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 Blackjackstood 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 upspots 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 betweenmy 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.”
