Page 74 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I found out what by two o'clock, and only because he told me himself, already grinning before he got the first sentence out.

"So, funny story," he said, catching me by the champagne staging table with a tablet under one arm and the specific glow of a man who had personally defused a bomb and wanted credit for it. "The string quartet we booked for cocktail hour got double-booked. Same agency, same string quartet, apparently promised to two different events tonight by two different junior bookers who never talked to each other."

My stomach dropped a full floor. "Beckett."

"Relax. I said funny story, not disaster story. I caught it at nine this morning when I called to confirm arrival times and got a very confused woman on the phone who thought I was calling about a wedding in Westchester. I spent the next four hours on the phone with three different agencies, found a trio that plays exactly this repertoire, upgraded them to a quartet with a cellist I bribed out of a rehearsal with an obscene amount of money from the contingency fund, and had them confirmed and rerouted by one o'clock. You never even knew it was a problem."

I stared at him. "You solved an entire vendor catastrophe by yourself and didn't tell me until it was already fixed?"

"I know what you always say. Bring me problems, not surprises." He shrugged, but the grin didn't move, and underneath the shrug I could see exactly how much he wanted me to know he'd earned it. "I figured I'd bring you neither. I brought you a solved problem wearing a funny story as a disguise."

"I'm unbelievably proud of you right now."

"Please don't get emotional at me while I'm holding a tablet. I will drop the tablet."

"I'm not getting emotional. I'm being professionally impressed, which is a completely different category of feeling."

"Your eyes are doing the emotional thing."

"My eyes are doing the professionally impressed thing. You wouldn't know the difference, you're not qualified yet." I bumped his shoulder with mine, and he let me, and for one clean, uncomplicated second the whole morning felt like exactly what it should have been, the payoff of two years of training someone to be better than the job actually required.

We almost didn't survive the champagne tower.

It went up at three, six tiers of crystal coupes stacked into a pyramid at the center of the reception space, the kind of showpiece that photographed beautifully and existed for no reason except spectacle. Luca had been assigned to help the catering crew move heavy equipment for the afternoon, a cover Nik had arranged so he could watch the loading dock without looking like he was watching it, and Luca, it turned out, had exactly zero natural instinct for handling six hundred dollars of stacked glassware.

"Just set it down," I said, watching him carry a full crate of coupes toward the tower with the confident stride of a man who had plainly never worried about breaking something expensive, "gently, on the table, not so close to..."

He set the crate down directly against the base tier.

The whole structure shivered.

"Do not move," I said, in a voice I did not know I had, low and absolutely level, the voice apparently reserved for moments when six tiers of crystal were one bad breath away from becoming a very expensive avalanche.

Luca froze mid-step, one hand still extended, his face doing something I had never seen it do before, which was genuine, unguarded panic that owed nothing to guns or federal agents and everything to stemware. Beckett appeared out of nowhere the way he always did in a crisis, already circling to the opposite side of the tower with both hands raised like he was approaching a spooked animal. Naomi grabbed the base tier from the front, I grabbed it from the side, and for three long seconds the four of us stood frozen around a wobbling pyramid of glass in complete, terrified silence, nobody breathing, one very large security professional looking genuinely more afraid of a champagne tower than he had ever looked of anything else in my presence.

It steadied.

Nobody moved for another five seconds, just to be sure.

"I have negotiated hostage situations with less tension than that," Luca said finally, straightening up, and something about the specific, deadpan horror in his voice broke the whole room at once. Naomi started laughing first, then Beckett, then me, all of us doubled over next to a tower of glass that had nearly ended several careers in one afternoon, and even Luca eventually cracked, a short, disbelieving laugh escaping before he caught himself and remembered he was supposed to be furniture.

"You're never doing manual labor again," I told him, wiping my eyes. "You're a liability to stemware everywhere."

"Understood. I will confine myself exclusively to threats I actually know how to handle."

"Please do."

"For the record," Luca said, straightening his borrowed catering jacket with what remained of his dignity, "I have carried men who outweighed that crate without breaking a sweat."

"Crystal doesn't bleed when you drop it," Beckett said. "It just becomes six hundred dollars of evidence against you."

"An excellent distinction. I will be mentioning it to Nik."

"Please don't. He already thinks catering work is beneath him. If he finds out it's also dangerous, he's never letting either of us do it again."

It was, I thought later, the last thing that made me laugh that hard all day, and I did not know it at the time, which was probably a mercy.

By six the room had finished becoming everything I had promised it would be, gold light and white flowers and four hundred place settings gleaming under a ceiling I remembered standing beneath on my very first day here, back when I had nothing but a stack of floor plans and considerably less idea what I was doing. Guests were starting to arrive in clusters at the front entrance, the low hum of a party finding its footing, gowns and dark suits moving through the doors on a current of perfume and small talk, none of them aware that the string quartet playing them in had been rebuilt from scratch in an afternoon, or that the man checking coats near the east terrace had spent the day rehearsing a very different kind of vigilance. I caught Naomi's eye across the room and she mouthed something that might have been we did it, and for one long, unguarded moment I let myself believe her completely.