Chapter Six #3
The club was open, the early crowd thinning the main floor with quiet money and quieter hunger. Men in expensive suits who never even looked at the dancers’ faces. Women who came to watch other women be looked at. The usual.
I took the private stairs up to the security office without announcing myself. The man on duty straightened the second he saw me, spine going rigid the way they all did. I didn’t bother with names.
“Show me the feeds from the secondary stage. Live.”
He pulled them up without a word. Multiple angles. The secondary stage under its usual wash of blue and gold light. The small crowd gathering near the front. Morena was on.
The same emptied-out grace she wore every night now.
She moved like someone who had accepted the ending, every turn precise, every extension of her arms deliberate and hollow.
Her eyes stayed down. Her hands trembled only once, when she lifted them above her head and the stage lights caught the faint red marks circling her throat from the night before.
The marks Dario had left. The marks I had stopped him from making worse.
I watched until the set ended.
She collected the tips with the same blank face she always wore now, fingers quick and efficient, never lingering. Then she disappeared toward the staff hallway without looking at the crowd. Dario was not waiting. Good. He had learned at least that much.
The feed showed the empty stage for a few seconds before the next dancer stepped into the light. I left the office without a word and took the stairs back down.
The shadowed column near the back of the main floor was empty. I claimed it, ordered a whiskey, and stayed until her last set was finished. The glass sat untouched on the small table beside me. Condensation ran down the sides.
I watched Rena the way I had watched her for weeks, silent, patient, certain of the outcome.
She never looked for me. She no longer needed to.
The weight of my attention had become part of the air she breathed in this place.
I could see it in the way she held her shoulders, the way she never quite let the performance reach her pretty blue eyes.
When she finally left through the staff door I followed at a distance that kept me invisible.
Six blocks. The same route she always took when she refused the bus.
Head down. Keys between her fingers, metal glinting once under a streetlight. Shoulders curled inward against a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.
She never once looked over her shoulder. Never once checked the shadows. Either she had stopped caring if someone was behind her, or she had decided that looking would not change whatever was coming.
I let her reach the building. Let her climb the stairs. Let the light in her single window flick on and then, after a long time, flick off again.
The room went dark. The street stayed quiet. Only then did I drive home.
At home, I didn’t turn on the overhead lights.
I walked straight to the wall under the windows and stood in front of the largest printed photo of her face.
That trapped, hollow look she wore when she thought no one who mattered was watching.
The photograph had been three weeks ago. I knew then. I had decided.
I pressed my palm flat against the photograph.
I would buy her in front of every man who had ever stared at her body like it was theirs. I would put my mother’s ring on her finger. I would take what the Families demanded, publicly, thoroughly, without mercy, and I would do it with the entire underworld watching.
The seat would be secured. The bloodline would begin. The plan would hold. And somewhere underneath the strategy and the bloodline and the seat I was carving out of Vernizzi bones, a quieter, darker truth had settled.
I was no longer doing it only for the power.
I was doing it because the thought of any other man touching what I had claimed made something violent and permanent open inside my chest.
Because the idea of Morena Caruso looking at anyone else the way she had looked at me in that private room, fear and something else, something that was not quite surrender, was unacceptable.
I left my hand against the photograph until the paper warmed under my skin. Then I turned away, poured the whiskey I had ignored at the club, and began the real work of the next twenty-one days.
Dario would stay in line. I would make certain of it.
A quiet word to the right people. A reminder of what the cut on his stomach had cost him, and what the next one would cost. The other bidders would understand the new order of things.
A few carefully placed conversations. A few men who needed to remember that some prizes were spoken for.
And when Morena Caruso walked onto that stage in three weeks, she would belong to me in every way that counted.
The rest would simply be the performance the Families required.
I sat in the dark with her face staring back at me from a dozen angles and let the final pieces of the plan lock into place. The photographs watched me the way she never had. Her eyes that did not know they were claimed.