Page 62 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

A silence stretched on the line, long enough that I could actually hear him realize, in real time, that the call he'd dialed into wasn't the one he thought it was.

"Cora. Hi. Is this the summit vendor call?"

"No. It is very much not that."

"Okay. Okay, that's fine, I'm just going to." Another pause, the sound of someone frantically trying to remember which button ends a call and failing under pressure. "Is that an FBI agent I heard say the word incorporation? Am I on a call with an FBI agent?"

"You are," Reyes said, entirely unbothered.

"And I'm going to guess the men in the room with you are not, structurally speaking, event vendors."

"You'd be guessing correctly," Luca said, and I could hear, even through a phone speaker, that he was enjoying this more than any of us.

"I'm going to hang up now and never mention peonies again as long as I live."

"Beckett."

"Yes."

"Ranunculus is fine. Approve it. Goodbye."

The line clicked dead, and for one full second the entire room, Dmitri, Nik, Luca, a federal agent I'd never met and would probably never meet in person, sat in the strange, ringing quiet that follows something absurd landing in the middle of something deadly serious. Then Nik actually laughed, short and real, and even Dmitri came close to something that might, on a more generous night, have counted as a smile.

"I like him," Luca said. "Keep him."

"He runs my summit," I said. "You don't get a vote."

"I'm allowed an opinion."

"You're allowed to have Beckett's opinion of you improve if you never mention this call to him again."

Dmitri came around the table and stood close, near enough that I felt the shift in the room before I'd consciously placed it, one hand resting flat on the map beside my folder, not quite touching me, though the nearness made its point anyway. "You did something today most people in this room couldn't have done with twice the resources and half the reason to care. I want you at this table for the rest of it. Not informed after. At it."

"I don't know how to run a security detail," I said.

"You don't need to. You know how to find things nobody else thought to look for. That's the seat I'm giving you."

I had no ready answer for that, and I didn't try to invent one. A month ago I would have flinched at being told I belonged somewhere as dangerous as this table. I stood there instead and felt something closer to relief, less like being praised and more like finally being handed the exact weight I'd already been carrying in private, and realized that being trusted with a real seat felt nothing like the versions of protection I'd been offered before it, the ones that came wrapped in a closed door and a summary handed over after the fact. For a moment the room let the silence be enough, Nik back at his laptop, Luca back at the window, the ordinary rhythm of people returning to work after something had shifted underneath them without anyone announcing it out loud.

Nik's laptop pinged again, a different tone this time, sharper, and I watched the change move across his face before he said anything out loud, the stillness of a man reading something twice because the first read had refused to be true.

"They've moved the timeline up." He read it a second time anyway, like the sentence might soften if he gave it another chance. "It's not happening at the gala's peak. It's happening during setup. Tomorrow."

33

DMITRI

A week of preparation had exactly one night left to happen in, and by nine every surface in my office had vanished beneath it, table and floor and windowsill alike. Floor plans of The Ambrose covered the conference table twice over, the old rotation crossed out in red and a new one drawn in beside it, every guard reassigned to a setup-day schedule nobody had planned for because nobody had believed they would need it this soon. Nik ran three phone lines from the corner of the room, coordinating vendors, security firms, and two men I had never met who Reyes had vouched for personally. Luca stood over the block map with a stack of badge photographs, memorizing faces the way other men memorized scripture, like his life actually depended on getting it right, which it did. Somewhere behind him a printer kept producing revised credential lists nobody had time to proofread, and a second line of coffee sat going cold on the windowsill, untouched since the last time anyone remembered they were allowed to be tired.

"Vendor badges reissue at five," Luca said without looking up. "Every name on the list gets photographed again at the door regardless of what they're already holding. If the picture doesn't match the face, that person doesn't get past the loading bay no matter whose invoice they're waving."

"Good."

"It's going to slow setup by twenty minutes, maybe more."

"I'd rather lose twenty minutes than lose the ability to know who's actually inside that building."

"Setup crew arrives at six," Nik said, phone still pressed to his ear, hand over the receiver. "That gives us nine hours to rebuild an entire security plan around a threat that used to have three weeks of runway and now has none."