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For a few ugly seconds it is even. Muzzle flash. Screams. A young lady in a glitter dress crawling under a banquette, an innocent caught in the carnage.

“Cover, cover, cover,” I bark, charging forward and taking a man down. “Press!”

Then our side finds the shape of it. Hardy’s shots are single and final. Mackensie moves like he always does, quick and nimble but deadly.

The assassins cut the room into pieces as is their way.

I see Elias. He is a dark streak across the floor, coat gone, making a beeline for Zane near the far bar. Zane has a pistol and a face that has just learned the USB was a trapdoor to hell, not a gift.

I start toward them.

“Fuck,” I growl. “Him.”

Tito.

He comes out of a side corridor with a shotgun and the look of a man who thought this night was his coronation. He fires. The blast takes a chunk of pillar beside me. Pellets scream off metal.

I shoot his arm. The shotgun drops. Tito staggers, useless, blood dark on black cloth, still on his feet from pride alone.

A Lucci man tries to cover him. Hardy is close. One head shot. The protector folds.

I close the distance. Tito looks up at me with hate that has been waiting years.

“You should never have stepped out of line,” I tell him. My voice is almost calm. “You should never have come for me.”

Tito spatters a laugh. Defiant. Dying and still trying to leave a mark.

“You’re the son of a rat,” Tito says. “Informant blood. It’s all you deserve. The families should have finished the name when they finished him.”

The rust taste fills my mouth. I shoot Tito in the heart. Then between the eyes.

His lights turn out forever. No last words worth remembering. No story for other men to spit. Nothing.

The gunfight thins and then it is over. My men hold the floor. Lucci bodies pile up, twitch, die. A few of ours do too, and these mem will be remembered and their families taken care of well.

Smoke hangs under the lights. The bass is dead. Someone has killed the music at the board.

“Probably for the best,” I laugh wryly.

I turn for Elias.

But the bar is empty of him. And Zane is gone too.

“I’ll find you,” I promise, my heart thumping and adrenaline coursing through my veins.

I move. Back rooms. Coat check. The corridor he would have used.

Mackensie is already sweeping. Hardy’s face tells me he has not found him either.

The victory sits in my hands and tastes wrong.

Tito is finished. The senior allies who came to make a night of it are finished or running into streets my men already own.

In the days that follow the rest of the family can be taken apart like a machine with the engine gone.

But there is no sign of my boy. Has the greatest win of my life been tainted by a death that would hurt more than anything I can comprehend?

I stand in the wreck of the club with my pistol still warm and the name Tito Lucci already cooling on the floor, and for the first time since I put my fist through a car window all those years ago, I feel a fear that is not about my own name.