Section 48
Standoff
Gia
The balance of power in the room snaps like a live wire hitting water.
“Right on time,” Frank says, beaming.
I turn slowly, maintaining the calm that keeps me alive in moments like these.
Bellini steps through the doorway.
His eyes sweep the room with clinical precision—the overturned furniture, the bloodstained floor, the guards standing at their strategic points like furniture that breathes. His expression stays placid. I know that look. The careful neutrality of a man running odds with every breath he takes.
Lucky’s head jerks up, recognition flaring hot in his eyes. Something passes between them—a history I’m not privy to, brief but significant enough that his jaw tightens against whatever surfaced.
“Well,” Lucky says hoarsely. “That’s not ideal.”
No.
It is not.
I told Bellini to stand down. Apparently he’s come to stand up.
“Quite the theatrical setup, Frank,” Bellini says, and he doesn’t look at a single one of the men. His attention is on me. Charcoal suit, pale blue tie, not one crease out of place at this hour. The kind of man who looks pressed even while planning an execution.
Frank straightens, adjusting his cuffs. “Not theatrical. Necessary.”
“Mm.” Bellini steps further into the room, footsteps echoing through the hollow where the music used to live. “I was promised an update.”
Something in my chest goes quiet.
Update.
My promise, handed back to me across a room full of Frank’s men like a coat I left somewhere.
Frank hears a business partner collecting. He pats Bellini on the back like they’re old bridge partners.
I hear an invoice with my name in the billing address.
I don’t move. I give him nothing to read, because if I read him and I’m wrong, I’ve spent the last card I own on a man in a good suit.
“The situation evolved,” Frank says, gesturing at Lucky. “Complications arose.”
“They do.” Bellini reaches the bar and trails one finger along the polished surface, testing for dust that isn’t there. “Seems excessive for a simple transfer of ownership.”
Frank signals one of his men with a subtle nod. The guard—broad-shouldered, face as expressive as concrete—moves toward me with surprising speed for his bulk.
“Let’s not pretend anymore, Gia,” Frank says. “You’ve made your priorities clear.”
Cold metal closes on my wrists.
I could resist. The Beretta is still tucked against my ribs; they were sloppy in the search, the way men are sloppy about women who arrive alone. But drawing now, in a room with this many barrels, is just an elaborate way of choosing which wall I die against.
So I let him.
Every plan has a line item you agree to pay before you walk in. This is mine.
“Really?” I say, boredom dripping off every syllable while the guard secures me to the metal frame of Lucky’s chair. “This seems unnecessarily dramatic.”
“This is getting crowded,” Lucky mutters.
The guard cranks the cuffs a notch past comfortable—a petty little power play that tells me everything about Frank’s hiring standards. The steel bites. Fine. There’s a shim sewn into the seam of my left cuff, and has been since I was twenty-four, and it takes under a minute.
Not yet. A card you show early is a card you’ve spent.
Lucky shifts beneath me, his shoulder pressing against mine in a way that would look accidental to anyone who isn’t paying attention. It isn’t. Reassurance. Still here.
I feel the heat of him through my coat. His breathing is uneven, ribs likely cracked. The smell of his blood does something in my chest that I lock down immediately, in the same motion, like closing a door on a room that’s on fire.
“You okay?” he murmurs, barely a vibration against my back.
“Shut up,” the guard snaps, driving a fist into his already ruined side.
Lucky doesn’t make a sound. But I feel him flinch, and the chair creaks. Somewhere behind my sternum I add a name to a list.
“That’s enough,” I say, ice coating it.
Frank ignores me. His attention is on Bellini, who has made himself comfortable behind my bar like a man who owns the deed.
“You have excellent taste in whiskey,” Bellini says, lifting a crystal decanter that holds more value than most people’s rent. My private stock. Kept for occasions. “Highland single malt. Twenty-one years.”
Frank’s smile turns almost genuine. “She’s a woman of refinement, our Gia.”
“Was,” Bellini corrects, and pours. “Past tense seems appropriate.”
The casualness of it—the way they discuss me like I’m already in a drawer—should enrage me.
Instead it clarifies. Anger clouds judgment. Clarity keeps you breathing.
Then Frank goes behind the bar himself and pulls out a bottle.
Not just any bottle.
The bottle my father kept in a safe and told me never to touch.
