15. Cora
CORA
Two days after Dmitri asked me, with no more ceremony than a man ordering coffee, to sit in on one of his actual work meetings, I found myself walking into the least romantic room I had ever seen a powerful man occupy, folding table, mismatched chairs, a coffee maker that looked like it had personally survived three administrations.
I decided within about four seconds that I liked it more than the penthouse, the restaurant, and the ballroom combined, because a room this unglamorous meant nobody in it was performing for anyone.
"You're early," Dmitri said, looking up from a stack of papers that had nothing to do with flowers or seating charts, at least not yet.
"I'm an event planner. Early is the only setting I have." I set my bag down and took the chair he nodded toward, directly across from Nik, who was watching me with the polite, unreadable patience of a man reserving judgment until the evidence came in. "Where do you want me?"
"Wherever you can be useful."
"Bold strategy, given you don't actually know yet whether I will be."
"I have a guess."
Nik cleared his throat in a way that managed to communicate an entire paragraph of skepticism without a single word, and the man beside him, younger, restless enough in his chair to suggest he'd rather be doing anything requiring motion, grinned at me like I'd just said something worth remembering.
"Luca," he said, extending a hand. "I'm the one who talks in his ear during dinners. I assume he's mentioned me."
"He has. You have opinions about wine lists."
"Strong ones. Correct ones." Luca's grin widened. "I like her already."
"We haven't started the meeting," Nik said.
"I'm allowed to form early impressions. It's a personality trait."
Dmitri did not smile, not with his mouth, but something in his shoulders eased half an inch, and I filed it away with every other small thing he gave me without meaning to. "Let's start with the shipping schedule. Nik."
For the next twenty minutes I sat mostly quiet, taking in more than I contributed, watching the actual machinery of Dmitri's world turn in a way that had nothing to do with warehouses full of secrets and everything to do with the same unglamorous logistics I dealt with every week of my professional life.
Trucks came up first, then delivery windows, then a vendor who wanted an extra hour on setup morning that nobody had approved yet.
It could have been any planning meeting I'd sat through for the last three years, except for the occasional detail that reminded me exactly whose table I was sitting at, a mention of a security rotation, a line item labeled simply protection, personnel, no further explanation offered or expected.
I had already gathered, without anyone spelling it out for me, that the benefit on my own calendar and the summit on theirs were the same night in the same ballroom, one name for the guests who thought they understood what they were attending, another for the handful of people in this room who actually did.
"The florist wants access to the ballroom at six instead of seven," Nik said, reading from a printed sheet. "Says the arrangements won't hold their shape if they're rushed."
"Every florist says that," I said, before I'd fully decided to speak. "It's not usually true. It's a negotiating position dressed up as a horticultural fact."
Nik looked at me for the first time like I might be worth listening to instead of simply tolerating. "You'd say no."
"I'd say five thirty, which sounds like a compromise and is actually exactly what I wanted, because everyone feels like they won something and nobody checks the math afterward.
" I shrugged. "Also she'll take it. Florists always take the compromise that sounds generous.
It's the ones who make you feel like you're stealing from them that you actually have to worry about. "
Nik was quiet for a second too long, the kind of quiet that meant he was recalculating something.
"Five thirty," he said finally, writing it down. "That's better than what I had."
"I know."
"You don't have to sound so pleased about it."
"I absolutely do. I don't get to win against professionals very often. Let me have this."
Luca laughed outright, a short, delighted bark he didn't bother hiding, and even Dmitri's mouth did something at the corner that wasn't quite a smile but was clearly related to one.
"Careful," Luca said to Nik. "She just out-negotiated you in under a minute. I've known you three years and I've seen that happen exactly twice, and I'm fairly sure both times you bought the other person dinner afterward out of respect."
"I did not."
"You absolutely did. I was there for one of them."
Nik did not confirm or deny this, which I was beginning to understand was its own kind of confirmation, and moved on to the next item with the brisk efficiency of a man who preferred being outmaneuvered in private.
"Seating," Dmitri said next, sliding a diagram across the table that was clearly meant to represent something more delicate than a simple chart, empty circles, unlabeled tables, no names anywhere on it, just the shape of a problem waiting to be solved.
"Two parties who don't currently sit within twenty feet of each other if they can help it.
I need them close enough to look civil and far enough apart that nobody has to test whether that's actually true. "
I turned the diagram around and studied it the way I studied every seating chart, as a puzzle with a right answer hiding somewhere inside a wrong one. "How much do they actually dislike each other? Old grudge, or new one?"
"Does it matter?"
"Enormously. Old grudges have a shelf life.
People get tired of maintaining them properly.
New ones are still fresh enough that everyone's actively keeping score.
" I tapped two of the circles. "If it's old, I put them at adjacent tables with a shared centerpiece vendor, something small and neutral they can both complain about together.
Shared annoyance is the fastest peace treaty I know.
If it's new, I put a dance floor between them and give both sides a reason to be watching the stage instead of each other. "
Nik and Dmitri traded a glance I couldn't fully read, though I got the distinct sense I'd just answered a far more complicated question than the one I thought I'd been asked.
"New," Dmitri said. "Very new."
