Chapter Nine

Damian’s POV

It had been days since Marco died, but time in the business never unwound the way it did for other people. Days stacked like ledgers numbers and entries and decisions you couldn't undo. I sat in the same private room where the air still smelled faintly of wine and cologne, and watched the men pretend they’d slept at night. They hadn't. They moved like men who'd woken from a dream with their hands empty.

Marco’s body wasn’t here; it was on a slab with a name tag and a sterile light, while men in gloves leaned over paperwork and the state wrapped fingers in rubber. I’d kept the police out of it. I closed the case from their reach the way you close a door on a house you no longer want to burn. The law was a thing for the outside. We had our own rules. I used connections favours owed and debts called in to put the official investigation on ice. That didn’t mean I wasn't investigating. It meant I was the investigator now.

I’d ordered an autopsy because some things you cannot feel out with muscle memory or intuition. You have to let other instruments tell you the truth. The autopsy report slid across my desk in the morning, crisp as a verdict. Poison. Not something immediate that kills with a single theatrical gasp, but enough to hollow a man out sleeping him into weakness, blurring his reflexes, making him soft and vulnerable. Then the blunt instrument of steel. A stab. Cold. Final.

That combination poison first, then the knife changed the calculus. This wasn't a single hand at work. It was choreography. Someone had needed Marco pliant before they struck. It wasn't an amateur job or a tidy hit. Someone wanted him alive long enough to be indecently helpless.

I read the report twice and felt the small hairs rise along my forearm. The autopsy said what my gut had whispered: the poison explained the slowness, the way his body gave up like a man cut of his own consent. The stabbing explained the theater, the loudness. Two actors. Two jobs. The kind of planning that required trust between them.

The footage we pulled from the club's smallest camera confirmed that suspicion in black and white. Grainy, cropped, the corner of the private room blinked like a retina. She masked, small, moving like she belonged to the shadows stepped close to him with glass in hand. He took it. A tilt of the wrist. She left. Someone else came in later, knife in hand, the quick, efficient shove of a man who'd done it before. The camera caught the fall. The throw of limbs. The moment order unraveled.

And then a slip: the mask fell, not fully but enough. A jawline, a throw of hair. Enough that you could see a face if you were watching closely. I watched it slow, frame by frame, until the woman's features matched the image my memory had been stealing from my nights her back, the curve and the small, hidden tattoo low and private, seen as she left. The mark on her lower back that I had glimpsed in odd moments of obsession now became a clue.

Thank Goodness I saw her that night, when her mask slipped and fell I still have the mask I will run a DNA test to get her full details and information

She isn't going anywhere.

She had been there to poison him. She had not pulled the knife. But she had made him weak. She had given someone the opportunity. She ran. She hurried. People ran in panic that night because once the knife came down, the room turned into something else entirely. She had reason to run, and run she did, but not before the camera caught her in an angle that told me everything I needed to know.

I felt anger then, a cold, bright blade. Not just the hollow ache you have when someone you keep loses his name, but a sharper cut: betrayal. If she had been connected to the man with the knife, then it wasn't just a one-off. It was a conspiracy. It was a plan someone drew and someone else executed at their side.

I thought of the rules my father had beaten into me. Women and children off-limits. A line that had kept us from swallowing the last of our humanity. I had clung to it because it let me sleep. It was the one law that made me feel like we were not wholly beasts. The autopsy and the footage folded that line into the gutter. Rules go flat under pressure. Blood erases syllables.

“Someone else did the blade,” I told the men around the table. They flinched. Some tried to look smug, like the revelation led them somewhere safe. It didn’t. “She drugged him. Then they finished him. Two hands. Complicity.”

Names were offered like bait. Names slid across the table in casual ways, because men love to point when the thunder is over someone else's roof. I let them talk. I let them rattle off alibis and red herrings. Leadership is not spectacle; it is surgical. You listen. You set pieces. You pick the moment to strike.

We had cameras elsewhere. License plates from the back streets. A bartender who remembered a hurried woman with her mask half off and the stench of fear in her perfume. Small, stupid details that felt like flint until you struck them together and watched a spark become flame. I fed men to the task and watched them come back with names and addresses. I pulled on threads until whole rooms of men had to stand and explain themselves.

A weakness in me had always been watching: the way she moved on stage had lodged inside me, the way she refused my advances had become a tooth I could not stop scraping. I thought about that how obsession sneaks into a leader's veins and becomes a hazard. I had let my personal vice live in the house for too long. My brother's death turned vice into war.

It would be simple to hunt her and condemn her in the mind of the crowd. Simpler still to make an example and close the book. But this was not a case to be closed with a speech. This was a problem of threads and knots. You pull one, the whole thing shifts. I could feel the web vibrating under my hands.

The order left my mouth like a sentence carved in stone: find her. Bring her to me. Alive, Quietly. No police. No spectacle. We decide. We execute. We keep the mess our own. The men taking notes nodded as if they had been waiting for permission to be brutal.

I did not want to be brutal because I desired it. I wanted to be brutal because the world had been brutal to me already because a brother’s corpse glared at me from a slab and expected answers. Mercy would look like betrayal to that blood.

I wanted her small for what she had done. For what she represented: a breach. For the way she had allowed a blade to pass through my house while I breathed the same air. I will find her and she will answer. Whether with truth or with whatever substitutes for truth people like us make confessions torn out under light, bargains struck with names and futures she will not slip away again.

The hunt was skill and appetite. I told myself I was clean in this: a leader doing what needed doing. But the truth had teeth. There was something akin to vengeance in the set of my jaw as I watched her face on that screen, grainy and fierce. It did not matter then whether she had also been a pawn. She had touched my life and left a wound.

I closed the file and set it in the drawer, thumb pressing a dent in the paper. Rules are only good until they aren't. I had decided: they wouldn't be anymore. Tonight, the men would check the usual places. Tonight, someone would give me the map that led straight to her. Tonight, whatever mercy I felt would be buried beneath a need for answer and balance.

I would get to the bottom of it. I would decide who lived and who paid. The autopsy had spoken. The footage had confirmed it. The woman with the tattoo had walked into the room and walked out with a secret. That secret was mine now, and I would unmake it.