Page 84 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Then he will learn the same thing Kirill just learned. This family answers to me, not to whichever answer happens to feel most satisfying in the moment." I said it evenly, without any heat behind it, because it was simply true and had been true long before tonight gave me a reason to say it out loud.

Nik studied me a moment longer than he needed to, then nodded once, the particular nod of a man deciding a conversation had reached the end of what either of us wanted to say about it, and went to find Reyes's people with whatever remained on his list.

I stood alone in the middle of the wreckage for the first time since the lights had gone out, and let myself feel, all at once, the full weight of everything the last hour had cost me. My hands had finally stopped shaking somewhere between the stairwell and this conversation, though I could not have said exactly when. A year ago I would have called what I had just done weakness and meant it. Tonight it simply felt like a decision I had made with my eyes open, unfamiliar in a way I did not fully understand yet. I went looking for her again, past the agents cataloguing evidence into clear plastic bags, past the toppled tables nobody had righted yet, past the paramedic who had apparently lost his argument and moved on to someone easier to convince, past the single candelabra still burning sideways near the stage, until the looking stopped mattering at all.

I turned around in the wrecked, emptying ballroom and found Cora already watching me. Neither of us said anything yet. It did not need words to be the loudest moment of the night.

46

CORA

The adrenaline left me all at once, the way a wave pulls back before the next one hits, except the next one never came. One second I was still laughing with Dmitri's arms locked around me, and the next my knees simply stopped agreeing to hold the rest of me up, and I found the nearest surface, which turned out to be the wrecked remains of my own coordinator's station, and sat down on what used to be my folding table before anyone noticed I needed to.

My hands would not stop shaking, not the dramatic kind you see in movies, just a small, constant tremor that made it hard to hold my phone steady enough to read the screen, which was probably a mercy, because the screen was already full of news I was not ready to face.

The guests were gone by then, herded onto buses and into rideshares by staff who had clearly rehearsed a version of this evening that did not involve federal agents, and the ballroom had settled into that particular hush that follows something enormous, equipment still humming somewhere, radios crackling low, nobody left who mattered enough to perform for anymore. I sat in the middle of it and let myself feel every hour of the last three months at once, all the seating charts and vendor calls and sleepless nights that had built toward a single evening now being catalogued by strangers in windbreakers instead of admired by anyone I had worked for.

Naomi found me first, stepping over a fallen chair with the practiced balance of someone who had navigated three years of my disasters in heels. Someone's borrowed cardigan hung off her shoulders, and she wore the expression I recognized from every crisis we had weathered together, the one that meant she had already decided I needed managing and was simply choosing her opening line.

"You're alive," she said, crouching in front of me. "That's the only headline I actually care about tonight."

"Is there another one?"

Something in her face flickered, and that was answer enough. She turned her phone toward me anyway, because Naomi knew by now that I would rather see a wound myself than have someone else describe it to me. The screen showed a local news alert, already three hundred shares deep, a headline built entirely out of the words federal raid and multiple arrests and society gala, my own name nowhere in it, Walsh Events nowhere in it, three months of my work reduced to a backdrop for somebody else's story.

"It gets worse before it gets better," Naomi said, gently, the way you tell someone the biopsy results are in. "Two outlets are already calling it the summit that ended in gunfire. One of them spelled Ambrose wrong."

"I planned a perfect party and a crime family is going to get all the credit for how memorable it was."

"I would frame that sentence and hang it somewhere, if I were you." She crouched lower, caught my eyes, and let the joke go quiet behind something more careful. "You don't have to be funny right now. I mean that. Nobody in this room is grading you on your material tonight."

"I know."

"Do you?" She studied me a moment longer, then seemed to decide I actually meant it, and straightened up, brushing plaster dust off her knees. "Beckett's got the vendor releases handled, and I intend to plant myself near an agent who looks like she knows what happens next, purely for informational purposes. Stay here. Somebody is looking for you, and I do not think he is going to be hard to find."

She left before I could ask who, though I already knew, the same way I had known it for months now: some low, constant awareness of exactly where he was in any room I stood in.

Dmitri found me a few minutes later, his jacket gone, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, a fresh scrape across one knuckle he had not bothered to look at yet. He did not say anything at first. He just pulled one of the few upright chairs over, turned it to face me, and sat down close enough that our knees almost touched, close enough that the last hour's cost was written all over him too.

"You found me," I said, because it seemed important to say out loud, even though he already knew it, even though we both already knew everything that sentence was carrying.

"I was always going to find you."

"That's a very confident thing to say about a woman who spent part of tonight hitting a man with a chafing dish lid."

"I heard." His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, more like the memory of one. "I am told you were extremely proud of yourself."

"I was. I still am. I fully intend to bring it up at inappropriate moments for the rest of my life." I looked down at my own hands, still faintly unsteady in my lap, and felt the old reflex rise up in my throat, the one that wanted to turn this whole conversation into something light before it could get anywhere real. I let it rise. I did not let it out. "I almost did not walk out of that stairwell tonight. I want to say that plainly, once, instead of turning it into a joke the way I turn everything into a joke, because I think if I make this funny I am never going to actually feel it, and I would rather feel it, even though feeling it is currently terrible."

He did not say anything right away. He reached over instead and took my shaking hand in both of his, steadying it simply by holding it, and for a long moment that was the entire conversation, his thumb moving once across my knuckles, both of us sitting in the wreckage of a party I had somehow built for a night just like this one without ever admitting that was what I was doing.

"I thought I was going to lose you," he said finally, quiet, stripped of every trace of performance. "I have run this family for twenty-three years without ever once needing to say that sentence about anyone, and tonight I could not stop saying it in my own head, over and over, while I was running down a hallway I could not see the end of."

"You found the end of it."

"I did. I try not to think about the version where I didn't."

"Well. We'll never know, because you did." I laced our fingers together and pushed myself past the easier exit a smaller version of tonight would have taken. "I built my whole career on being the person who has a plan for everything. Exits mapped. Contingencies labeled. A notebook for every disaster I could imagine happening at one of my events, and I never imagined this one, and it turns out none of my planning was ever actually going to protect me from the thing I was most afraid of, which was losing someone, not losing an event. I have been managing the wrong disaster for three years."