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“No alcohol means no club.”

“It means bleeding money, angry members, and the press sniffing around.” He shifted to the third document. “And this is the private complaint.”

He glanced at me.

“Sarah Farris is the private plaintiff in a civil suit,” he explained. “She’s not Isabella’s client. Not directly. Delgado represents the City in enforcement actions. Sarah is the sympathy play, the victim narrative. The alleged assault story they want the press to repeat.”

“So when she said she represented the plaintiff—”

“She was blurring the lines on purpose.” Nik’s voice stayed flat. “The City is the hammer. Farris is how they make attacking Xyst look like protecting women. The SLA is the noose. And the Sixth Precinct gave the city the police incident report they needed to turn an underage drinking, fake-ID, officer-assault mess into a public-safety case. Someone tied it together and sent a city lawyer into Xyst with men from a precinct that should’ve answered to Luca.”

I dragged a hand over my mouth. The documents on the screen blurred for half a second before I forced them back into focus.

“Are they claiming Xyst committed the assault?”

“No. They’re claiming Xyst served the underage kid who later assaulted Farris and a responding officer. Negligent security. Failure to protect patrons. Unlawful service to a minor. Dram shop liability.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Dram what?”

“A type of bar liability,” Nik said. “Their way of saying Xyst helped create the danger by putting alcohol in the kid before he hurt someone.”

“The kid was drunk and underage. That part we knew.” My voice came out in a growl. “Ana was handling the club’s business side back when it happened. She said Luca dealt with the rest, and no one mentioned a woman had been assaulted until now.”

Nik’s fingers paused.

“That wasn’t in the original charges?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I remember a drunk rich boy with a fake ID. I remember him getting stupid enough to put hands on a cop and learning fast that a rich father and a fat bank account couldn’t protect him inside Xyst.” I leaned forward. “I don’t remember any woman being involved. And I sure as hell don’t remember the Sixth coming to us with that kind of allegation.”

Nik studied me.

“Anyone who knows us understands we’d burn our own club to the foundation before we let a woman get hurt inside it or because of it and shrug that off.”

“Yes,” was all he said.

Nik had been forged in the Russian bratva and knew the underworld’s violence firsthand. Luca represented generations of mafia power, backroom deals, dirty money, and handshakes that ruined lives. None of us was a saint. But even men like us had lines we didn’t cross.

The true monsters were the ones who had no lines, then smiled for the cameras and sold themselves as decent men while girls disappeared behind them.

“Is this Hayes’s dirty work?” I asked.

Andrew Hayes no longer occupied the mayor’s office, but he still had enough political reach to make trouble from City Hall to Washington.

Nik’s mouth tightened. “It has his fingerprints all over it.”

“Too bad Lucian didn’t fucking kill him.”

“Hayes is hard to kill,” he grunted.

“He’s a politician. They usually are.”

“His influence only grew after Lucian put a bullet in him.” Nik leaned back, eyes on the documents. “City Hall. Albany. Federal friends. Donors. Men near the White House who think favors are currency and women are collateral. Hayes still has pull, and he’ll use every bit of it to win that Senate seat.”

“That cat has to be on his ninth life,” I said. “And it’s time someone stopped him from landing on his feet.”