Chapter 76: Disaster

POV: Carly

"Those are absolutely not the tables I ordered."

Dana opened her mouth.

Carly held up one hand. "Don't. Just tell me what happened."

"You said party tables and I thought—"

"I said eight foot white party tables with red black and gold tablecloths." Carly set her clipboard down on the nearest surface with a controlled click. "What you brought me are four foot tables with white cloths only. Do you understand what that does to the entire layout I planned?"

Dana's mouth opened and closed.

"Don't apologize." Carly said. "Just fix it."

She was already moving.

The band was sound checking near the stage and the tempo was so slow it made her teeth hurt. She snapped her fingers twice at the nearest musician. "Pick it up please. This is homecoming not a memorial service."

She made it three steps before she saw the banner.

"The font." She said flatly. "'Lena. The font is wrong."

Sierra looked up from across the gym. "I gave them exactly what you sent."

"Then something got lost because I can barely read it from here and I am not standing at the back of the gym. Take it back." She turned before Sierra could respond.

The lights were being hung in flat droops across the ceiling.

She felt something behind her left eye begin to pulse.

"Ladies." She said to the two witches on the ladder. "Trickle. I showed you the diagram. It should fall like water not hang like laundry."

She stepped back and looked at the whole room at once.

Tables wrong. Banner wrong. Lights wrong. Band wrong.

She had distributed every task with a detailed written list including measurements and color codes and font specifications and reference images and somehow every single one of them had managed to produce the opposite of what she asked for.

She threw her hands up.

"We have less than a month." She said to the room. "Everything I assigned was already planned before the semester started. All anyone had to do was follow instructions. So can someone explain to me how we ended up here because I genuinely cannot figure out how this happened."

Silence.

She looked around.

Everyone was looking at the floor or at each other or at the walls. Nobody was looking at her.

Then Sierra looked at her.

"Maybe if our leader was actually around to help instead of sneaking around with vampires things wouldn't be such a mess." She said.

The room went very quiet.

Carly held Sierra's gaze for a long moment.

She had been expecting this. Had known it was coming since she walked through the door and felt the specific quality of the silence that meant everyone had been talking before she arrived and had stopped.

She had been expecting it.

It still landed somewhere sharp.

She looked at Whitney briefly. Whitney was looking at her hands.

Carly looked back at Sierra.

"Help." She said. "I planned this entire dance. Every color. Every measurement. Every vendor. Every item on every list. All you had to do was place the orders and follow the instructions I provided and you couldn't manage that." She kept her voice even. "So the idea that this is my fault for not being around to supervise a task that required no supervision is interesting to me."

Sierra's jaw tightened.

"And yes." Carly said. "I am dating Niko Monroeson. The whole school knows. I am not going to keep apologizing for it." She looked at the room. At all of them. "I know this is strange for everyone and I understand that. But I need you to hear me when I say my priorities have not changed. I have never once let this committee down and I am not starting now."

She took a breath.

"We are supposed to be more than a coven. We were supposed to be a family. And I am sad that some of you cannot put your personal feelings aside for the sake of something we have all worked toward. But if you are going to sabotage this dance because you are angry with me just say that now so we can figure out who actually wants to be here." She looked at each of them in turn. "Because this reflects on all of us. Not just me."

The room was silent.

Then slowly, one by one, they went back to work.

Carly picked up her clipboard and turned back to the tables.

She did not let the exhale show until her back was to the room.

POV: Carly

"Some speech."

Carly turned.

Reba Monroeson was coming through the gym doors with a large box of decorations balanced between her arms and that specific expression she wore when she was amused and not hiding it.

Carly felt something loosen in her chest. "Was it too much."

"It was exactly enough." Reba said setting the box on the nearest table. "They needed to hear it."

"I just wanted to get it over with." Carly said. "I knew someone was going to say something eventually."

"Sierra's been winding herself up since Monday." Reba said. "You handled it better than I would have." She pulled a length of gold ribbon from the box and started measuring it against the table edge.

Carly watched her for a moment. "Thank you for being here. You really did not have to."

Reba shrugged. "I wanted to. I'm the party planner in the family. Always have been." She cut the ribbon cleanly. "Back home I organized all my siblings birthday parties. Every single one. Even the ones who pretended they didn't want them." She smiled slightly. "I'm sure Niko told you."

Carly pressed her lips together.

The opening was right there.

"Reba." She said carefully. "I want you to know I was not nice to you because of him. What we have on the squad is completely separate from whatever is happening between me and your brother."

Reba looked up from the ribbon.

Her expression shifted. Something moved through it that was less composed than her usual.

"I know." She said. "And I appreciate you saying that." She looked back at the ribbon. "It wouldn't be the first time someone got close to me to get to one of them. Specifically Niko." She kept her hands moving but her voice had gone somewhere quieter. "He's magnetic even when he doesn't mean to be. People are drawn in. They use whatever access they can find."

"That's not what this is." Carly said.

"I know." Reba said again. More certain this time.

She set the ribbon down and looked at Carly directly.

"He's happy." She said simply. "I don't know what you're doing but whatever it is keep doing it because I haven't seen him look like himself in a very long time."

Carly did not know what to do with that so she just nodded.

Reba picked up the box and turned toward the back room.

"Oh." She stopped. Turned back. "And Carly." Her expression shifted into something that carried the full weight of the Monroeson name behind it. "I don't care who you are or how good you are for him. If you hurt my brother I will pull your spine out through your throat."

She smiled pleasantly.

Then she walked into the back room.

Carly stood very still for a moment.

Then she looked at her clipboard and reminded herself that she had bigger things to manage right now than the very real possibility that Niko's sister could and would follow through on that threat.

She went back to work.

POV: Reba

She set the box down in the back room and stood there for a moment.

She had meant the threat. She always meant the threat. It was not a performance. If Carly McPherson hurt Niko she would not hesitate and the witch seemed smart enough to know that.

But standing in the gym watching Carly manage a room full of people who were actively angry at her and doing it with that specific combination of vulnerability and backbone had done something to Reba's assessment.

She had been watching Carly for weeks.

Had clocked every moment on the cheer squad. Every time Carly had noticed Reba before Reba expected to be noticed. Every time she had been genuinely warm without any apparent agenda.

She had been waiting for the agenda to surface.

It had not surfaced.

What had surfaced instead was a girl who had blown up her own reputation and lost her best friend and stood in a cafeteria full of people and walked across it anyway.

For Niko.

Reba leaned against the shelving and thought about her brother's face the morning Deacon had caught them at his door. She had seen it from the corridor. The specific expression Niko wore when something had gotten past the wall. Not the smug expression or the controlled one or the deliberately unreadable one.

The real one.

She could count on one hand the number of times she had seen Niko's real face.

She thought about what she had warned him. About the wedding. About Isabel. About being faster than their mother.

She was still worried about that.

She was slightly less worried about Carly.

Slightly.

She picked up the box and went back out to help with the decorations.