4. Tamayo
TAMAYO
D arius guides the car into another alley. There’s no dumpster, no stench of piss or garbage. It’s three brick walls with exactly one door and one gated entryway, to which three people have the code. Darius, me, and Den of Inequity’s manager.
The club’s muffled music thumps through the steel door and into the cab of the car. My neck relaxes, the muscles easing as the gate rolls shut behind us. I’m back in Tamayo territory, with my people around me; the closest thing to safety we have. I don’t wait for Darius to open the door, too impatient and unceremonious. I’m not a fucking princess.
He rushes past me and jabs me with his elbow. I nick his ankles with my boot in retaliation. But he beats me to the club door, which was his goal anyway. I allow him to open it for me, only so I can box his ears.
“Oh, you little—” Darius aims to flick my forehead, and I duck to slap his right nipple. Hard. He hisses and makes to wrap his way-too-big arm around my neck, but I dance out of reach with a laugh.
Directly into Angie .
She stands almost an entire head shorter than me in all her grunge glory—fishnets under ripped jeans with a cropped Nirvana tee that is definitely vintage. Her brown hair hangs in an asymmetrical bob, makeup applied with exacting perfection, and currently, one of her shaped brows arched at us in annoyed amusement. Her scarlet-painted lips twitch. “If you two are finished?”
“Sorry, Angie,” Darius and I chorus with two wide grins and not an ounce of genuine remorse.
Angie rolls her eyes and shoves a wet cloth into my hands. It foams against my skin. “As requested.”
“Thanks.” I immediately crouch down and clean my boot as best I can.
She offers me another damp cloth to wipe off the soapy, dirty water left behind. “How’d it go?” she asks, raising both brows and not moving when I try to give her back the used towels.
“It didn’t.” I sigh and wrap the cleaner around the dirtier one, resigning to carrying them myself.
The stone walls keep the club’s noise muffled, but the dance floor still vibrates down the bones of the building as we navigate through the basement. It’s stark white down here, light reflecting bright over the interconnecting, overlapping, sometimes dead-ending maze of hallways. A protection tactic taken from a past kingdom and a past family.
“What’s that mean?” she asks.
“It means Antoni broke tradition.” Tradition I suppose he thought he didn’t owe me, a lowly gang leader. I crack my neck. For nigh on a decade, I’ve brokered and smuggled and violently carved out a piece of this city in pursuit of one goal: become a Cardinal Family. They own the dirt Louredo is built on, commanding districts like fiefdoms. There has never been a space for me or people like me. It’s high time they made us a seat at the goddamn table .
I make a left and then an immediate right, my boots clunking with each step. “It means the Falcones have a week to make it right.”
“Fuck,” Angie mutters.
I hum in agreement.
“They’ll make it right,” Darius reassures in his smooth baritone.
I take a hairpin turn and shoot him a censuring look. “We aren’t in the business of predictions.”
“Every business attempts to predict something—risk, market trends, competitors’ moves,” Angie says. And she would, being the manager of a night club.
“You know what I mean.” I press the trick stone in the wall, and the apparent dead end ahead of us opens to reveal a stairwell.
Angie’s boots clunk against the floor as Darius pulls the faux-wall closed behind us. A door opposite us leads into storage and laundry, and the stairs ahead lead to the main floor and then the private rooms and VIP box—or what Darius likes to call the throne room. I grab the railing, the bass vibrating through the building and up my arm, when Angie taps my elbow.
I pause, turning back to her.
She clears her throat with a scrunch of her nose. “There’s something else you couldn’t predict.”
I cock a brow. “Well?”
Angie straightens, smoke-lined eyes narrowed and shrewd. “Do you know Zarina Gallo?”
The name releases the inferno I had tucked away.
I keep my face relaxed, my hand loose on the stair’s railing, as the word Gallo shudders through my entire body. My knee flexes, and that twinge from kneeling at Antoni’s head and kicking his throat settles into a bone-deep ache.
Gallo .
The family that took me, one of a hundred lost kids, off the street. The family that taught me the ropes of what it meant to hold all the power of a kingdom. The family that I have done everything in my power to cripple since they left me lying cold and broken in an alley much like the one we visited tonight.
“Why?” I ask nonchalantly, as if Zarina Gallo’s name is not threatening to spark an explosion inside of me.
“She’s at the front door.” Angie studies me with a too-knowing look. I try to pull back the rage from where it simmers on my skin, over my face. It doesn’t matter as Angie grimaces. “And she’s asking—er, demanding —to see you.”
I let a nasty grin slink across my lips. “By all means, let the princess in.”