Wrong Bar, Right Monster

CHAPTER 3

DOMINIC

The door closed behind her, and the room exhaled.

I didn't.

Razor was the first to open his mouth. "Want me to follow her, Prez?"

"No."

"She saw everything. The patches, the faces, the..."

"I said no."

He shut up. They all did. That was the thing about fear, it was more reliable than loyalty. Loyalty had conditions. Fear was unconditional.

I stood where she'd left me, in the centre of my own bar, and did something I hadn't done in years. I replayed a conversation. Not for tactical analysis. Not to identify a weakness or catalogue a lie. I replayed it because I wanted to hear her voice again.

What's yours?

She'd said it without flinching. Without the tremor that crept into most people's voices when they stood in front of me. Her shoulders had been back, her chin level, her eyes, grey, I'd noticed, the grey of river stones, locked on mine like she was daring me to blink first.

I'd wanted to keep her.

The thought arrived fully formed, and I let it sit for exactly two seconds before I locked it in the vault where I kept every impulse that could get me killed. I didn't keep people. People were variables. Variables were liabilities. I'd learned that lesson the way I'd learned most lessons, in blood.

"Prez." Nix, behind the bar, held up her phone. "Viper's getting impatient."

"Viper's always impatient. That's why he's useful." I pulled my own phone from my back pocket and opened the security feed. Twelve cameras. Six exterior, six interior. I scrolled to the front entrance.

There she was. Half a block north, heels cracking against empty pavement, moving fast but not running. Smart. Running would have made her prey. Walking made her someone who'd decided to leave, different posture, different message. She knew the difference, even if she didn't know she knew it.

I watched until she turned the corner and disappeared from the frame.

Then I pulled up a blank message.

My tech guy, Switch, had pinged her dead phone the second she'd walked through the door, standard protocol for unidentified visitors. Model, number, carrier, name on the account. Seraphina Voss. Twenty-six. Last known address, a converted warehouse in the Flats. One prior arrest, misdemeanour, failure to appear on a parking ticket, dismissed. Credit score in the low five hundreds. No social media presence worth mentioning.

Nothing about her screamed threat. Everything about her screamed survival.

I typed four words. Routed them through a relay that would make the number untraceable. Hit send.

Sleep well, Sera Voss.

Not a threat. A perimeter check. If she responded, I'd know she was home. If she didn't, I'd know she was home and smart enough not to engage with unknown numbers.

She didn't respond.

Smart girl.

I pocketed the phone and headed for the back hallway. The docks situation needed my attention, Viper had intercepted a shipment that wasn't ours, which meant someone was moving product through Iron Saints territory without permission. That was either stupidity or a declaration of war, and I needed to determine which before Viper did something irreversible.

I was halfway to the back exit when my phone rang. Not the burner. My other phone, the one that belonged to Dominic Caine, CEO. The one with the custom ringtone I'd assigned to exactly one number.

I answered.

"Working late, Dominic?" The voice was silk over broken glass. Cultured. Almost warm. The kind of voice that could order a glass of wine and a murder in the same sentence without changing inflection.

Roman Volk.

"What do you want, Roman?"

"Just calling to chat. Catch up. It's been, what, three months since our last conversation? The one where you explained, very eloquently, why I should stay east of the river?" He paused. I could hear him smiling. "I've been staying east of the river, by the way. Very obediently. Like a good boy."

"Get to the point."

"The Voss girl." Another pause, longer this time, loaded with intent. "She just walked through your front door. Funny coincidence."

My hand tightened around the phone. The leather of my glove creaked.

"Don't know what you're talking about."

"Sera Voss. Twenty-six. Grey eyes. Silk blouse. Looked very out of place in your... establishment." He laughed. Soft, private, the laugh of a man sharing an inside joke with himself. "My people have been watching her for eighteen months, Dominic. She's Linda Voss's daughter. You remember Linda? Borrowed three hundred thousand from my operation and then vanished like morning fog?"

I said nothing. Saying nothing was a weapon most people didn't know how to use.

