2. Stryker #3
“Recently enough.”
“That means no.”
“That means recently enough.”
Blade leaned forward just slightly, his voice quieter. “You working both nights?”
Her gaze shifted to him, and something in her posture eased by a fraction. Blade had that effect when he wasn’t covered in blood. “Tonight and tomorrow.”
“First event like this?” he asked.
She paused. “Is it that obvious?”
“No,” he said. “You just still look like you’re noticing things.”
That could’ve pushed too close, but he said it without pressure. Nora looked at him for another second before her mouth curved faintly. “I notice things for free. It’s one of my few hobbies.”
“Useful hobby,” I said.
“Depends on what you notice.”
“And what have you noticed?”
She glanced around the ballroom, then back to me. “That most of the men here want everyone to know they’re rich, powerful, or important, which makes me assume at least half of them are less rich, powerful, or important than they want to be.”
Viper laughed under his breath. “Accurate.”
“And the other half?” I asked.
Her eyes held mine through the mask. “They don’t need to prove it.”
It was a good answer. Too good for a bottle girl working a private event for rich men with hidden faces. I wanted to know where she learned to sort threats that quickly, and I didn’t like the answer I suspected.
Viper reached for his glass, still watching her. “And us?”
Nora looked at his rented tux, then Blade’s plain mask, then mine. She noticed the fit, the shoulders, the hands, the shoes. Her mouth pressed together for a second like she was deciding whether honesty was worth the tip.
“You three look like you’re here for a reason,” she said finally. “And not the same reason as everyone else.”
Blade went still in the quiet way he had.
Viper’s expression stayed easy, but his attention sharpened.
I leaned back. “That a problem?”
“Not for me.”
“For who then?”
“For whoever gets in your way, probably.”
There it was again. That careful, practical read.
She should have walked away after saying it. Instead, she stood beside our table with one hand wrapped around the neck of the bottle, eyes steady and shoulders controlled, and I forgot for a few seconds that we had come here to work.
Viper recovered first because he always recovered first. “Sit with us.”
“I’m working.”
“Stand with us, then.”
“That is also not my job.”
“What is your job?” he asked.
“Serving drinks.”
“Perfect. We’re thirsty.”
She looked at the half-full glasses on the table. “You’re really not.”
Blade reached over, took my glass, and drank enough to make room. “Now he is.”
Nora blinked at him, then laughed once before she caught herself.
That small laugh did more damage than it had any right to.
“Traitor,” I told Blade.
Blade set the glass down. “You looked thirsty.”
Viper pushed his empty glass toward Nora. “Ignore them. They get strange when they’re underdressed.”
“You’re all underdressed?” she asked.
“Only spiritually.”
She poured for him despite herself. Her hand was steady, nails short and clean beneath pale polish.
No rings. No bracelet except the slim gold cuff issued with the uniform.
When she stepped closer to fill Blade’s glass, I caught the faint scent of vanilla, champagne, and something clean beneath the room’s heavier perfume.
“You should drink water between those." she told Blade.
His gaze lifted to hers. “Medical advice?”
“Bartender advice.”
“You a bartender?”
“Sometimes.”
“What else are you sometimes?” Viper asked.
Nora looked at him over the bottle. “Employed.”
I laughed again, and this time she looked pleased before she hid it.
Viper tipped his head toward me. “Careful. He doesn’t laugh unless someone bleeds or surprises him.”
“Which one did I do?”
“Surprised him.”
“Good,” she said. “Less cleanup.”
Blade gave a quiet chuckle at that, and Viper looked between all of us with open interest now. I knew that look. It was the look he got when a room shifted around a new possibility and he decided he wanted to understand its shape before anyone else did.
Sharing women wasn’t new for us. It had happened once before, in a stretch of recklessness after the Wolves became more than whispers, and before we understood how much leadership would cost. Hannah had been beautiful, wild, and mean in ways that became less interesting once the novelty wore off.
She liked the idea of three men more than the reality of three men with work, scars, and expectations.
By the time she left, all three of us had been relieved enough not to say it out loud.
Nora didn’t feel anything like Hannah.
That was the problem.
A man in a gold mask at the next table lifted his hand sharply. “Bottle girl.”
Nora’s shoulders shifted, but her polite face returned before she turned. “I’ll be right there.”
