Page 77 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"I know."

"The lights."

I looked up in time to watch it happen instead of simply hearing about it after, which felt, in the moment, like the only mercy the night intended to offer me. It did not flicker first. It did not dim as a warning the way lights do in the movies, giving everyone a generous second to understand what was coming. In one breath the chandeliers were burning gold over four hundred unsuspecting faces, and in the next they were not, and somewhere underneath the first startled gasp of the crowd I heard Nik say my name a second time, closer now, already moving.

The east wing went dark, all at once, the particular dark of a breaker box someone had found on purpose.

42

CORA

The lights went out the way lights only go out when someone means it, all four hundred of them gone in the same breath, and the ballroom answered with forty different sounds landing on top of each other at once: a woman's scream cut short, a tray of glasses shattering against marble, the string quartet grinding to a stop mid-note, a chair scraping back hard enough to tip over. I had spent three months planning every second of this night down to the color of the napkin rings. Nobody had planned for this.

A hand closed around my wrist in the dark, tight and unfamiliar, and a voice I didn't recognize said my name like a question. "Miss Walsh? Is that you? What is happening?" I had no idea which of the four hundred guests the hand belonged to, and it didn't matter. "A power failure," I said, keeping my voice level even while my heart tried to climb out through my throat. "Stay exactly where you are. Someone will get you to an exit in under a minute." It was a promise built entirely out of hope, and I made it anyway, because the alternative was four hundred people finding out how frightened I actually was.

My first thought, ridiculous and immediate, was that a breaker had blown early, before the toasts, before dessert, and someone was going to owe me an apology and a very large invoice. My second thought caught up half a second later and correctly identified the first one as denial wearing a work badge.

"Everyone stay where you are!" I shouted, pitching my voice the way I had learned to project across a ballroom full of chatter, except this time the chatter had turned into something closer to a stampede warming up. "The exits are marked, they're lit independently, and someone is going to walk you to them in under a minute. Stay together!"

Nobody could see me. That did not matter. Voices carry, and mine had spent two years learning exactly how to carry over two hundred people arguing about seating charts, which turned out to be excellent training for four hundred people in the dark discovering they were afraid of it.

Beckett's flashlight found me first, a narrow white beam cutting through smoke that wasn't smoke, just perfume and spilled champagne and too many people breathing too fast in one room.

"Cora." His voice cracked once before he caught it. "What do we do?"

"Emergency lighting kicks the exits along the north and west walls in about ten seconds. When it does, split the room in half. You take north, I'll take west. Nobody runs. Running kills more people at events like this than fire ever does."

"You know that from experience or from one of your seventeen notebooks?"

"Both. Go."

He went. The emergency strips along the baseboards flickered on exactly when I told him they would, a thin ribbon of pale green light low enough to follow with your feet even if your eyes were useless, and just for a moment, underneath the terror, something in me came close to pride, because I had insisted on that lighting package against a budget that fought me on it for a week.

My brain, apparently deciding this was an excellent moment for administrative categorization, began making a list whether I asked it to or not: exits, four, all accounted for, guests, four hundred, roughly eighty percent already moving and twenty percent still frozen, the building's structural integrity unknown and filed under things I could not currently control, my own hands shaking badly enough that I had already dropped my phone twice, filed under deal with it later, and the whole situation finally filed under worst case scenario, subcategory literal, which was the exact point at which something in me laughed despite the fact that laughing seemed like the least appropriate response currently available.

I knew these corridors. I had walked every service hallway in this building a dozen times over the last four months, memorized which doors stuck, which ones opened the wrong way, which stretch of hallway near the kitchen had a step down that had already claimed one waiter's ankle during a walkthrough. That knowledge, useless trivia an hour ago, had become the only thing standing between four hundred people and a very bad night.

"This way!" I called to a cluster of guests frozen near table nine, an older couple and two women in heels that were absolutely not built for this. "Through the service door behind the head table, down the hall, first left, there's a fire door that opens onto the east lawn. I promise you it's faster than the front entrance right now."

"How can you possibly be sure?" one of the women asked, gripping my arm hard enough to bruise.

"Because I designed this room, and I have been walking these halls since before you had your first cocktail tonight. Move, please. Quickly."

They moved. I kept moving too, weaving between guests and overturned chairs, calling directions into the dark, and somewhere behind me I heard Naomi's voice picking up the same rhythm on the other side of the room, guiding a different cluster just as I was, because I had trained her on this floor plan two weeks ago for a moment exactly like this one, minus the part where I had actually expected to need it.

An older man near the coat check refused to budge, planted in place with the stubbornness of someone who had decided panic was beneath him. "I paid for a seat at that table," he said, as though the blackout owed him a refund instead of an apology. "I am not leaving my coat."

"Sir, your coat will still be here in the morning. You might not be, if you keep arguing with me in the dark." I took his elbow before he could protest further and steered him toward the green glow along the baseboard. "Walk with me. I promise the coat check survives this better than we do."

"You're very calm for someone in the eye of a crisis."

"I do this for a living. Technically, this still counts as an event."

The service stairwell behind the kitchen was darker than the ballroom, no emergency strips reaching this far back, just my phone's flashlight cutting a narrow cone up a stairwell that suddenly felt a great deal taller than it had during any of my walkthroughs. I was checking a supply closet off the landing for stragglers when a shape peeled off the wall below me, too tall, too still, wearing catering black that didn't sit right on his shoulders the way it sat on everyone else's.

I knew that vest. It belonged to the same company behind the badge I had flagged eight days ago, the one nobody had pulled from the vendor list.

"Wrong stairwell," I said, before he could say anything at all, my voice coming out steadier than I felt, because if there is one skill three years of event planning actually teaches you, it is how to sound calm while internally rearranging your entire understanding of how badly a night can go.