say it. The one exception was a planner I'd worked with twice on smaller galas, who went pale over lunch when I mentioned the name and told me, very carefully, that whatever I did, I should read every line of that contract myself and never, under any circumstances, assume a verbal agreement meant anything at all. I had thanked her for the advice. I had not slept especially well since.

So I overcorrected, the way I always did when fear had nowhere useful to go. I printed three copies of the contract instead of one. I color-coded the tabs by section, blue for scope, green for payment, red for anything that could be renegotiated, though I had no real evidence anyone from his side would bother renegotiating a single clause. I rehearsed a handshake in the bathroom mirror that morning, firm but not aggressive, the kind of grip that said a competent adult, not a woman who had spent an entire afternoon three days ago taking directions from her own client without realizing it.

"You've polished that table for twenty minutes," Naomi said from the doorway, coffee in each hand, one of them presumably for me if I behaved. "It's wood. It's not going to get any more sincere."

"I want it clean."

"It's clean. You scrubbed the shine off it ten minutes ago and kept going out of spite." She set my coffee down out of splashing range of the folder, which told me she'd noticed the shake in my hands before I had. "You good?"

"Forty thousand dollars," I said, because saying the number out loud sometimes made it smaller, though it never actually worked. "My mother cosigned that loan two years ago so I could make payroll through our second year, and this is our third. If this contract falls through, it's not just my company that's underwater, it's her house."

Naomi's teasing vanished, all at once. "It's not going to fall through. You've got a signed proposal and a very intimidating man who apparently likes moving furniture."

"He's not going to remember the furniture."

"Cora. He hand carried a folding table for you like it was a personal errand from God. Men do not forget that."

"Men also send lawyers to sign nine-million-dollar contracts instead of showing up themselves, so let's not build a whole theory out of one table."

"I'm just saying, when he walks in, do not offer him coffee like he's a golden retriever who wandered into the wrong building."

"I offered you coffee like that and you took it."

"I'm delightful. He's a different category of client." Naomi glanced at the color-coded folder, then at me, one eyebrow climbing. "Blue, green, red. Did you make him a whole filing system?"