Dirty Sunshine's Three Daddies

1. Jupiter

JUPITER

The earpiece crackles for the third time in ten minutes, and I resist the urge to rip it out entirely.

"Jupiter." Marcy's voice pitched high enough to crack glass. "The ice sculptor just walked off the job. Something about unpaid deposits and a hostile work environment."

"Where are the floral centerpieces?”

"Still in the van. The driver says he won't unload until someone signs?—"

"Tell him I'll sign. Tell the sculptor I'll have a check cut by nine. Where's the lighting crew?"

A pause. "Also... gone."

I stop moving through the chaos of Nocturne's main ballroom and take one full breath. Around me, the venue is a spectacular disaster dressed up in velvet draping and crystal chandeliers. Gorgeous bones, zero functioning organs.

The charity gala for Aldridge Children's Hospital was supposed to start in forty-seven minutes.

The original coordinator, a woman named Petra something-or-other, apparently dissolved into hysterics backstage thirty minutes ago and walked straight out the service entrance.

I got the call from her assistant while I was eating a sandwich in my car after finishing a corporate luncheon across town.

I took the job because I am constitutionally incapable of saying no to a disaster.

The ballroom smells of fresh flowers no one has arranged yet, and somewhere above me, loose rigging sways gently from incomplete installation.

A server nearly collides with me carrying an empty tray, muttering something in Spanish that I suspect isn't a compliment.

Three VIP guests in designer suits have already found their way inside and are standing near the bar, looking mildly offended by the chaos swirling around them.

"Gentlemen." I pivot toward them with my most disarming smile firmly in place. "Bar service opens at eight sharp. In the meantime, can I offer you a private preview of the VIP lounge on the second floor? Much quieter. Better view."

The tallest of the three narrows his eyes at me. "Do you know who I am?"

"Senator Aldrich, yes. I absolutely do." His photo was on the gala's donor wall, which I'd memorized in the car ride over.

"Which is exactly why I'd like you seated somewhere more comfortable while we put the finishing touches on the space you generously helped fund. Thirty minutes. You have my word."

He lets the moment stretch past comfort before smoothing down his jacket. "Thirty minutes."

I have the server escort them upstairs before the senator can notice the centerpieces are still in a van outside.

Marcy reappears at my elbow, tablet clutched to her chest like a shield.

She's Nocturne's event intern, nineteen years old, and currently wearing the expression of someone experiencing her first natural disaster.

"The florist is signing. The lighting crew, I found the foreman. He says they need another two hours."

"They have forty-five minutes." I take her tablet, pull up the venue layout, and start reassigning.

"Pull the ambient lighting from the east wing.

It's enough for the dining floor if we supplement with the candelabras in storage.

Call catering and push the first course back fifteen minutes. Where's the sound tech?"

"Hiding in the booth upstairs."

"Good. He stays there. That's the one thing currently working." I hand the tablet back and keep walking. "Find me the head of Nocturne's floor staff. Someone in this building actually knows where things are."

The voice that answers isn't Marcy's.

"You're looking at him."

I turn. The man standing near the service corridor is enormous.

Not soft or broad but dense with function, the kind of size that comes from years of work rather than accident.

Dark blond hair, close-cropped. Pale blue eyes so light they read almost colorless under the chandelier glow, set in a face that carries old damage quietly.

A scar runs along his jaw, another bisects his left brow, and he stands with the kind of unnatural stillness born from years of knowing attention can be dangerous.

He's wearing a dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and he keeps his eyes on me with the quiet vigilance of a man guarding every possible escape route.

Measuring, automatic, never quite landing on anything long enough to seem interested.

I've startled people before. He doesn't startle at all.

"Perfect," I say. "I need the storage inventory list and access to the east wing lighting panels. Can you get me both in the next four minutes?"

Something registers behind his eyes. Surprise, maybe. He reaches for the radio clipped to his belt. "I'll get you the storage key."

"I also need someone physically standing at the main entrance turning away early arrivals until seven fifty-five. Non-negotiably polite. Do you have someone for that?"

He's already moving. "I'll handle it myself."

"Thank you—" I realize I don't have his name.

He glances back. "Kane."

Then he's gone through the service door, and I don't have time to think about the way he looked at me before he left, so I don't.

Forty-three minutes later, the ballroom looks like it was always supposed to look like this.

The centerpieces are arranged. Better than Petra's original plan, asymmetrical clusters of white peonies and trailing greenery that catch the warm flicker of every candelabra we pulled from storage.

The ambient east wing lighting does exactly what I needed it to do, casting the dining floor in something that reads as intentional rather than hasty.

The sound system hums beneath a jazz quartet who arrived with twelve minutes to spare, and Senator Aldrich descends from the VIP lounge looking substantially more at ease than when I'd sent him up.

I'm arguing with a VIP guest near the champagne tower, a red-faced man in a tuxedo who has decided the table assignments are personally insulting, when I feel it.

