Chapter 8 What the Club Moves #2
Matteo picked up the propane torch instead of the box cutter, lit it with a single practiced motion, the blue-orange flame hissing to life and throwing hard shadows up the concrete walls.
He closed the last few feet without hesitation, without ceremony, and pressed the flame low against the side of the driver's throat, holding it there while the man's scream tore through the soundproofed room, raw and animal, his whole body convulsing against the zip ties hard enough to split skin at the wrists.
The smell hit a second later, thick and sickly sweet, skin blistering black where the flame lingered, and Matteo moved it once, twice, methodical, unhurried, watching the driver's eyes roll white with the particular focus of a man finishing a job rather than enjoying one.
The screaming broke into something wetter, choked, and within minutes it stopped altogether, the driver's head slumping forward against his own ruined chest, the only sound left in the room the low, steady hiss of the torch still burning in Matteo's hand.
Ronan stood by the door the entire time, arms crossed, watching without flinching, the particular stillness of a man who'd witnessed this exact scene enough times that it no longer registered as anything beyond necessary maintenance.
When it was finished, the room smelled like copper and something worse, and Matteo stood over what remained with the same flat, exacting calm he'd carried through the entire interrogation, no satisfaction in it, no cruelty for its own sake, just the particular arithmetic of a business that occasionally required this exact kind of accounting.
"Clean it," he said to Ronan. "Usual protocol. And get me everything we have on anyone named Sorin operating in this district or the ones bordering it."
"You think this connects to something bigger?"
"I think a man who runs unauthorized product through my loading dock at two in the morning and sends a driver back to check whether it was noticed isn't a one-time opportunist. That's someone testing a route, which means there's a larger operation behind it, and I want to know what it is before it costs me something I actually care about. "
Ronan nodded, already moving to handle the logistics that followed a room like this, calm and practiced, brothers who'd built an empire together on exactly this kind of unglamorous, necessary work.
Matteo crossed to the small washroom attached to the lower level, the one built into the original renovation for precisely this purpose, and turned the tap on hot, watching blood spiral pink down the drain as he scrubbed his hands with the same clinical thoroughness he brought to everything else in this business.
The water ran clear eventually. His hands didn't stop feeling stained, not from guilt, he'd made peace with this particular cost of his world a long time ago, but from something more specific tonight, a low, persistent hum of unease he couldn't fully place until he caught his own reflection in the washroom mirror and recognized, with sudden and unwelcome clarity, exactly what his mind had drifted to in the middle of an interrogation that should have commanded every ounce of his attention.
Del.
Not because the shipment had anything to do with her.
Not yet, not that he knew of. But because somewhere in the last hour, some part of him had catalogued this entire threat not purely as a problem for Obsidian, but as a problem for the district, for everyone operating in it, for a woman three blocks south who ran a club with the same visibility and vulnerability that had apparently made his own loading dock an attractive rerouting point for whatever Sorin was moving.
He dried his hands, buttoned his cuffs back into place, and told himself the thought meant nothing beyond professional thoroughness, the same instinct that would have flagged the risk to any operator in this district regardless of who they were.
He didn't fully believe himself. He hadn't fully believed himself about anything involving her in weeks.
Ronan found him still standing at the sink a few minutes later, phone in hand.
"Got something on Sorin already. Not much, but the name's not clean.
Comes up twice in old cartel intelligence reports from Colombia and Miami both, always in connection to financial structuring, never directly tied to product movement himself.
If it's the same man, he's not a street level player.
He's someone who launders money for people who are. "
Matteo turned that over, the pieces sliding into a shape he didn't like the outline of. "Money launderer running unauthorized shipments through legitimate club supply chains."
"That's my read."
"Then this isn't about territory. It's about using clubs like mine, and clubs like every other operator in this district, as cover for something considerably larger than a turf dispute.
" Matteo's jaw tightened, the earlier fog of distraction burned away entirely now, replaced by the cold, focused clarity that had built everything he owned.
"I want a full list of every club in this district that's had unexplained financial anomalies in the last two years.
Every silent investor, every backer nobody talks about publicly.
If Sorin's running this through supply chains, he's not doing it through one venue. "
"That's a lot of digging."
"Then start tonight."
Ronan left to make the calls, and Matteo stood alone in the washroom a moment longer, staring at his own reflection, hands clean now but the night's weight still sitting heavy behind his sternum.
He had a name. He had the first real thread of an operation running beneath the district's surface that had nothing to do with his war against Marea and everything to do with a threat considerably larger than a supplier contract or a poached DJ.
He didn't yet know how close that thread ran to her. Some instinct he refused to examine too closely told him it ran closer than he wanted to believe, and the particular unease that thought produced sat heavier in his chest than anything the last hour's violence had managed to.
He checked his watch. Past midnight, which meant Marea would be closing soon, staff finishing their last cleanup before the lights went dark until tomorrow night.
He thought about texting her. He thought about calling instead, hearing her voice, telling her nothing about tonight and everything about the low, insistent pull that had been building between them since the moment she'd told him he was in her chair a month ago.
He didn't do either. He straightened his jacket instead, buried the unease under the same discipline that had carried him through every other threat this district had ever thrown at him, and headed for the elevator, telling himself he had work still waiting at his desk upstairs.
He made it exactly as far as the car before he changed course entirely, giving his driver an address three blocks south of Obsidian instead of the one he'd meant to give, and didn't examine too closely why some part of him needed to see her tonight, needed it more than he needed the paperwork waiting for him at his own desk, needed it enough that the decision had made itself before he'd consciously agreed to it at all.