Reckless Bratva Daddy (Wicked Bratva Daddies #12)

1. Cora

CORA

"AV at nine. Florals confirm by ten. Table linens arrive whenever the universe decides to be kind to me."

Nobody answered, because nobody was there yet.

The Ambrose still smelled like sawdust and wet paint the morning I walked in to save my career, which felt about right, since career-saving has never come with flattering overhead lighting.

Three chandeliers hung under dust sheets like ghosts waiting for a reason to haunt the place properly.

Scaffolding leaned against the far wall in a stack that looked one sneeze away from collapse.

Somewhere above me a single work light buzzed, flickered, and gave up entirely.

I stood in the doorway with my bag digging a groove into my shoulder and ran the list out loud, low enough that only the empty room could judge me for it.

That was the problem. AV should have already had risers going up along the east wall, and instead the only sound in the whole cavernous space was my own voice bouncing off plaster and gold leaf like it was auditioning for the part of my last remaining shred of sanity.

I pulled out my phone and refreshed my inbox for the fourth time in six minutes.

There were no new messages from the crew and no missed calls, only a folder of vendor confirmations I had already read so many times the words had stopped meaning anything, the way any sentence falls apart if you stare at it long enough.

Reading things four times was cheaper than therapy and worked almost as well, most days.

This contract was the biggest my company had ever signed, and I had exactly nine weeks to turn a half-gutted ballroom into the kind of event that got written up in the sections of magazines nobody admits to reading.

My mother's signature was on the loan that kept the lights on at my office.

My own name was on the line for everything else.

I had learned a long time ago that the only cure for that particular kind of fear was motion, so I kept moving, checking angles, picturing where four hundred chairs would eventually sit.

My shoes echoed against the marble floor as I walked the perimeter, running my palm along a stretch of gold molding that would need cleaning before anyone photographed it.

Dust caught the light coming through the tall windows and turned the whole room into something almost pretty, if you squinted past the plastic sheeting and the exposed wiring dangling from one corner of the ceiling.

I made a note about the wiring, and then about almost everything else, because notes were the only thing standing between me and the specific kind of disaster that ended careers.

Then I saw him.

He was over by the north wall, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hauling a folding table by himself as if it weighed nothing.

It did not. I had wrestled with those tables myself and lost more than once.

He was broad through the shoulders in a way that would have made an off-the-rack shirt look tailored, and his dark blond hair had gone silver at the temples.

He wore no name tag and carried no clipboard, no walkie clipped to a belt, no lanyard, nothing at all that said he belonged to any vendor I had hired and vetted and made sign three separate contracts with.

That meant only one thing. Catering had sent someone new again without briefing him properly, the same way they had done twice before on other jobs, and I had opinions about caterers who sent bodies into a room without paperwork.

I had even stronger opinions about the table itself, which was heading at a determined clip straight toward the exact spot where the dance floor was supposed to go. If there is one hill I will die on, it is that furniture does not belong where four hundred guests are meant to be dancing.

I crossed the room with my spare clipboard already coming off my bag strap.

"Hi. Hey. That table's actually supposed to go against the east wall, not the middle, we're doing risers there for the band.

" I held the clipboard out like a peace offering nobody had asked for.

"I know today's been chaos, I promise it gets better once the rest of the crew actually shows up, but could you grab the round tables from the loading dock while I work out sightlines? "

He looked at the clipboard, then at me. Something moved behind his expression, quick and private, vanishing before I could name it.

"East wall," he said.

His voice was low, even, the kind that did not need volume to fill a room. He set the table down exactly where I had pointed, no argument, no attitude, and took the clipboard from my hand as though he were accepting a job he found quietly entertaining.

"Thank you," I said, already three thoughts ahead in my own head.

"Seriously, today has been a disaster and it's barely mid-morning.

The last caterer we used organized like it was a personality flaw, everything had to be perfectly symmetrical or the whole crew would just stand there having a collective breakdown, so if you can work with me on layout, I'll make sure you get fed something better than the sad little sandwiches setup crews usually get. "

"Symmetrical." He tested the word slowly, like it was something he'd never had a use for.

"To the millimeter. Borderline concerning."

"And you prefer?"

"Functional chaos. Organized enough that nobody dies, loose enough that I'm not having a breakdown over a centerpiece sitting two inches off center."

He looked around the ballroom, at the dust sheets and the scaffolding and the general devastation of a room that had nine weeks to become somewhere four hundred people would wear their best clothes. Something that might have been the start of a smile settled into the corner of his mouth.

"This room isn't winning yet," he said.

