Section 53
Load-Bearing
Gia
Red is half-skeleton, half-promise—exposed beams overhead, plastic sheeting whispering in every draft, ladders standing where dancers used to. The bar has been rebuilt but not polished. The lighting grid is still open in places, its guts visible.
It should feel violated.
Instead, increasingly, it feels like a wound being stitched closed.
“Those need to be moved six inches to the left.”
My voice cuts across the floor without effort.
Three men look up.
The contractor nearest the stage blinks. “What?”
I point toward the line of banquettes being fixed along the east wall. “They’re wrong.”
He glances at them. Then back at me. “They’re centered.”
“They’re symmetrical,” I correct. “That isn’t the same thing.”
He squints, trying to understand how both things can be true.
Lucky does not look up from the clipboard in his hands when he says, “She’s right.”
The contractor turns to him with the exhausted expression of a man who’s begun to suspect he is surrounded by lunatics.
Lucky finally lifts his head. One eye still carries the faint yellowed shadow of Frank’s hospitality, but the rest of him looks irritatingly put back together. Even bruised he has the same infuriating calm.
“You’ve got a bottleneck at the south aisle,” he says, tapping the page. “Once the room fills, staff won’t be able to move cleanly from bar to floor.”
“Oh,” the contractor says.
“Like I said,” I say with a sigh heavy enough to create a vortex of dust particles. “Shift these six inches and you open the lane.”
Lucky writes something down.
I watch him for a beat too long.
This has become a problem.
Not the attraction. That has been a problem for some time, and one I have at least catalogued. The newer problem is operational.
He’s useful in places that have nothing to do with standing between me and violence. He reads traffic flow, notices bad placements, and clocks weak points in structures and people before anyone else realizes they exist.
It’s deeply annoying, and also familiar—Frank used to do that. The thought leaves a bitter taste.
No. Not the same.
Frank anticipated weaknesses to gain leverage over them. Lucky anticipates them to keep people from getting hurt.
He looks up suddenly, catches me watching, and tips the clipboard toward me.
“Good news,” he says. “Your dance floor still exists.”
“How comforting.”
He grins.
There it is again—that easy, stupid warmth that keeps appearing where it has no business being. It makes me miss the helmet, shielding his idiotic, pretty face and what it does to me.
Sylvie appears beside me with a paper cup in one hand and a blueprint tube tucked under the other arm.
“Excellent,” she says, taking in the room. “You haven’t murdered anyone today.”
“It’s barely three.”
“Love the optimism.”
She hands me the cup. Coffee. Black, because she has known me long enough to stop asking.
Then she glances toward Lucky, who is now saying something to one of the lighting techs and somehow making the man nod instead of argue.
Sylvie’s gaze slides back to me, sharp with that infuriating female intuition I usually prefer to avoid.
“You keep looking at him like you’re solving a geometry problem.”
“I’m assessing a resource.”
“Mhm.”
I take a sip of coffee.
“It’s nice,” she adds, too casually.
“What is?”
“That you finally have a problem you can’t solve by shooting it.”
I look at her.
She smiles sweetly and leaves before I can say something unpleasant.
Traitor.
Across the room, Lucky says something that makes one of the electricians laugh. People like him here.
It doesn’t bother me. It concerns me strategically.
Slightly.
Diablo trots across the floor like he personally commissioned the rebuild, sniffing at open crates and supervising with grave importance. He stops at Lucky’s feet and sits.
Of course he does.
Lucky glances down, scratches behind his ears without breaking conversation, and keeps talking about sightlines and camera placement like this is the most natural thing in the world.
I have built an empire and apparently my dog and my staff have both unionized around one irritating man.
Wonderful.
I move toward the bar.
The new marble is still covered, but the frame is in, the shelving rebuilt, the lighting rewired. I run my fingers over the edge of the covered counter, already mapping the finished version in my head.
“What do you think?”
Lucky’s voice comes from close enough behind me that I should be annoyed and am not.
“It’s acceptable,” I say.
“That’s basically poetry from you.”
He’s standing there with the clipboard tucked under one arm, shirt sleeves pushed up, dust at the cuff, looking far too at ease in the center of my rebuild.
“Six,” he says, and I turn to stare at him.
“Did they scan your head properly after the concussion?”
“That’s how many times the guys have ignored you when you’ve been right.”
“Only six?”
“Since I got here this morning.”
“My right hand is gone,” I say, half to myself, scanning the delivery list in my other hand. “Apparently I’m expected to do everything myself.”
Lucky does not miss a beat.
“I’d be willing to lend you a hand.”
I look up.
His expression is innocent in exactly the way that means it isn’t.
I raise a brow.
He tilts his head slightly and adds, “Or my fingers.”
“Go check the basement wiring before I assign you to manual labor out of spite.”
His grin widens.
“Kinky.”
I absolutely do not smile.
He heads toward the back stairs, and I watch him go for one full second before making myself look elsewhere.
This is unsustainable.
Things with edges are simple. Attraction is manageable. Conflict has shape.
Ease is how things slip past defenses.
Ease is how people become load-bearing without permission.
“Need help?”
Dante’s voice brings me back to reality.
He stands near the side entrance, coat immaculate, expression unreadable in the way that only works because he has spent years making unreadability look civilized.
“No,” I say.
