Page 88 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"From who?"

"Everyone," Luca said, which was not an answer, and also somehow entirely sufficient as one. He wandered toward my bookshelf next, already inspecting it like a man conducting a very casual, very thorough security assessment.

I looked around my own apartment, now containing five extra people, two cakes, a bottle of wine, a folder nobody strictly needed tonight, and a tin of something Rosa refused to name, and started laughing before I could stop myself.

"This is insane," I said, to the room in general. "It is a completely ordinary evening, and somehow every single person I love is standing in my kitchen at the same time, for reasons that individually make sense and collectively make none."

"Coincidence," Naomi said, pouring wine into a mug because I owned exactly three actual glasses and all of them were dirty.

"Enormous coincidence," Beckett agreed, entirely too fast.

Nobody gave me a straight enough answer to actually pursue, and before I could try harder, the buzzer went one more time, and this one I recognized instantly by the particular patience of it, two knocks, evenly spaced, the sound of a man who did not knock twice if once had not been answered yet.

I opened the door already smiling, and there he was.

He was not wearing a suit. Let the record show that, because in eleven months I do not think I had ever once seen Dmitri Zolotov in anything that had not been tailored on a body somewhere in Milan, and here he stood in my hallway in a plain gray sweater and jeans, hands empty, no phone visible anywhere on him, every trapping of himself deliberately stripped off and left downstairs in a car. Even his posture looked different, less like a man permanently bracing a room for trouble and more like one who had simply walked up five flights of stairs because he wanted to see me.

"This is the second time," I said, before hello, before anything else. "You know that, right? You are aware this is officially a pattern now."

"I am aware."

Behind me, the kitchen had gone very quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when five separate people all decide, simultaneously and without any apparent coordination, to pretend they are not listening.

"You should also know my apartment currently contains your grandmother, your two most dangerous employees, my best friend, my brother, and my business partner, none of whom I invited tonight, and every last one of whom showed up within forty minutes of each other for reasons they each individually swear are completely unrelated."

He nearly laughed, catching it before it fully arrived and folding it back down into something steadier and more composed. "I already knew that."

"You knew."

"I did not arrange it. I would not have dared. I simply was not surprised to hear it, once Nik texted me from your lobby." He exhaled once, like he was setting something down he had been carrying a long way. "I nearly went home instead. I spent a full minute outside on the sidewalk deciding whether to wait for a night when this apartment held exactly two people and no cake, no unnecessary paperwork, no audience of any kind."

"And?"

"And I decided that version of tonight does not actually exist. Not for this family. There was never going to be a night when all of them were not somehow already here."

"What changed your mind?"

"I realized I did not actually want a version of tonight with no one else in it. For twenty-three years, I decided alone what mattered and who got to witness it. I am finished doing that." He glanced past me, briefly, at the small chaotic crowd trying very hard to look like they were not listening, and whatever tension he had walked in carrying visibly loosened and let go. "They are already family. I would rather they hear it firsthand, from me, than get the story secondhand from Luca, badly exaggerated in three separate directions."

"That is extremely fair," Luca called from the kitchen, not remotely offended.

"Dmitri."

"Let me finish. I have been practicing this for two full days, and if you stop me now I will lose my place." He kept both my hands in his, steady, unhurried, like the small audience behind us had already ceased to exist for him entirely. "You handed a stranger a clipboard eleven months ago and told him where to put a table, and for twenty minutes nobody in that ballroom looked at me and saw anything except a large, mildly incompetent man who kept getting the symmetry wrong. Twenty-three years, and I have been looked at for what I control, never for anything simpler than that. You looked at me like I was simply a person who could be told what to do, and it was more peace than I had felt in years. I have wanted that feeling back every day since. I do not want the trappings. I do not want the suite or the driver or the version of myself that walks into a room and makes it go quiet. I want to be a man standing in your kitchen, in plain jeans and no title anyone in this building would recognize, asking you a question none of that has any bearing on." He reached out and took both of my hands, empty-handed otherwise, no box, no ceremony. "The ring is downstairs in the car, because I did not want you saying yes to a box. I wanted you saying yes to this. Marry me. Not the boss of a family, not a name on a building, just the man you met with a clipboard, asking you plainly, because I have run out of better or safer ways to say it, and I do not want one."

"Yes," I said, before he'd finished the sentence, and somewhere behind me, in an apartment that should not have fit this many people, Naomi actually screamed.

49

CORA

The following summer, The Ambrose smelled like fresh flowers and warm candle wax instead of sawdust and wet paint, which felt like the entire point, since apparently some part of me had spent the last year quietly hoping I would get to stand in this exact room again and notice everything that had changed about it.

"Do not touch the seating chart," Naomi said, without looking up from the clipboard she had physically wrestled out of my hands forty minutes earlier. "I know that look. That is your seating chart look. This is not your seating chart. This is my seating chart, for my event, that I am allowing you to attend as the bride."

"I built this company on seating charts, Naomi."

"And I have spent three years learning from the best, which means today you get to sit there and be pretty and let somebody else catch fire over the florist for once." She adjusted something on the clipboard with the particular ferocity of a woman settling an old score, and I supposed, in a way, she was. "You banned yourself from planning exactly one thing in your entire adult life today, and I am the one enforcing it, so put the pen down."