Page 78 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Wrong night to be back here, sweetheart," he said, low, almost bored, like someone who had already decided how this conversation would end and felt no urgency about getting there. The words landed strangely in my ears, too calm for a stairwell this dark, too certain for someone with no business standing in it.

He didn't answer anything else. He simply took a step toward me instead.

My hand found the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall beside me before my brain finished deciding to grab it, four months of safety walkthroughs finally paying for themselves in a way nobody had budgeted for. I pulled the pin, aimed low the way the fire marshal had drilled into every vendor on this contract, and let the whole canister go directly into his face.

He staggered back choking on white powder, hands up, momentarily blind, and I did not wait around to see how quickly he recovered. My legs were moving before the rest of me caught up to the decision, adrenaline doing the thinking my brain was apparently too busy to manage. I ran, extinguisher still in one hand because apparently I intended to keep it now, back down the stairwell toward the kitchen and the sound of Beckett's voice still cutting through the dark.

"Cora, you're bleeding!" Naomi said, appearing out of the dark with a flashlight and an expression I did not have time to unpack.

"I'm fine. It's not mine." I looked down and realized I had no idea whose it was either, a thin line of red across my knuckles that I did not remember earning. "There's someone in the back stairwell who does not belong here. Tell Luca. Tell him now."

"Luca already knows more than either of us does. He has been watching that stairwell for the last ten minutes." She grabbed my arm, steadying me more than I liked admitting I needed. "The front half of the room is nearly clear. What's left?"

For one unsteady second, in a hallway thick with panic and spilled perfume, I let myself think about Dmitri, about where he was standing right now and whether the room around him had gone as dark as mine. I didn't have time for the thought, and I set it down anyway, just as I'd learned to set down every feeling that wasn't currently useful. He had people trained for exactly this surrounding him. I had a stairwell full of strangers who didn't.

"Kitchen staff. I need to make sure the kitchen staff got out."

I found most of them already gone, herded out by a line cook with more presence of mind than the entire catering management chart combined, pans and half-finished trays abandoned across every steel counter like the kitchen itself had been caught mid-breath. The same stairwell door where I'd fought off a stranger minutes earlier was still propped open, and through it I could hear someone struggling, breath ragged, feet finding the stairs too slowly.

Mrs. Alvarez, the caterer's head chef, seventy years old if she was a day and built like she had survived worse kitchens than this one, was three steps down and losing a fight with a hip that had clearly picked the wrong night to act up.

"I can do this myself," she said, her voice making it clear she absolutely could not, gripping the railing with both hands.

"I know you can. I'm coming anyway." I climbed down to her, got my shoulder under her arm, and felt her weight settle against me the way people only let themselves lean when they have run out of other options. "Small steps. I've got you. We're almost there."

"My knees disagree with your timeline."

"Your knees can file a complaint once we're both outside. Right now they're walking."

She let out something close to a laugh, which I decided to count as a victory, and we took the next three steps together, her hand locked around the rail and mine locked around her waist, both of us moving at the deliberate pace of two people who knew slow and upright would always beat fast and fallen.

"You planned a beautiful party," she said, breathless, somewhere between the fourth and fifth step, and it startled a laugh out of me that had absolutely no business existing in that stairwell.

"Ask me again once we're both outside."

"I'm holding you to that."

We reached the landing together, the exit door propped just ahead with a thin wedge of night air slipping through the gap, close enough that I could already hear voices outside, calm, organized, someone directing guests across the lawn the way I had trained them to be directed. Two more steps and we would be through it, and this whole impossible night would become a story I told at some future gala, the one about the extinguisher and the stairwell and the chef who complained about her knees the entire way down.

I turned to help Mrs. Alvarez, the caterer's seventy-year-old head chef, out of the service stairwell, and the door behind us locked from the outside.

43

DMITRI

The lights went first in the ballroom, the same moment a service door somewhere upstairs locked shut behind Cora, though I would not learn that detail until later, and then the room went with them, four hundred voices dissolving into one long confused sound that told me exactly nothing about what I actually needed to know. Kirill had drifted back to my side less than a minute before it happened. I only understood why afterward. I did not think. I moved, one hand closing around his sleeve before the dark had even finished falling, because whatever was happening in this building right now had started with him, and I intended to have that confirmed in the next sixty seconds or die finding out why not.

There was a service office twelve feet from where we stood, unused during events, a door I had walked past a hundred times without once considering what it might be useful for. I had him through it before the first scream in the ballroom finished climbing toward its peak, my grip locked around his arm hard enough that he stopped pretending he could shake it off.

Somewhere behind us glass was breaking, and a woman was screaming a name that was not mine, and I registered all of it distantly, the way you register weather through a closed window.

"Dima, what are you doing? Let go of me."

"The lights, Kirill." I shut the door behind us, and the noise of the party dropped to a muffled roar behind it, close enough to remind me how little time I actually had. "Tell me you had no part in the lights."

He straightened his jacket where I had crumpled it, buying himself a second he clearly needed, and in the thin gray spill from the hallway I watched something in his face stop performing, the first honest thing I had seen from him all evening.

"I had everything to do with the lights."