The quality of stillness that descends over a room when someone walks into it who commands that kind of unconscious deference.

Staff straightens fractionally. Voices drop.

The red-faced man notices none of it, still gesturing at the seating chart, but I look up.

He's on the balcony above the main floor, arms resting on the railing, and he's looking directly at me.

Dark hair, faint silver threaded at the temples.

Gray eyes are visible even at this distance because they catch light in a way that seems almost deliberate, like two coins placed on still water.

Broad-shouldered and severe in a black suit that was constructed specifically around the architecture of his body.

He's not smiling. He doesn't appear to be a man who defaults to smiling.

He simply stands there, watching, with the kind of patience that suggests he's accustomed to watching things unfold exactly as he expects them to.

Except his gaze on me doesn't feel like expectation. It feels like recalibration.

Beside him, leaning on the railing with the loose ease of someone perpetually entertained, stands another man.

Lean, olive-skinned, dark curls brushed back from sharp cheekbones and amber eyes that catch even from here.

He says something to the man in the black suit.

The man in the black suit says nothing back.

"Excuse me." The red-faced guest snaps his fingers near my face. "I'm speaking to you."

I redirect my attention and my smile back to him.

"You absolutely are, and I apologize. Mr. Hartwell, your table placement is beside the Aldridge Foundation's board chair, which was arranged based on your donor tier.

If you'd prefer a different position, I can have it reassigned, but I want to make sure you understand what adjacency you'd be giving up. "

He blinks. His posturing deflates by exactly one degree. "Well. I didn't realize it was a tier consideration."

"It was. Entirely." I handed him a revised program with his name printed on it. I'd had Marcy reprint the covers an hour ago when I'd changed the running order, and watch him take it. "Enjoy your evening."

When I look back at the balcony, both men are gone.

The gala ends at eleven-fifteen to a room full of satisfied donors and a hospital foundation director who shakes my hand three times and asks for my card twice.

My feet are destroying me. My voice is half-gone from four hours of near-constant problem-solving at elevated volume.

Marcy has crashed on a velvet bench near the coat check and is asleep sitting upright.

I'm supervising the first round of breakdown when a man in a suit appears at my side. Not Kane, someone else, younger, with the look of someone sent to deliver a message.

"Ms. Laurent."

"Yes."

"Mr. Vex would like a word."

I've been in this industry long enough to know that when the owner of a venue asks for a word after an event, it either means something went very wrong or something went very right.

Given that the evening's donations exceeded their projected target by thirty percent according to the foundation director, I decide to assume the better option.

He leads me to an office on the third floor that overlooks the now-dimming ballroom below. The room itself is spare, dark-paneled, dominated by a desk that likely weighs more than my car. The man from the balcony sits behind it.

He doesn't stand when I enter. He watches me cross the room and gives nothing away.

"Malachi Vex," he says. Not an introduction so much as a statement.

"Jupiter Laurent." I stop in front of his desk and don't wait to be offered a seat, because no chair was offered and I've been standing for hours. "You have a phenomenal venue. Your original coordinator did not deserve it."

Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "You saved an event that should have collapsed."

"I've done it before."

"I know." He folds his hands on the desk. His forearms are visible below his rolled cuffs, dark ink disappearing beneath the fabric. "I'd like you to do it permanently. As Nocturne's head event coordinator."

The ballroom glitters below us through the window, servers moving between empty tables like slow fish.

I think about my sandwich in my car. I think about my current client list, which is respectable but not enough, and my apartment, which is comfortable but barely.

The way this place felt tonight, enormous and alive once made to work, lingers longer than it should.

I think about Kane disappearing through a service door and somehow making everything I asked for appear within minutes, and the man on the balcony watching me like I was something worth calculating.

"I'd need to discuss terms," I say.

"Monday," he says. "Nine a.m."

He says it the way people say things when they've already decided the answer and are simply offering the other person the courtesy of pretending there's still a choice.

I tell myself I'm not unnerved by that.

I'm a little unnerved by that.

"Monday," I agree.

He lets one beat pass, longer than the conversation requires, before he looks away. The dismissal is wordless and absolute. I let myself out.

Downstairs, on one of the security monitors near the coat check, a screen flickers to a feed of the now-empty ballroom. And then, so briefly I almost think I imagined it, to a feed of the corridor I just walked through.

I don't look back. I take my coat and go home.

The night air outside is cold and clean, and I breathe it all in the way down to the bottom of my lungs.

My phone shows three missed calls from my grandmother and a voice note from Marcy that is almost certainly her sleep-talking.

I pull my coat tighter and walk to my car, replaying the evening the way I always do after a save.

Cataloguing what broke, what held, what I'd do differently.

I don't replay the office. The desk. The face that gave nothing away and asked for nothing except Monday at nine.

I get in my car and drive home, and I don't replay it at all.