Section 37
Means to an End
Gia
The expensive espresso machine makes coffee that tastes like ass.
I’m not going to cry.
That’s the first rule. The only rule. All the other rules are built on top of that one, but it’s the base layer, the steel foundation of every decision I make.
You don’t cry when someone finds the chink in your armor.
You don’t cry when a man betrays you, or when a city tries to wring loyalty from your bones.
You don’t cry when the only person you let close enough to matter turns out to be a walking time-bomb with a fuse wired by your worst enemy.
I discreetly pour the rest of the coffee out in the sink, just as Dante enters the kitchen.
“Gia,” he says, and there’s a rare heat in the word that snaps my focus back to the fact that I’m not here to process feelings. I’m here to finish this.
Dante gestures to the doors behind him—heavy and old, the kind that require intent to move.
“Walk with me.”
It is not quite a request.
He takes the corridor at a pace just shy of aggressive.
We pass marble busts of men who never flinched, oil portraits of women who ran this place before their husbands took credit for histories.
These people lasted because they learned to eat pain as fuel.
Nobody tells you that’s the job description, but you absorb it.
Dante studies me with a look that says he’s measuring the perimeter of my failure, deciding if it’s worth sewing shut or cauterizing.
“You want to get out ahead of this, you end it yourself. You want to prove you can absorb a betrayal and move forward?”
I meet his eyes. “I want it buried before Frank can turn it into a power-sharing agreement.”
He nods, a slow movement. “You can’t salt the earth on your own. You need to be ruthless, yes, but you also need to be accurate. You’re not here to be liked. You’re here to win.”
“I know how to be ruthless, Dante.”
He gives a half-smile, and for a second he almost looks like he pities me. “That’s your flaw. You do ruthless like a mathematician. But sometimes the answer isn’t in precision. It’s in mess.”
I cross my arms. “So you want me to make a scene?”
He leans in, drops his voice. “I want you to show them a woman with nothing left to lose.”
“That’s not my brand.”
“Maybe it should be.”
The words echo down the empty corridor. In the distance, I hear glass break. Someone in the house is already making a mess of something expensive. That’s the Lussari legacy.
Dante slips a hand into his pocket, pulls out a cell, unlocks it with his thumb, and hands it to me without looking down. There are three messages on the screen, all from the same number: Bellini’s.
“He’s waiting,” Dante says. “He wants to see if he can turn you, or if he can break you.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He shrugs. “Because you’re my best hope.”
It’s the closest thing to affection I’ve ever heard from Dante.
“Thank you.”
He doesn’t ask if I’ll be careful. He knows I don’t have that setting. He just takes the phone back and tucks it inside his jacket like he was never holding it.
A hideous creature zooms around the corner, hissing. Dante doesn’t seem surprised that a wild raccoon or possibly some kind of oversized sewer rat with one ear is in his home.
His second in command, Steve Kowalski, jogs shortly behind and manages to pick the animal up.
“No, bad Catshit,” he says in a way that’s somehow both stern and affectionate at once. “You have to take your insulin.”
“That’s a… cat?” I ask. “With diabetes?”
“Unfortunately,” Dante replies, pinching the bridge of his nose.
It’s gnawing on something that’s either a slug or a chunk of imported prosciutto.
Steve squares up, whispers something to the cat, and deftly grabs the loose skin at its’ shoulder.
The creature counters with a flurry of unprintable language, but the needle is in and out before it can process the indignity.
She hops away, giving each of us the kind of hostile glare reserved for IRS auditors and exes from the first marriage.
“Good girl,” Steve murmurs, then the pair disappear again.
There’s a pause, then Dante gestures for me to follow, like we were never interrupted by the most bizarre feline interaction known to man.
We take the stairs down two flights, past storage rooms and old wine, and into a basement corridor that smells like concrete and solvent. At the end of the hall is a steel door with a fingerprint lock. Dante presses his thumb to the pad and the lock clicks open with a whine.
Inside is a private shooting range, climate controlled, walls twice as thick as the outside world. There’s already a selection of handguns, preloaded and disassembled for examination. The air hums with the faint scent of powder and oil.
“Pick your poison,” he says, gesturing at the lineup.
I select the SIG Sauer, field strip it, check the slide, reassemble. The ritual is enough to make the tremor leave my hands.
Dante loads a target at the twenty-five-foot mark. “What’s your angle on Bellini?”
“He thinks I’m cornered.”
“You’re not.”
I nod. “He wants to see if I’ll trade information for leverage. He’s going to dangle something Frank did and see if I’ll bite.”
“Will you?”
“Depends what he offers.” I take aim at the silhouette. “You think Lucky would have told me if I asked?”
Dante’s mouth twitches, then goes flat. “He would have said yes until you stopped wanting to hear it.”
I squeeze off the first shot, then another. Let the tight ringing in the air tell me that I’m still in control of something, even if it’s only my hands and the evenness of my breath.
Dante sets another magazine on the table, watching the grouping appear in the heart of the paper man.
“Gia, if you want to break their narrative, you have to take all the pieces off the board at once.”
I line up another shot, the weight of the SIG a comfort. My father taught me to shoot with kitchen towels and a snub-nosed Beretta that stank of sulfur.
“You’re telling me to kill them all?”
“I’m telling you to make it inevitable,” he says. “Frank will try to use Lucky to prove you’re compromised. So you use Lucky to prove you’re untouchable.”
I set the gun down, safety still off. “He’s not the enemy.”
Dante’s eyes are all calculation. “He’s your leverage. That’s all anyone is, at the end.”
He’s wrong about that. But I do not argue. I reload and take out the next target, aiming for the throat, then the eye, then the hollow space where Frank’s grin would go.