"Understatement of the year. Sightlines first, though, before anything else moves. I need to figure out where the head table blocks the stage. I keep standing in different spots and I still can't tell if the quartet's visible from the back corner."

He walked with me to the opposite end of the room without being asked twice, which I appreciated more than I probably should have, since half the crews I had worked with acted insulted by every request. He stood where I told him to stand, moved when I told him to move, and answered every question with a dry precision that made me forget, for a solid stretch of minutes, that I was supposed to be panicking on a professional schedule.

"There," I said, pointing at an invisible line only I could see. "Right there. If the head table's even a foot further left, nobody in the back three rows sees a thing, and then I've got four hundred people staring at the back of somebody's head instead of the ceremony."

"Move it a foot right instead."

"That puts it too close to the fire exit."

"Then move the fire marshal's opinion of your table," he said, "and not the table."

I laughed, sharp and surprised, the kind of laugh that startles even the person doing it. "You can't just override the fire marshal."

"You'd be amazed what people overlook for the right price."

"That's either the most helpful thing anyone's said to me all week, or deeply illegal, and I genuinely cannot tell which."

"Both," he said. "Frequently."

"Do you always negotiate furniture placement like it's a hostage situation?"

"Only the pieces that deserve it."

"This table's done nothing to you."

"Yet," he said, and picked it up anyway, setting it exactly where I had wanted it in the first place.

I gave him a look meant to be stern and knew it landed closer to delighted.

He did not rush to fill silence the way I did, constantly, out of some deep need to keep the air moving so panic could not settle into it.

He simply stood there, patient, watching me work out the geometry of a problem that had nothing to do with him at all.

"You're very calm for someone taking orders from a stranger with a clipboard," I said, mostly to fill the quiet, because apparently even his silence made me nervous in a way I had not figured out yet.

"I've taken worse than paperwork."

"High bar or low bar?"

"Depends on the day."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

Something in the way he said it, flat and amused at once, made me want to keep pulling on that thread, but the next round table needed moving and the clock above the door reminded me that AV was now officially forty minutes late, which meant I had exactly zero time left to be curious about a man whose name I still did not know.

"Round tables, loading dock, you know the drill by now," I said, tapping the clipboard he was still holding. "I'll start on linens. If anyone from AV finally shows up, tell them I want the risers up before I lose the will to live."

"I'll relay the message."

"With those exact words, ideally."

"Word for word," he said, and something in his tone made it land like a promise instead of a joke.

For the next ten minutes we worked in a rhythm better than any setup morning I could remember.

He handled the tables as if they weighed nothing at all.

He answered every clipped instruction with either compliance or a one-line rebuttal that somehow turned out to be right.

When I told him the round tables needed six inches more clearance from the wall so servers could pass through, he measured it with his own stride instead of arguing, and landed it exactly right on the first try.

"You've done this before," I said, half question, half accusation.

"I've moved a table or two."

"Nobody moves furniture like that without practice. What'd you do before this? Events circuit? Catering?"

He considered the question longer than it deserved. "Something like that."

"Very mysterious. I respect it."

"I contain multitudes," he said, and the dryness of it startled another laugh straight out of me.

Our hands brushed once, passing the clipboard back and forth over a folding chair.

I felt it more than I wanted to admit, a small electric jolt that had no business showing up on an ordinary work morning surrounded by dust sheets and scaffolding.

I covered it by talking faster. That was my answer to most things.

I was midway through a full reenactment of the last caterer's exact tone of voice during the great centerpiece standoff of the previous spring, complete with hand gestures, when the door at the back of the ballroom banged open hard enough to echo off the ceiling.

Naomi came through it at a dead run, coat sliding off one shoulder, hair escaping its clip, phone still clutched in one hand as if she had been mid-call when she decided running was more urgent than finishing the sentence.

"Sorry, sorry, the train decided today was the day to personally ruin my entire life," she said, breathless, dragging air in like she had sprinted the last several blocks. Knowing Naomi, she probably had.

Then her eyes landed past me, on him.

I watched it happen in real time. Her sprint died mid-step. The phone slipped an inch in her grip before she caught it. Every ounce of the frantic energy that had carried her through the door drained straight out of her posture, replaced by something stiller and far more careful.

"Naomi, this is..." I gestured toward him, realizing halfway through the sentence that I still did not have a name to put there. "Sorry, I never actually asked, which is embarrassing considering I've had him moving furniture for the last hour."

He did not answer. He watched Naomi with an expression I could not quite place, something between patience and reluctant amusement at whatever was about to happen next.

Naomi's mouth opened, closed, and opened again.

"Cora," she said, very quietly, the color gone from her face. "That's Mr. Zolotov."