Chapter 20
Twenty
Valkyrie
The room went silent when Blackjack said, “It’s Roman.”
I was halfway down the bar with Tanya, Rebecca and Quinn, laughing at something that didn’t really deserve it, when that tone cut through the clubhouse noise.
Blackjack’s voice. Short. Flat. Carrying over the click of pool balls and low music and the constant murmur of men in leather trying to pretend they weren’t waiting for the sky to fall.
“It’s Roman.”
Jersey was beside Miami at the bar, a step or two off from us.
One second he was just there—shoulders relaxed enough to pass for casual, hand around his glass.
The next, everything in him sharpened. Not a flinch.
Not a twitch. Just this full-body stillness, like his bones locked into place and all the movement drained inward.
Miami caught it too. His fingers flexed once around his drink, eyes narrowing as he glanced over his shoulder toward the pool table where Blackjack stood with his phone to his ear.
Around them, guys stopped talking. Laughs fell silent. Then the scrape of a chair. 8-Ball lined up a shot, cue still resting against green felt. He struck, sank a ball, then turned to Blackjack and nodded.
The war was calling.
Blackjack said something low into the phone, eyes sweeping the room. He found Miami and Jersey, then me. Snake Eyes and Spade over by the dart board. His eyes then moved to others.
“Office,” Blackjack said, covering the receiver with his palm for half a second. “Now.”
Jersey set his glass down without finishing it. Miami shifted on his crutch like he was about to argue about being left behind, then thought better of it and started moving anyway, Quinn rushing to his side.
I slid off my stool.
Tanya’s hand brushed my arm. “That our bedtime story?” she asked, chin tipping toward Blackjack.
“That’s our nightmare,” I replied. “We’ll see if it has any pictures and a happy ever after.”
I followed the others down the hall.
***
Blackjack’s office felt smaller with all of us in it—Blackjack behind the desk, 8-Ball at his shoulder, Snake Eyes in the chair nearest the wall, Spade leaning against the filing cabinet.
Jersey and I took up spots on opposite sides of the room, close enough to move, far enough to see everything.
Miami maneuvered in with Quinn’s help and sank into the spare chair along the wall with a grunt, crutch hooked on the edge of the desk.
The phone sat on the middle of the desk, speaker on. Roman’s voice spilled into the room like a slow bleed.
“…I was ten minutes away from putting a bullet in his head myself,” Roman was saying.
Calm. Controlled. Dangerous in that way men get when they’re done pretending they might be wrong.
“Vladimir knew it. He smiled when I told him to meet me in my office at the penthouse. That smug little curve he gets when he thinks he’s the only one in on the joke. ”
“You confronted him?” 8-Ball asked.
“I tried,” Roman said. “When I got into the office he never showed up. My men last saw him walking out of the tower and into the new construction at the end of the boardwalk.” He let out a deep breath. “With my wife and my daughter.”
The air in the room changed immediately.
My spine went cold. Jersey’s head came up like someone had jerked a string. Miami’s hand tightened on his knee.
Blackjack’s expression didn’t flicker. “You sure?” he asked.
“I pay my men good money to notice when my blood walks into a building with a man I’m about to accuse of treason,” Roman said. “They saw them. They watched him hold the door for them. They watched them go in.” His voice flattened. “And then their radios went quiet.”
“How long ago?” Blackjack asked.
“Long enough to be a problem,” Roman said.
“I’ve called both of them. My wife. My daughter.
Straight to voicemail. I’ve called the site foreman.
No answer. The on-site security. No answer.
Either everyone suddenly forgot how phones work, or Vladimir has decided to accelerate whatever he and Tesauro have planned.
I need your help, Alice. You know the gravity of this. ”
Miami stared at the phone like he was seeing the shape of the thing we’d all been talking about as it finally stepped into the light in real time.
“Why us?” Blackjack asked. “Why not send your own men in? You’ve got more bodies than we do and a better excuse to walk into that place carrying.” His tone didn’t have deference in it. Just curiosity and calculation.
“Because if I send a small army down the strip toward a half-built monument with guns visible and engines screaming,” Roman said, “every cop, every reporter, and every idiot with a cell phone in this city is going to have an opinion before the first shot is even fired. Because if Tesauro is behind this—which I am ninety percent sure he is—I don’t want him thinking I’m rattled enough to charge blindly into a trap.
