Page 52 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I looked up and found Rosa watching me across the table, her hands still folded, her face doing nothing at all to soften whatever she saw crossing mine, because she had never once in her life offered me the comfort of pretending a hard thing was easier than it was.

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," I told Nik, and set the phone down on the table beside a plate of toast neither of us was going to finish.

Rosa did not ask what the call had been. She simply reached across and took my untouched plate away, same as she had a thousand mornings before this one, and for once I let her, because there are certain kinds of ruin a man cannot pretend his way through, not even in his own kitchen, not even with the one person who had spent a lifetime refusing to let him try.

27

CORA

The Ambrose no longer smelled like sawdust and wet paint. It smelled like fresh paint drying under new chandeliers, like a hundred fresh-cut stems waiting in buckets along the service hall, like the particular electricity of a room four weeks out from finally becoming what it had been promising to be since the morning I first walked in with a clipboard and no idea what my life was about to turn into.

"Riser height on the north end needs to come up two inches," I said, walking the room with my phone against my ear and a tape measure looped over one shoulder like a very unglamorous accessory. "The quartet's fine where they are, but the sightline from table nine cuts them off at the shoulders, and I am not spending four weeks solving every other problem in this building just to let somebody's grandmother watch a headless string section."

"Two inches, on it," Beckett said, already halfway across the ballroom with his own tablet, marking risers with the calm, methodical focus of a man who had stopped being surprised by anything I asked for months ago. "Linens confirmed for both head tables. Floral's running an hour behind on the mockup, but they swear the peonies will be worth the wait."

"They'd better be. I'm not paying peony prices for anything less than transcendent." I crossed to the east wall, where a stretch of gold molding I remembered scrubbing myself on my hands and knees during a different, smaller crisis now gleamed under fresh light. "Where's Naomi?"

"Fighting with the AV company about a microphone feed. Losing, from the sound of it."

I could hear her before I saw her, her voice carrying from the far corner in the particular register she used exclusively on vendors who had disappointed her. "No, I understand that the feed worked in testing. I am telling you that testing happened in an empty room, and this room will have four hundred people in formalwear absorbing sound like a very expensive sponge, so unless your equipment has opinions about acoustics, we are adjusting the levels again before the actual event." She paused, listening. "Great. Glad we agree."

She hung up, exhaled through her nose, and caught my eye across the ballroom with the specific look of two women who had learned to read each other's disasters from thirty feet away.

"You good?" she called over.

"I'm fantastic," I said, and meant it, mostly, in the narrow and specific way that only counted the parts of my life currently visible on a floor plan.

The seating chart alone had taken me three full days, a diplomatic effort that would have made actual diplomats weep with professional respect. Two families who had not spoken civilly in a decade sat four tables apart with a dance floor and a string quartet between them. A donor who had once sued another donor over a disputed property line sat close enough to look gracious and far enough to avoid an incident. A board member's ex-wife and her considerably younger new husband got a table near the exit, angled just enough that leaving early would look like planning instead of retreat. I had built the entire chart the way I built everything when I did not want to think about something else, with total, obsessive, load-bearing precision, one name card at a time, until there was no room left in my head for anything that did not have an assigned seat.

"Cora." Beckett appeared at my elbow, tablet held slightly away from his body like it might bite him. "The cake tasting's in ten minutes. I need you to prepare yourself emotionally."

"For cake?"

"For what the baker is currently calling a structural adjustment."

The structural adjustment, when I reached the kitchen, turned out to be a five-tier confection lying on its side across two full sheet pans like the world's most elegant crime scene, buttercream roses scattered across the counter in a blast radius that suggested the cake had not so much collapsed as staged a small, dignified rebellion.

"It was the humidity," the baker said, with the flat, wounded dignity of an artist explaining a betrayal. "The humidity in this building is a war crime."

"Can you rebuild it?"

"I can. I cannot promise it will forgive either of us for what just happened."

"I don't need it to forgive us. I need it standing upright on the night, ideally not looking like it survived a small earthquake." I crouched to examine the wreckage, mostly to keep myself from laughing in front of a man who was clearly in genuine mourning. "Internal supports. Dowels through all five tiers, not just the bottom three. I don't care if it costs more. I have had exactly one cake collapse in three years of doing this, and I would like to keep that number right where it is."

"I felt every one of those tiers go, Ms. Walsh. I felt it in my soul."

"I believe you. Rebuild it anyway."

I left him to his grief and walked directly into a different one, because that was apparently the theme of the morning.

The ice sculptor had set up in the loading bay, a block of ice the size of a small car dripping steadily under a space heater someone had thoughtlessly left running nearby, and he was standing over it with his arms crossed and an expression I recognized from every artist I had ever hired who believed, correctly or not, that they were about to be asked to compromise their vision.

"You want swans," he said, before I had gotten within ten feet of him.

"It's not about what I want. The client asked for two, facing each other, over the champagne fountain."

"Facing each other is a mistake. Swans facing each other reads as confrontational. It reads like two swans about to fight over territory, which is not the energy anyone wants at a champagne fountain." He gestured at the ice with real anguish. "I have been carving swans for eleven years. I know what a swan wants to say."