She Was Sipping Tequila Alone At 2:13 A.M.—Then She Realized The Mafia Boss Had Been There All Along Spotlight8

“You brought three men to my bar,” Declan said.

Dmitri’s hand stayed on his lapel.

“That is not a war. That is a suicide mission.”

Everything after that happened in less than four seconds.

Declan did not reach for the weapon holstered under his jacket, which was the thing every man in the room had been watching for. He reached sideways and picked up the half-empty bottle of twenty-year Pappy Van Winkle off the bar, and he brought it down across Dmitri’s face.

The crystal broke the way crystal breaks — flatly, without drama, and then all at once.

Liquid and blood went across the polished floor in a single sheet. Dmitri went down onto one knee with a guttural sound, both hands to his face, and the two men behind him clawed inside their jackets for the matte black pistols they were carrying.

They got them out. They did not get them pointed.

From the mezzanine, from a position that none of the three Russians had thought to look at since they walked in, Liam O’Connor opened up with a suppressed Heckler & Koch, and the sound it made was not the sound the movies promise. It was three flat thuds, almost polite, and then two bodies on the floor and two handguns skittering across the brass foot rail.

The room came apart.

A woman screamed somewhere near the fire exit. A man in a dinner jacket went over a booth rather than around it. Glass broke under running feet in six or seven places, and the door to the stairs banged open and stayed open, and the jazz kept playing through all of it because nobody had thought to turn it off.

Meline had her hands clamped over her ears and her back against the oak bar and her eyes squeezed shut so hard she saw colors.

She was on her knees. She did not remember getting there.

The smell arrived a half second later and stayed: copper, spilled liquor, and the sharp acrid sting of powder.

“Open your eyes.”

A hand closed around her upper arm and pulled.

She opened them.

The Obsidian Room looked like a room that had been fought in, which is exactly what it was. Dmitri was on his side near the velvet booth, unconscious, breathing wetly, a fan of blood spreading from his hairline. Two of his men lay where they had fallen and were not moving. Liam came down the mezzanine stairs with the weapon slung against his chest and three more Fitzpatrick men behind him, and began walking the perimeter without being told to.

“He’s not dead,” Declan said, following her eyes. “The big one. I need him to carry a message.” He pulled her upright. “We’re leaving.”

“I can’t.”

“You can stand. You’re standing.”

“I can’t go with you.” Her voice cracked straight down the middle. “I’m an auditor. I balance spreadsheets. I don’t — I don’t belong in this. That’s not my world. That’s not—”

Declan’s hand came up and took her chin.

It was the second time in ten minutes that he had touched her and the second time that it had not been rough, and both times it had stopped her more completely than force would have.

“Listen to me carefully,” he said.

His voice had dropped into a register she had not heard from him yet — lower, slower, almost gentle, and it did more to steady her than anything louder could have.

“If I leave you here, the Volkovs will find you before the sun comes up over Lake Michigan. They will put you in a car and drive you to a warehouse in Gary, Indiana, and they will keep you alive in it for as long as it takes to make you sign every document that exists with your name on it. Then they will put a bullet in the back of your head and put you in the river, and there will be a funeral and a closed casket and a very sad story about a young woman who drowned.”

She was shaking. She could not make it stop.

“Bradley sold you to the devil,” Declan said. “Tonight, you’re with me.”

“But I’m not—”

“No one touches what is mine. Do you understand?”

She stared at him.

She was trading one monster for another. She knew that with the intact part of her mind — the part that had passed the CPA exam and could spot a falsified invoice from across a room.

But the rest of her looked at the blood on the floor and the two men who were not moving and the door the three of them had come through, and did the arithmetic.

Nobody in her ordinary life could stand between her and those men. Not the police. Not the firm. Not Bradley, who had built the whole machine that was about to kill her.

“Okay,” she said.

“Good girl.”

He stripped off his jacket and put it around her shoulders. The fabric was warm from him and smelled of cedarwood and gunpowder, and she hated how much it helped.

His arm went around her waist, and he walked her toward the back of the room, past the bar, past Harvey the bartender, who was standing frozen with a towel in his hand and his mouth open.

They went out through the service door into the alley.

The rain hit her like a wall. It soaked through her hair in three steps and ran into her eyes and down her neck, and she barely felt any of it.

The alley was full of cars.

Matte black Mercedes G-Wagens, four of them, engines already running, idling in the rain with their headlights off and their exhausts steaming. Liam was already at the rear door of the first one. He opened it and stood aside.

Declan lifted her into the back seat as though she weighed nothing and slid in beside her, and the doors closed with a sound like a bank vault, and the noise of the city disappeared.

“Drive,” he said.