“Priceless, wouldn’t you say, Gia-bella?” Frank smiles in a way that makes my palm itch.
Lucky mutters something obscene.
Bellini steps closer and gives a low whistle. “That is a very special bottle.”
He takes it from Frank’s hands the way a surgeon takes an instrument from a nurse—without asking, without looking, without the possibility of refusal.
Amber catches the overhead light.
He pours one glass.
He pours a second.
Then he pours a third, and sets it down at the far end of the bar. The end where I stand every night of my life, doing inventory with a pen behind my ear.
Frank glances at it. “Who’s that for?”
“Habit,” Bellini says.
Three rings, never more, never less. Three fingers, never two. Three terms to our arrangement, recited back to me on a rainy street like a liturgy.
The man does everything in threes.
And he has never once, poured for the dead.
I look at that third glass sitting there, untouched and out of reach, and I understand that I am the only person in this room who knows what’s about to happen.
“To new partnerships,” Bellini says, raising his.
Frank steps forward and takes the glass Bellini offers him.
“To inevitable outcomes,” he counters.
They drink—Frank immediately, Bellini with a hesitation that would be invisible to anyone who wasn’t watching for it. I am. I see the glass touch his lips without allowing the liquid passage.
Three signals.
I’ve built entire quarters on less.
Frank sets his empty glass down with a decisive click. “We should discuss the logistics.”
“By all means.”
Frank turns to me, and for the first time I see the thing he keeps under the urbane exterior. Not the impersonal dislike of a rival. Something personal. Wounded.
“It’s simple,” he says, even and controlled. “Lucky dies. Tonight. Publicly enough to send a message, privately enough to avoid complications.”
Behind me, I feel Lucky stop moving.
“And Gia?” Bellini asks, swirling whiskey he has no intention of drinking.
“I offered structure. She answered with defiance. I offered guidance, and she mistook it for limitation.”
“So she—”
“Disappears,” Frank says. “A tragic accident. Or she simply abandons the city after losing her… security detail.” His eyes flick to Lucky and back. “The narrative writes itself.”
Dante should already be here.
Bellini checks his watch with the mild interest of a man confirming a train time.
Fine.
Then it falls to me to keep Frank talking, and men like Frank only ever want one thing.
“You didn’t drink my father’s whiskey,” I say.
He blinks. “I just did.”
“You drank a glass someone else poured you.” I let the silence do a little work. “He never poured you one. Twenty years in his house and he never once took that bottle out of the safe for you, and you had to wait until he was dead and I was cuffed to a chair to get a taste.”
Frank’s jaw tightens.
“Pour your own,” I say. “Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. You’ll still be a man drinking someone else’s inheritance.”
He pours refills his glass. Of course he does. Fills it past a gentleman’s measure and drinks it standing up, watching me over the rim, because he needs me to see him do it.
“You seem very confident about all this,” I say.
Frank loosens his tie. “I’m always confident when I hold all the cards.”
“That’s your problem, Frank.” I let my gaze drift to Bellini’s untouched glass, then back. “You’ve never been very good at counting the deck.”
He smiles like I’ve confirmed something flattering.
“Once we remove the unnecessary variables,” he says, “the structure becomes very clear.”
His smile lingers a sentence too long.
“And you—”
His voice catches.
He clears his throat, irritation flickering across his face as though his body has picked a profoundly inconvenient moment to betray him.
Then he coughs.
His hand drifts to his collar, fingers slipping beneath it as if the room has grown too warm.
Bellini watches him over the rim of a glass he never touched.
Frank tries again. “You’ll—”
The word collapses into another cough. Harder.
His eyes go to the film of whiskey still clinging inside his tumbler. Then to Bellini.
Bellini raises an eyebrow.
Frank blinks. Reaches for the bar. Misses.
The glass slips and shatters across the floor, and the sound goes through the empty club like a verdict.
He stumbles sideways, one knee striking polished concrete with a crack that makes several of his own men flinch. His breathing turns wet and ragged, every inhale fighting its way up his throat.
Foam gathers at the corner of his mouth.
His hand claws at his neck.
“No…”
Barely a whisper.
He looks at Bellini with disbelief.
“Oh,” Bellini says mildly, lowering his glass at last. “I was wondering how long that would take.”
Frank’s legs give out completely.
Bellini does not move to help him.
I slide the shim out of my sleeve.