"Then dance floor it is. I'll also want the band running longer sets during the stretch when both tables are seated at the same time. Less silence for anyone to sit in with people they're currently furious at."
"You've done this before," Luca said, sounding genuinely impressed for the first time since I'd walked in.
"I've seated exes at the same reception, business partners mid-lawsuit, and one bride's entire side of the family against a groom's mother who called her a gold digger at the rehearsal dinner.
This isn't the first war I've planned seating for.
It's just the first one where I understood, going in, that it actually was one. "
The security rotation came up twenty minutes later, buried in a longer conversation about entrances and exits that I mostly followed the way I followed any conversation about a venue I hadn't personally walked yet, half attention, half mental floor plan.
I had pulled up my own version on my phone without really meaning to, the draft I'd built for the vendor logistics weeks ago, before any of this had folded together into whatever it currently was.
"North stairwell's covered eight to midnight," Nik said. "East corridor gets a rotation every forty minutes starting at nine."
I looked up from my phone. "That doesn't match the floor plan."
Everyone looked at me at once, considerably more attention than I'd expected to generate over a stairwell.
"The east corridor doesn't connect to anything past nine," I said, turning my phone around so they could see the screen.
"The caterers close that hallway down for the night service reset.
It's blocked with rolling carts from nine until close.
If someone's supposed to be rotating through there, they're either walking through catering equipment every forty minutes, or the rotation's covering a hallway that isn't actually open, which means whatever's actually happening in that stretch of the building isn't being watched by anyone. "
Nobody said anything for a second. Dmitri had gone very still, the specific stillness I recognized now as him listening harder than he wanted anyone to notice.
"Say that again," Nik said.
"The east corridor's closed for service after nine.
Your rotation's covering the wrong hallway.
" I turned the phone back around, feeling suddenly like I'd wandered into a much more serious conversation than the one I'd thought I was having.
"I only caught it because I've walked that building forty times this year.
It's not a criticism. It's just not on the plan you're working from. "
"It's on the plan we were given," Nik said, and something moved behind his eyes that had nothing to do with florists or delivery windows.
"Then whoever gave it to you needs a better plan," I said. "Or a reason for giving you the wrong one."
The room went still in a way that felt different from the quiet before it, heavier, more deliberate, and I watched Nik and Dmitri exchange a look that traveled a whole conversation in about a second and a half, the kind of look two people share when they've just both arrived at the same uncomfortable place from different directions.
"Get me the actual building schematics," Dmitri said to Nik, not raising his voice, which by now I understood was worse than if he had. "Today. Not from the file we've been using."
"On it."
Luca, for once, was not smiling. "That's twice in one meeting she's caught something we missed."
"I noticed," Nik said.
"I'm not trying to catch anything," I said, mostly to fill the silence, which had gotten uncomfortably heavy for a room that had started with jokes about wine lists.
"I just spend my whole life staring at floor plans until they make sense.
It's not a skill. It's mostly just repetition and mild obsession. "
"It's a skill," Dmitri said, looking at me in a way that made the folding table and the ancient coffee maker disappear for a second. "Most people in this room have spent years learning to see exactly that kind of gap. You found it in under a minute without trying."
I did not entirely know what to do with that, so I fell back on my usual move when a compliment landed somewhere I hadn't braced for it: deflect with something lighter before it could sit too long on my chest. "Give me a few more meetings and I'll start charging a consulting fee."
"Granted," Nik said, and I could not tell if he was joking, which I was rapidly learning was true of most things he said.
We finished the rest of the agenda in the ordinary, unremarkable way meetings finish: a handful of remaining line items, a debate about valet placement that Luca won by sheer stubbornness, a final read through of the guest list that I only half listened to.
I was still turning the east corridor over in my head, the particular wrongness of a rotation covering a hallway that wasn't there, when my phone buzzed against my leg somewhere in the middle of the valet debate, and I let it sit, because interrupting a room full of men discussing security to check a text felt like exactly the kind of thing that would undo whatever I'd just spent the last hour building.
"You did well in there," Dmitri said, once the door had shut behind us and the hallway had gone quiet enough that his voice didn't have to compete with anything.
"Better than well. Nik doesn't hand out compliments.
Whatever that was you did with the delivery window, he's still doing the math on it. "
"I wasn't trying to prove anything."
"I know. That's exactly why it worked." He studied me for a second, the same quiet attention he gave everything he'd decided was worth actually looking at. "Most people who walk into that room are trying to prove something. You just answered the questions."
"Careful. I might start expecting to be invited to these regularly."
"You should expect that." He said it simply, without any of the weight I might have expected around a sentence like that, and somehow the plainness of it landed harder than ceremony would have.
It buzzed again while he walked me to the elevator, Nik and Luca already back in the conference room with their heads bent over a laptop, and I finally pulled it out while I waited for the doors to open, more out of habit than urgency.
It sat at the top of the screen, no greeting, no buildup, exactly the kind of message Beckett only sent when he'd already decided panicking wouldn't help and was trying, unsuccessfully, to talk himself out of it in real time.
Beckett's text read: "Don't panic but there's a vendor on the summit list I've never heard of and neither has anyone else."