Page 32 of His Obsession
“Any details on the shooter?”
“All we’ve got is male, black cap, dark jacket. From the footage, he came in through the east side and went out the rear service corridor before the second bouncer got eyes on him.” Matteo gestures toward the broken mirrored display. “Fired twice at the bar and once into the wall. And he made damn sure to keep his face off camera.”
“Are we thinking it was a message from Marchetti?” I ask.
“Maybe.” He exhales. “Are they that stupid, though?”
A uniformed detective starts toward me from the other side of the room before I can answer. I know before he opens his mouth that he’s going to be worthless. Sure enough, he gives me the bureaucratic version ofwe’ll do what we can, which means nothing.
When he leaves, Matteo and I make our way to the security room behind the club office. Three screens are up, two different angles paused. The first shows the east corridor, crowded and dark. The second catches the shooter but only in fragments, showing details of his black cap, jacket, and roughly average height. He comes in with purpose, disappears into the crowd, then reappears near the back bar moments before the shots. His movements are too clean for anything but intent.
The third screen catches him leaving through the service hall, his shoulder turned from the camera and head down, gone in seconds.
“Got a plate on his vehicle?” I ask.
“Not yet,” Matteo says. “But we’ve got one grainy angle from the alley cam. Car waiting at the rear turnoff. Could be a driver, could be coincidence. I’m pulling traffic routes now.”
I realize, with a clarity that turns immediately to anger, exactly how distracted I’ve been.
Not enough to cause this, maybe. That would be vanity. Men like Marchetti make their own choices whether I spend my week buried in work or fixated on Valentina Moretti’s polite emails like an idiot. But enough that I let my attention drift when it should have been locked on our most recent security threat. That black sedan has been taunting us for weeks, and now this.
My distraction is unacceptable. I stare at the paused image of the shooter and make a resolution.
Whatever happened with Valentina happened. She made her choice about what it meant, and she made it immediately. I’m the one who let myself get carried away. No more. Valentina goes back to being my best friend’s sister and nothing more.
“What do you need?” Matteo asks.
“I want all street footage from here to Santa Monica before sunrise. Names on every Marchetti runner who’s been near West Hollywood this week. The rear alley route mapped and the car from the alley cam cleaned up if possible. And the bouncer statements retaken by somebody with more patience than the LAPD seems capable of.”
Matteo nods once.
“Done.”
“I’ll call Nico to double security at our other properties. And I want every dancer escorted to their cars for the rest of the weekend.”
I look back at the frozen frame of the man in the cap. This should not have happened. Not on my watch.
That’s the truth under everything else. While I was letting her get under my skin, somebody fired shots in one of my clubs and vanished. I won’t let that happen again.
I step away from the monitor and head back toward the main floor, where glass still glitters under the raised lights and uniforms mill around pretending they’re in control.
The club will reopen. The damage will be fixed. The guests will retell the story tomorrow over brunch and make themselves sound braver than they were. Publicly, this will become a contained incident at a high-profile venue. Unfortunate, but handled.
Privately, this requires a reset in my organization. A full reset in my focus, too. I need my men battle-ready in case the Marchettis decide to make their move, and I can’t afford to let any woman get in the way of that.
13
VALENTINA
For the next month after the gala, things go well. I get calls and emails from guests asking to book me. My schedule fills completely for the next year, which is insanely gratifying. Still, something is off.
For a while, I convince myself I’m just stressed.
It’s not much of a stretch. Stress is the most reliable thing in my life these days. It’s there when I wake up, there when I go to bed, sitting heavy in my chest like something I swallowed wrong and can’t cough back up. It’s in every strange car lingering too long at a light. Every bouquet that arrives without a card. Every unknown number that spikes my pulse before I can stop it.
I keep reminding myself that Adrian is in New York.
He’s in New York. He’s not here. He can’t be here. He’s just doing what he always did best, which is finding ways to make me feel watched, and then gaslighting me about it. He wouldn’t shut down his operations just to fly to LA and stalk me.
