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“Sam! Sam, I need you! Quickly!” The urgency in Raphael’s voice got Sam to completely forget about trying to figure out the bow tie he’d been trying to tie and run for the bathroom where Raphael was supposed to be doing his makeup.
As soon as he got in there, it wasn’t hard to figure out what the problem was. His dress was gorgeous, but all the rhinestones on the top made it quite heavy. When one of the straps broke, Raphael didn’t have any way of keeping it up. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was reaching over to get a wipe because I messed up the eyeliner, and I felt it snap.” Raphael looked ruefully at the way the front of his gown was flopping down. “I know. This is why I should have done the makeup first.”
“On the other hand, we still have time to fix this.” Sam found the broken edge of the strap and the place where it connected to the bodice, frowning as he examined it. If it had just broken, he would have expected frayed threads, ripped stitches, something. Instead, the edges were almost perfectly clean, except for a tiny tear on one side. “Um. I’m no expert, but I don’t think this was an accident.”
“What?” Raphael twisted his head to look at what Sam was seeing. Then he growled. “You’re right. That was cut. Can you check the other side?”
Sam moved around, and sure enough, the strap on the other side was barely hanging on. The cut was clean. “Someone tampered with your gown. Aside from the obvious, any idea who would do this?”
“That depends. Is the obvious the seamstress who put in the straps for me because I knew I wasn’t comfortable with the original strapless design, or is the obvious my asshole brother who we really need to figure out a way to go no contact with without having to give up racing?” He shook his head. “Other than those two ideas, no, I don’t, unless it’s Michael hiring someone else to do his dirty work in which case we still blame him.”
“I was thinking Michael, but yeah, that tailor was not happy about altering the dress for you.” At the time, he’d tried to convince Raphael to go to someone else who wouldn’t be judgmental about a man wearing a gown. Heck, given the event it was for and the rainbow design of the skirt, he would have thought anyone who had a problem with it to refuse to do the work at all no matter who it was for. “All right. I don’t have the skills to fix this, so I’m going to call Ephraim. Hopefully he can get here and figure out how to fix this for you and we don’t miss the Pride ball.”
Thankfully, the cuts being clean made it easy for Ephraim to sew some reinforcement in without letting it show, hiding the stitches in the rhinestone design covering the black bodice. He also had news. “Zachariah has been bragging about there being a real show-stopper at the ball tonight. Something special he arranged for Michael, that would put a stop to the humiliation. I suspect he was talking about this. He probably expected it to happen after you got there.”
“Zachariah. That figures.” Sam reached for his phone, stopping at a shake of Raphael’s head. “I was going to call Dean…”
“If you do, tell him not to do anything about it. We can confront Zachariah and Michael afterward, but letting them stew in the anticipation only for their little scheme to fall flat is the best revenge I can think of. After all, they didn’t get to publicly humiliate us.”
Sam decided not to alert Dean. When the DJ announced the last dance, he took Raphael out on the floor, and the two of them danced together flawlessly.
Until someone crashed into them, and in the confusion, managed to give the back of Raphael’s gown a sharp tug. It was not a surprise that it was Zachariah, and the fury on his face was almost comical. “You idiots! How dare you!”
“How dare they what?” Gabriel demanded, stopping his own dance with Balthazar. “I was watching the whole thing. You and Naomi crashed into them, not the other way around, and it sure looked like it was on purpose to me. There’s no way you yanking my brother’s gown was an accident. You meant to do that, and you meant for something to happen, didn’t you.”
“It’s not like we haven’t heard you bragging,” Castiel snarled, and his dance partner Hannah nodded. “So go on. Tell us what, precisely, Raphael and Sam have done to offend you, because there are witnesses that if anyone can claim clumsiness or intent for the crash, it’s you.”
“I… um…” Zachariah tried a couple times to speak, but the glares of not just Gabriel, Balthazar, Castiel, and Hannah, but everyone else who had stopped to watch the confrontation, kept him silent. “Never mind.”
“He intended for the tug on my gown to rip the straps so that my gown would fall and embarrass me,” Raphael supplied. “It failed, because I noticed the cuts before the ball and had Ephraim reinforce things. I had planned to let it go at letting him squirm, but since he seems intent to force the issue…”
“Right. I assume you either did this on Michael’s orders or to earn his favor?” Gabriel said. “Naomi, are you in on this or just having some bad choice of dance partners tonight?”
“Like she’s going to be honest if she was involved,” Balthazar said. “Come on. If she’s innocent, she can at least tell it to Joshua, and the dance is pretty much over now anyway. Let’s go.”
Sam and Raphael stayed behind as Gabriel and Balthazar took Zachariah and Naomi away, as did most of the others at the ball. The DJ cleared her throat. “Let’s try this last dance again, shall we?”