He surveys the room. The workers. The dog. The clipboard abandoned briefly on the bar where Lucky must have set it down. Then me.
“Interesting.”
“I’m going to need you to use more words than that.”
“You already know who can do Frank’s job,” he says.
I fold my arms. “Lucky is head of security,” I say, rather than voice my growing concern that both he and Sylvie understand my business far too well.
Annoying me to the point of mild murder.
Growth.
Dante’s mouth shifts slightly.
“For now.”
I hate when people are perceptive before I’ve fully decided to be.
Dante steps closer to the bar, glancing at the new layout. “You trust his instincts,” he says.
“I trust his competence.”
“Same family of feeling.”
“Not really.”
He looks at me. A long look. One that would be paternal if I didn’t know him better. And if we weren’t the same age.
“Your father trusted Frank because Frank made himself indispensable,” he says. “You trust Lucky because he never tried to.”
Before I can answer, Lucky returns from the basement.
“Good news,” he says. “The wiring won’t kill anyone.”
“An increasingly high standard around here,” Dante says.
“Why don’t you go double check, Dante?” I mutter under my breath.
Lucky glances between us, clocking the shift in the air immediately because of course he does.
“Did I interrupt something deeply repressed?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Excellent. Love continuity.”
Dante actually looks amused.
This is getting out of hand.
Lucky switches to business mode. “Basement cameras need to be moved. The old blind corner by storage still exists, and if one more person in this city uses the phrase hidden access point around me, I’m starting a fire of my own.”
“You are not allowed to start fires in my club.”
“Wow,” he says, deadpan. “One time.”
I should stop standing this close to him while discussing floor plans.
I do not stop.
He leans over the blueprint, one hand braced on the bar, and says, “You know, for someone who claims not to get sentimental, you are rebuilding the whole place prettier.”
“It’s more efficient.”
“Mm.” He glances at me sideways. “And more beautiful.”
The word settles between us with unwelcome softness.
I hate softness.
I hate that it sounds better in his voice.
I reach for the corner of the blueprint at the same time he does, and our fingers brush. I might as well have touched a live wire.
There are men on ladders ten feet away. Diablo is chewing on something expensive near the front door. Someone in the back yells for a level.
And yet the entire room narrows around one point of contact.
Lucky lifts his eyes to mine.
“Careful,” he says quietly.
I should move my hand. I really should…
“Why,” I ask, “would I start now?”
His gaze is hungry, and gentler than hunger has any right to be.
He pulls his hand back first.
Good, I decide. Otherwise I might have done something unhelpful with mine.
I straighten the plans, because I am an adult and not a creature ruled by friction.
“You should eat something,” he says.
“I’m busy.”
“You’ve only had coffee.”
“I function well on coffee.”
“You function on spite and selective insomnia.”
“Both reliable fuel sources.”
“Gia.” He pushes a takeout container from God knows where toward me along the bar top. I stare at it as if it might explode at any second.
“Why are you like this?”
“Because apparently your right hand is gone and someone has to make sure you don’t accidentally die in a cloud of blueprints and caffeine.”
The vacancy Frank left behind has been sitting at the edge of every decision for days now, like a missing tooth my tongue keeps finding.
Someone who can stand in the room with me and not mistake proximity for power.
I look at Lucky.
At the man who keeps inserting himself into systems I built and somehow improving them. At the one person in my orbit who never once tried to diminish me in order to feel large. At the idiot who walked into a trap because he couldn’t stand the thought of me walking into it blind.
He’s saying something about chopsticks now. Or napkins. I’m not listening. I’m thinking.
Dangerous habit.
He notices the silence and stops. “What?”
I lean back against the table, coffee still in one hand, and study him.
He frowns. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re about to either fire me or ruin my life.”
I consider that.
“Unclear,” I say.
He exhales sharply through his nose. “Great. Love an ambiguous workplace environment.”
“Frank’s role needs replacing,” I say after a moment’s hesitation.
He goes still, picks up one of the food containers and opens it with exaggerated focus. After what could’ve been an entire minute he looks up slowly.
“No.”
“I didn’t ask anything.”
“You thought it loudly.”
That is… annoyingly fair.
I set the coffee down.
“Frank sat in rooms my father built for men like him,” I say. “He advised, influenced, translated, interfered. He made himself necessary.”
Lucky watches me carefully now, all the joking thinned out into attention.
“I won’t have another Frank,” I continue.
“Good.”
“But I do need someone in that place. Someone who notices every time people undermine me.”
“Gia…”
“You already weigh in on things beyond security. You read people well.”
“So do you.”
“Yes.” I hold his gaze. “I also know when I trust someone’s instincts.”
He doesn’t move.
And because I have apparently lost all self-preservation in the vicinity of this man, I say the next thing too.
“I’m considering it.”
There.
He stares at me like I just handed him a loaded weapon and a confession folded inside it.
“That,” he says carefully, “is a terrible HR decision.”
“I’ve never been especially compliant.”
“No,” he says. “You really, really haven’t.”
I open the food container, because if I don’t do something practical I may say something worse.
He watches me take the first bite like he’s won a territorial dispute.
“Don’t look so smug,” I say.
“You’re eating.”
“You’re intolerable.”
“So you keep saying. And yet…” he says softly.
And yet.
That’s the problem.