Chapter 3
Pietro
The bottle Marco opened at six was now half gone. He’d set me up in the raised corner booth like it was a safe zone—soft seats, good sightlines, wall at my back, a glass in my hand that refilled itself every time I looked away.
The club was heavy with guests. Main floor was packed with the right kind of crowd: too rich, too desperate, too pretty, and every last one of them pretending it was for fun.
Nero liked its guests performative. Dress codes were pointless.
Nobody followed them. You could show up in a t-shirt if it cost more than the doorman’s rent.
You could show up in nothing but skin and hunger.
Nothing quite like this place in Sicily—for better or worse.
The lights were down to red and nothing else. Bass like a punch in the chest, nothing above one-twenty hertz, the kind of pressure that rattled the booths and made the glasses crawl on the table if you left them alone.
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 a wedding 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.
Tonio arrived like a shot 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 where he 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.
She turned, just once, and looked back at the door. She checked the bouncer, then the rail above where we sat, and then she tracked every exit on the far wall in a single pass. Her face never changed. She just logged the information and stored it.
I felt my heart knock once, hard, in my chest. I knew her. I did not know her name, but I knew her. She was the same kind of animal as me.
Tonio caught the shift in my face and whooped. “Oh,” he said, leaning in so close his breath was wine and aftershave. “Oh, who is that? Fantasma, look at him—Sal, look at his face!”
Sal did not smile, but his mouth did the thing it did when he was amused. “Leave it,” he said. But Tonio was not leaving it.
“Look at her,” he said, all teeth. “Look at how she’s looking at him, look—“
And I watched her look up and see me.
And I watched her decide, instantly, that I was one of them.
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look away. She just looked right at me, and in her eyes was the cold calculation of a woman who had already mapped out what to do if I came over.
I felt it in my teeth. I felt it in my chest and lower.
I drank, bbecause if I didn’t, I might have stood up and crossed the room that second.
She held my eyes across the whole floor. The music, the red lights, the crowd—it all blurred out. Just her, and the way her mouth was tight at the corners, and the way she stood, scared, fragile, alone.
I wanted to know who had made her like this. I wanted to know who she was hiding from. I wanted to know how it would feel to touch her.
I watched her until she broke the line of sight.
And then she was gone.
My chest was tight. The club air was heavy and sour, all sweat and melted ice, and still I could taste the back of my own tongue. She had held my eyes across the whole fucking floor and it felt like someone was leaning a thumb on my larynx. I could not look anywhere else.
Tonio kept on me. “Jesus, Fantasma, you seeing what I’m seeing? That’s a woman who wants to eat your bones.” He jabbed my ribs, missed, sloshed his drink and didn’t care. He looked over at Sal for backup. “Tell him, Sal. Tell him that’s a thing you don’t see every night. Not here, not anywhere.”
Sal regarded the scene with the slow, judgy calm of a man who did not get moved by anything, let alone a girl in a threadbare coat. He tipped his glass in the girls’s direction, just enough to acknowledge, and said, “You ever see a wolf not know it was in a trap?”
Tonio whooped, delighted. “See? It’s like the two of you got dropped out of the same helicopter and forgot to pick up your parachutes.”