Viper caught her attention before she moved. “Come back after.”
“I have other tables.”
“We’re more interesting.”
“That’s debatable.”
“It’s really not,” he said. “But I’ll let you pretend.”
She looked at me then, maybe expecting me to pile on. I didn’t. I just held her gaze and said, “Come back when you can.”
She left for the other table, and the three of us watched her go with varying degrees of subtlety.
Blade spoke first. “Young.”
“Twenty-one tomorrow,” Viper said.
I looked at him. “How do you know that?”
“She has a birthday pin clipped inside the edge of her service tray. Staff joke, maybe. Small twenty-one charm.”
Blade stared at him. “You saw that from here?”
“I observe.”
“You snoop.”
“Observation with ambition.”
I looked back across the room, where Nora poured champagne for the gold-mask table while keeping her body angled away from the men seated there. “She’s careful.”
“She doesn’t trust the room,” Blade said.
“Smart,” Viper murmured.
We should have gone back to watching the guests.
We should have used the time she spent away to track introductions, names, security patterns, exits, and the men most likely to need discreet transportation for things that couldn’t go through official channels.
Instead, I watched Nora move from table to table while my attention kept snagging on small things.
The way she smiled without giving too much.
The way she stepped around hands before they reached.
The way she spoke to another server, a dark-haired girl with olive skin and a sharper kind of beauty, and let her expression soften for the first time all night.
“That one’s hers,” Blade said.
I didn’t ask who he meant. “Friend?”
“More than friend. Family, maybe.”
Viper followed the line of sight to the dark-haired girl. “She’s trouble.”
“Looks like it,” Blade said.
The dark-haired girl glanced toward our table at one point and caught us looking. Unlike Nora, she didn’t bother pretending politeness. She looked straight at me, then Viper, then Blade, and made a small gesture with two fingers toward her own eyes before pointing at us.
Watching you.
Viper lifted his glass in acknowledgment.
Nora turned, saw the exchange, and her eyes narrowed slightly before she said something to the girl. The girl laughed, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and walked off toward another cluster of tables.
“Definitely trouble,” Viper said.
“Nora comes back,” I said.
Neither of them argued.
She did, fifteen minutes later, carrying a fresh bottle and a look that said she had convinced herself it was because we were customers. “You three are still here.”
“This is our table,” Viper said.
“It’s assigned?”
“Emotionally.”
Nora sighed, but she poured for him. “That sounds serious.”
“We’re committed men.”
Blade coughed.
She looked at him. “You disagree?”
“I’d use different wording.”
“What wording?”
Blade thought about it, then said, “Stubborn.”
“That fits better,” she said.
I pushed the chair beside me out with my boot. “Sit.”
She glanced toward the ballroom floor. “I told you, I’m working.”
“For thirty seconds,” I said. “Your feet hurt.”
Her eyes snapped back to me.
I nodded toward her shoes. “You keep shifting off the left.”
She looked down, like her own body had betrayed her. “That’s annoying.”
“Your feet hurting?”
"You noticing.”
Viper leaned forward. “He notices practical things. Blade notices injuries. I notice everything interesting.”
“And modesty just avoids the table entirely?” she asked.
“I’ve found it limiting.”
She hesitated, then sat on the very edge of the chair like she was prepared to stand again immediately.
The skirt rode higher on her thighs when she sat, and she tugged it down once without looking embarrassed.
Practical. Automatic. That small gesture did more to keep my attention than if she had tried to draw it.
“How’d you end up working this?” Blade asked.
Her fingers rested around the bottle neck. “Recruiter found us through a hospitality contact.”
“Us?” I asked.
“My friend. Valentina.”
“The one who threatened us from across the room?” Viper asked.
Nora’s mouth curved. “She didn’t threaten you.”
“She implied future violence.”
“That’s how she says hello.”
“Warm girl,” Blade said.
“The warmest.”
There was affection under the dryness. History too. The kind that didn’t come from knowing someone casually. The kind that got built in bad places and stayed because leaving would mean cutting into your own skin.
“You trust the people running this?” I asked.
Viper’s gaze flicked to me, probably because I’d gone too direct.
Nora didn’t answer immediately. She looked down at the bottle, then toward the nearest staff lead watching the room from beside a column. “Enough.”