"The debt transferred," Roman continued. "Daughter's been struggling, credit cards, temp jobs, the slow bleeding-out of someone trying to outrun inherited sin. I've been patient. But now she's walked into your bar, talked to you face-to-face, and I have to ask myself: is this a coincidence? Or did you find her first?"

"She wandered in off the street."

"Maybe. Or maybe you've been doing what you do best, playing chess while the rest of us play checkers." His voice dropped. Lost the silk. Just broken glass now. "Here's what I know, Dominic. If she's yours, if you've turned her, recruited her, or so much as given her a reason to think she's under your protection, then the rules we agreed to three months ago are void. And I will come collect what's mine."

"She's nobody. A civilian."

"Then you won't mind if my people pay her a visit."

"Touch her and I'll burn your operation to the ground."

The words left my mouth before the calculation caught up. Too fast. Too raw. Too much, and we both knew it.

Roman's silence lasted three seconds. When he spoke again, the amusement was gone.

"Interesting," he said. "Very interesting."

The line went dead.

I stood in the hallway with my phone still pressed to my ear and the sound of my own heartbeat filling the space where his voice had been. I'd made a mistake. A fracture in the mask, three seconds of honesty that had given Roman Volk more information than six months of surveillance ever could.

He knew now. He knew she meant something.

And the worst part was, I didn't understand why she did.

I'd known her for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of defiance and grey eyes and a voice that didn't break. That wasn't enough. That shouldn't have been enough. I'd stood across from federal prosecutors and cartel lieutenants and men who'd killed with their hands, and none of them had made me say something I hadn't planned to say.

She'd done it without trying.

I pocketed the phone and walked to the back office. The room was small, cinder block walls, a desk bolted to the floor, three monitors showing security feeds. I sat down and pulled up everything Switch had compiled on Seraphina Voss.

It took twenty minutes to find the connection to the Reapers. Linda Voss's gambling debts; I'd assumed street-level bookmakers. Wrong. The paper trail, buried under three layers of shell accounts, led directly to Roman Volk's lending operation. Three hundred grand in disbursements over twenty-two months. Zero repayments. Then Linda vanishes, forwarding address bouncing, and the debt rolls downhill to the only living relative.

Sera hadn't stumbled into my world by accident. She'd been living in the shadow of it her entire adult life. She just didn't know it.

I leaned back in my chair. The monitor in front of me showed the empty bar, Nix wiping down the counter, Razor racking pool balls, the last two Saints nursing whiskey in the corner. Normal. Quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded either peace or catastrophe, and in my experience, peace didn't come to places like this.

My second phone buzzed. A text from my assistant, Helen: New hire confirmed for the analyst position. Seraphina Voss. Starts tomorrow. HR is sending the onboarding packet tonight. Do you want to meet her, or should I route through Liam?

I stared at the screen.

Seraphina Voss. Hired by my company three days ago through a process I hadn't touched. Interviewed by Liam Park, approved by the division head, salary benchmarked against market rate. Clean. Legitimate. No fingerprints of mine anywhere near it.

The smart move was to let the hire stand and stay invisible. Keep her inside the building where Volk's people couldn't reach her. Manage the situation from a distance. Never let her connect the CEO on the forty-fourth floor to the man in the henley who'd told her to sit down.

That was the smart move.

I typed back: I'll meet her myself. Send her up when she arrives.

Not the smart move. The honest one. And honesty, in my world, was the most dangerous thing a man could afford.

I put the phone down. Pulled up the security footage from the bar's front entrance and scrubbed back to the moment she'd walked in. The door opening. The red neon catching her face. The three steps inside before the door swung shut.

I watched it twice.

Then I went to the docks, where three men were kneeling on concrete with zip ties around their wrists and Viper standing over them with a crowbar and a question that needed answering.

But the whole time, through the interrogation, through the inventory of seized product, through the call to my lawyer at two a.m.; I kept hearing her voice.

Everyone in this room chose to be here.

And I kept thinking: You didn't choose. But you're here anyway. And God help us both, I'm not letting you leave.