And because if he is in there with my family, with my traitor, the last thing I want is a firefight between my men and his in a building that isn’t finished yet.
That, and I can’t leave myself exposed here.
Say this is a lure to pull my men away from me, they could send theirs here and I’d be a dead man sitting. ”
He let that sit.
It was also a valid point.
“I need your eyes,” he said. “I need people who can move quietly. Who know how to walk into a bad room and read it before it bites. People who don’t wear my face but don’t flinch when it’s time to put a dog down. That’s you.”
“And how do we know this isn’t some fucked-up setup where we get caught between your boys and Vincino, Bolivar, and those Steel Serpents?” Blackjack asked. “We walk in there and the whole world decides we’re the loudest thing in the room. We don’t walk out at all.”
“If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have to lure you into my construction site to make it happen,” Roman said dryly.
“I’d stop answering your calls and let Tesauro keep kicking over your businesses until you were too weak to resist when I came to collect your scraps.
You know this, Alice. Besides, we have a decades long partnership.
You saved my son, Dante. I would never betray that. ”
“That’s almost sweet,” 8-Ball muttered.
Roman ignored it. “My men are not moving on that building,” he said.
“Not unless I tell them to. The ones who were already there are either dead, tied up, or hiding and praying they aren’t next.
Everyone else is at pre-set stations watching Tesauro’s other properties.
His mother’s house. His son’s apartment.
Isabella’s favorite restaurant. If I call them in now, I pull those eyes off places I might need them more and they’d never get here in time anyway. ”
“So, you want us to walk into what might be a Vincino kill box with nothing at our backs except your good intentions,” Snake Eyes said, voice mild but eyes sharp.
“I want you to walk into a building at the far edge of a boardwalk you already ride,” Roman replied.
“A building where my family might be held. Where Vladimir might be waiting. Where Tesauro may or may not have started stacking kindling. I want you to look. To tell me what you see. To bring my wife and daughter back if they’re still in there.
And if you find Vladimir…” His voice went soft in that way that was worse than any shout.
“You drag him to me so I can finish the conversation we were supposed to have tonight.”
“And if the Vincinos are in there?” Blackjack asked.
“Then you do what you do best,” Roman said. “You burn them.”
Blackjack’s fingers tapped on the desk once. Twice. Then he reached forward and hit a button on the phone, muting the line.
The office went very still.
8-Ball cleared his throat, pushing off the filing cabinet. “Well,” he said. “That sounds like a party.”
“Nobody say anything loud and stupid,” Blackjack said. “Think.”
“It’s a trap,” Snake Eyes said immediately.
“Has to be. Vladimir loses his nerve right when Roman’s ready to cut his head off and conveniently walks into the one building on the strip that’s half-finished and empty enough to stage something in?
With the wife and daughter as a plus-one?
That’s a stage. Question is who’s the audience? ”
“It’s more than that,” I said. “They hit Dante’s club. That wasn’t random. Tesauro’s testing Roman’s edges. Pushing into his kids’ spaces. This is bigger. This is the monument. The legacy piece. You burn that or bloody it with his women inside it, you don’t just hurt his wallet. You humiliate him.”
“Assuming they’re not already dead,” Spade added. “If they went in with Vladimir and nobody’s answering… That clock’s already ticking.”
Miami shifted, the chair creaking. “If we don’t go,” he said, “Tesauro still did what he wanted. He disappeared Roman’s family.
He ghosted his Russian. He made the old man hesitate.
And when Roman falls apart, they come for us next.
Or, this war explodes more, and we get caught in the crossfire.
If we do go, worst case we walk into a shitstorm and get ventilated.
Best case we pull his family out and maybe catch Vladimir with his pants down.
He’s expecting Roman. Maybe he’ll make a ransom call.
Have demands. Maybe we have a chance if we slip in before that call gets made.
Before they expect a move to even be made. ”
“I agree,” Snake Eyes said. “It’s about leverage. Tesauro or Vladimir is either about to send Roman a very pretty video or they’re waiting for the right moment to light the fuse. If we can cut in before that, we change the script.”
My fingers found the key at my throat without thinking, metal cool and familiar under my thumb. The ledger back at home. Liberty’s safe in the basement sitting heavy like a bomb we’d already pulled the pin on.
Jersey hadn’t spoken yet.