“That wasn’t yes.”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”
Blade shifted slightly in his chair, attention moving toward the same staff lead. “You need a reason not to?”
Her eyes returned to him. “I need a paycheck.”
There wasn’t shame in the answer. Just fact. I understood facts like that. They made men take jobs they didn’t like, women smile at hands they wanted to slap, clubs walk into rooms full of predators and call it opportunity.
“How much?” Viper asked.
“Rude.”
“Curious.”
“Still rude.”
I reached into my jacket and pulled out a folded hundred, setting it beneath my empty glass. “Then don’t answer him.”
Her gaze dropped to the money. She didn’t grab it. That, too, told me something. She was used to needing money, but she had trained herself not to snatch too quickly in front of men. Pride, maybe. Caution, definitely.
“That for the champagne?” she asked.
“For sitting.”
“I sat for maybe a minute.”
“I round up.”
Viper smiled into his drink. “He’s very generous when he’s trying not to look interested.”
Nora’s attention slid back to me. “Is that what you’re doing?”
“No.”
“Which part?”
“Trying not to look.”
The words came out before I measured them as much as I should have.
Blade went quiet. Viper’s amusement settled into something more attentive.
Nora looked at me for a long second through that black-and-gold mask, and for the first time since she came to the table, her service expression disappeared completely.
Without it, she looked younger.
Not at all fragile—I wouldn’t have made the mistake in believing that.
Then she looked away first, reaching for the bottle as she stood. “I should get back.”
I wanted to tell her to stay. I didn’t because wanting something didn’t make it smart, and because men in my position didn’t get to forget the difference between invitation and pressure.
“Tomorrow,” Viper said lightly before she could leave. “You should come find us.”
“I don’t know where you’ll be.”
“We’ll be wherever you are.”
Blade looked at him. “That sounded worse than you meant.”
“It did,” Nora agreed.
Viper lifted both hands. “I meant to be charming.”
“You missed.”
I stood then, not fully, just enough to take the hundred from beneath the glass and hold it out to her. “Come find us tomorrow if you want to.”
Her gaze moved from the bill to my hand, then to my face. “And if I don’t?”
“Then don’t.”
She seemed to like that answer more than the money. After a second, she took the bill and tucked it into the small pouch at her waist. “Maybe.”
Viper sighed. “Painful, but I’ll accept it.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
Blade smiled faintly.
Nora stepped back from the table, and before she turned away, her eyes met mine again through the mask. “Try not to get kicked out before then, Stryker.”
I let the sound of my name in her mouth settle somewhere it shouldn’t have. “No promises.”
She left us there, moving back into the crowd with her bottle and careful steps, the blue stones on her mask catching light until other bodies swallowed her.
The three of us sat quiet for longer than we should have.
Viper broke first, because he usually did when silence got too honest. “Well, that was inconvenient.”
Blade’s gaze stayed on the room, but I knew where his attention was. “She’s not like the others.”
“No,” Viper said. “She’s not.”
I picked up my drink and remembered too late that Blade had finished most of it. “We came here to work.”
“We did,” Viper agreed.
“Still need contacts.”
“We do.”
Blade looked at me then. “But not tonight?”
Across the room, Nora laughed at something Valentina said. It wasn’t the polite laugh she gave customers. This one opened her face beneath the mask, quick and real before she tucked it away again.
I thought about the Wolves. About Black Rock.
About fifteen men waiting for me to turn a victory into an empire.
I thought about the invitation, the money in the room, the work we needed, and the way a smart man didn’t let himself get distracted by a woman he met behind a mask at a rich man’s party.
Then I looked at Viper and Blade, and I saw the same decision already sitting there.
Networking could hold for a little while.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
Viper’s smile was slow and satisfied. “Tomorrow.”
Blade didn’t smile, but his gaze found Nora again before he looked back at us. “If she comes.”
“She’ll come,” Viper said.
I watched her disappear through a service door near the far end of the ballroom, and that feeling from earlier moved through me again, stronger this time. A door opening. A wall cracking. Something coming before I knew whether it would build us up or cost us more than we could afford.
“She’ll come,” I said, and for once, I wasn’t sure if I was making a promise or trying to believe one.