Page 12 of Ruthless Daddy
Marco had left me here an hour ago, said he was running the floor but I knew he was downstairs, gladhanding the VIPs and the couriers and the girls who worked in velvet and lace because that was the business. He would make three new friends and five new enemies before midnight and not know which was which until somebody called him the next morning and told him about it. Marco was built for this place. He could smile at a cop and a killer in the same night and neither would remember who’d said what first.
Me, I was just passing time.
Serafina had gone home at nine. She had looked tired, or maybe bored, or maybe just too pregnant to care about the pulse of a club she’d spent all day running. She had squeezed my hand, kissed my cheek, and whispered in Sicilian that next time, I should bring someone who smiled.
I wanted to tell her I didn’t know anyone who did that. Except for Tonio, of course. Bastard smiled too much.
So now it was just me. Booth to myself, coat still on, glass sweating in my hand. The crowd below had thickened to a single moving animal, all flashing teeth and wet hair and the blue glow of a thousand phones held just above the line of sight. Every once in a while the crowd would break open and someone would get carried over the heads—an empty bottle, a girl on the shoulders of her friends, a man who didn’t know he was about to get thrown out. You learned a lot about crowds by how they handled sudden change.
The booth two over was louder than the rest. Every time a song crested, the guy at the center of it grabbed the woman beside him and lifted her straight up in the air. She squealed every time like it was the first time, legs flashing under her skirt, heels raking lines on his back. He wore a suit, midnight blue, and a ring with a sapphire on it the size of a marble. I clocked his hands: perfectly clean, nails buffed, the faintest tan line where awedding ring used to be. Corporate money, probably finance, or just an asshole with enough credit to fake it. He looked over at my booth twice. Each time I let my face go blank. He lost interest after that.
Marco texted a new ETA for Sal and Tonio. “5 min.” I didn’t care. I liked being alone in the booth. It let me keep my back to the wall and count the exits without having to explain why.
I finished my glass and poured another. The wine was a Nero d’Avola. Sicilian, probably not expensive, but it was heavy and dark and I liked it. I drank it fast and waited for the world to slow down. It never did.
I let my head rest against the top of the booth and closed my eyes. Just for a second.
The bass rolled under my ribs. The crowd screamed. The man in the blue suit knocked a glass off the table and it exploded on the floor. Nobody stopped dancing.
I took another drink and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Tonioarrivedlikeashot of adrenaline to the chest. I heard him before I saw him—a burst of laughter, a crash on the steps, a girl’s voice yelling “no way” and then Tonio’s own louder over everything else, “SI SI SI!”
He hit the stairs to the booth two at a time, already with his arm around a girl he had collected on the way from the door. She was small, pretty, dark hair, some kind of tattoo blooming up the inside of her arm. She looked delighted and a little stunned, like she’d been plucked off the street and set down inside the best seat at the club, which she probably had.
Tonio grinned at me as he came up. “Fantasma!” he bellowed, and with his free hand he caught me in a headlock, kissed the side of my head—wet, deliberate, on the temple—and then dropped down into the booth beside me. The girl slipped in after him, half in his lap, half not.
“Fantasma” was the name Tonio used for me when he wanted to get a reaction. I never gave him one, which only made him use it more. He slammed a glass in front of me. “Drink. Smile. Be a person.Cazzo, you look like a statue.”
I drank. It was not a question. The wine burned less this time, or maybe I was just expecting it.
Sal followed three steps behind. He moved slower than Tonio, from a deliberate, heavy patience. He wore black on black, shirt buttoned high, and if you didn’t know him you might have thought he was security, not blood. He barely glanced at the girl, just sat across from me and nodded, once. His eyes were ringed dark, but clear. Sal was never not clear.
He leaned across, voice lower than the music but sharp enough to cut through it. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” I said.
He poured himself a glass, measured, and sipped once before turning to scan the floor. This was how we did it: scan, compare notes, scan again. It was instinct. It was what had kept us alive this long.
Tonio rolled his eyes, tilted his head at the girl. “Marta. Meet my cousin, the famous Pietro. He can kill you with a breadstick.”
The girl, Marta, gave me a look I had seen a thousand times before—half curiosity, half fear, a small shiver behind the eyes. I nodded at her, polite. She turned back to Tonio immediately, which was smart.
I looked out over the rail at the floor below. The bodies were packed tighter now, sweat shining on necks and foreheads, everything moving together. The DJ was doing that thing wherehe pretended to mix but was actually just letting a playlist run, flicking knobs that weren’t even connected, but nobody cared. The crowd didn’t want artistry. The crowd wanted oblivion.
And then I saw her.
She was across the room, near the far wall, standing half-shadowed under the red lights. She wore a wool coat that was too thin for the night, the color of asphalt, buttoned up to the collar. Her hair was pulled tight, and I knew instantly that she had done it herself, probably in a bathroom, probably without a mirror. Her bag was pressed to her hip, both hands clamped around the strap.
But what got me was the way she held her body.
She was still. Not frozen—frozen was fear, frozen was what girls did in the moments before the crowd closed over them. Still was something else. Still was deliberate. Still was the kind of calm that came from years of knowing that the second you moved, you got noticed.
Her eyes were on the crowd, but not moving with it. She was tracking patterns, not people. Counting bodies, not faces.
