Dominic’s face falls apart in stages. He grips the edge of the desk, and his fingers are trembling. His posture collapses from his usual proud erectness into something hunched and small. Then he makes a choking sound as his shoulders slump.
“It was insurance.” He says it quickly, and the rehearsed quality tells me he’s imagined this conversation before and prepared a version of the truth that would make his actions seem rational. “Everyone records in this business. Everyone keeps backups. I wasn’t selling anything. I was protecting myself.”
“Protecting yourself from what, exactly?”
“From everyone.” He gestures broadly with both hands. “You, Karpov, the feds, and whoever comes through that door next. I’ve been running this club for nine years, and every powerful man who sits in those rooms treats me like I don’t exist until they need something. Nobody looks out for Dominic, so I look out for myself.”
I keep my tone cold and each word crisp. “By selling recordings of my private meetings to the man who is trying to dismantle my organization.”
“I didn’t sell everything.” He leans forward and presses both palms flat on the desk. “I gave him pieces but nothing operational…nothing that would…”
“Nothing operational.” I repeat his words without emphasis. “Karpov knows which nights I bring a full detail and which nights I bring only Viktor. He knows my meeting times, my room preferences, and the names of contacts I specifically selected for their discretion. You gave him the architecture of my security protocols, and you’re telling me it wasn’t operational?”
Dominic swallows and looks at Viktor, who is still standing at the door with no expression, blocking the only exit.
“Karpov pressured me.” He drops his voice to almost a whisper as he slumps in his chair. “He said if I didn’t cooperate, he’d come after the club. He’d send people through the door, notclients. I didn’t have a choice, Adrian. You have to understand that.”
“You had a choice. You chose wrong.” I pick up my phone from the desk. “You could have come to me, told Viktor, or shut down the devices the moment Karpov made contact. You should have trusted I would handle Karpov. Instead, you decided to profit from my trust while hiding behind the excuse that everyone in this business does the same thing.”
A bead of sweat drips down his forehead. “I wasn’t profiting. He paid me, yes, but it wasn’t about the money. It was about staying alive.”
I pointedly glance at the Patek Philippe on his wrist. “How much did he pay you?”
Dominic hesitates. The number matters because it tells me whether this was survival or greed, and he knows it. He looks down at his hands on the desk, and I can see him weighing whether a smaller number might change the outcome. It won’t.
“How much, Dominic?”
“Eighty thousand.” He tells it to his desk rather than me because he isn’t looking up.
Eighty thousand dollars. The new watch makes sense now, along with the condo renovation and the Lexus. He put a price on three years of trust, and it wasn’t even a good one.
“Adrian, please.” His voice cracks. “I’ll shut it down. I’ll give you everything. The server access, the recordings, all of it. Just let me…”
“Let you what?” I put my phone in my jacket pocket. “Continue running this club while I wonder which conversationyou’re recording next? Continue taking Karpov’s money while pretending loyalty to me every Thursday night? Tell me what arrangement you’re proposing, Dominic, because I’m listening.”
He doesn’t have an answer. The silence in the room stretches for five seconds, and in those five seconds, Dominic Caruso’s entire position collapses. He built a system to protect himself from powerful men, and the system brought the most dangerous one directly to his desk.
I draw the suppressed pistol from the holster inside my jacket and screw on the suppressor I keep in a different pocket. Dominic sees it, and whatever he was about to say dies in his throat. He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t run. He stares at the weapon and then at me, and for one second, I see in his expression the full recognition of what he did and what it will cost him.
Viktor hands me the pillow from the couch in the corner to further muffle the sound. Dominic doesn’t try to defend himself or raise an arm to cover his face. He just slumps against his chair and closes his eyes. I think he might be praying, but his words are impossible to make out.
With the pillow in place, I fire once, center mass. He falls backward in his chair and hits the floor behind the desk. The suppressor and pillow combination reduce the shot to a sharp crack that won’t carry past the office walls with the bass from the main floor absorbing everything below a shout.
Viktor moves immediately. He’s at the laptop within seconds, pulling the hard drive and checking the desk drawers for additional storage devices. I holster the weapon and look at Dominic on the floor. I feel no satisfaction or anger. The outcome was predictable the moment he chose Karpov’s deal. Dominic just didn’t know the timeline.
Viktor pockets two USB drives from the desk drawer and closes the laptop. “I’ll have Grigor wipe the cloud server within the hour. The physical devices in the rooms need to come out tonight.”
“Handle it. I want this building clean before sunrise.” I glance at Dominic once more. “Make sure you get in a good cleaner, and the body is never discovered.”
He nods and moves toward the door but freezes when he opens it. I turn to follow him.
Aurora is standing in the corridor. She’s frozen in the doorway with one hand still on the door frame, and the color has drained from her face. She’s looking past me to the floor behind the desk. Dominic’s body is visible from where she’s standing, and so is the blood.
I calculate distance, reaction time, and if she’ll run. If she runs, Viktor will stop her before she reaches the floor. If she screams, the music will cover most of it, but not all. I run them automatically because that’s what I was trained to do. I run them about the woman I was inside thirty minutes ago, and I hate myself for it.
She opens her mouth slightly, but no sound comes out. She doesn’t scream, gasp, or run. She goes still. I’ve seen that stillness before, in the service corridor when I kissed her. It’s the same shutdown while she processes everything internally. That she responds to violence and desire with the same absolute control tells me something important about Aurora Moore that I’ll have to analyze later.
Viktor looks at me, then at her, and shifts slightly in front of me with the instinct of seventeen years. I stop him with a hand on his arm.
