The Table Across From Me…
Across the street, Marzano’s glowed all white linen and amber candles and expensive calm.
At the corner table, a man in a dark gray suit sat with two other men and a woman in pearls while a waiter shaved truffle over somebody’s plate like the city outside didn’t smell like wet brick and diesel.
I knew the hard line of that face before the candle found it.
Julian Moretti.
Real estate titan in the papers, shipping investor on panels, donor at galas, and a person of continuing interest everywhere people wore badges and asked polite questions.
In South Philly the old men playing cards under saint pictures didn’t call him Mr.
Moretti.
They called him the king, quiet, quick, and never twice.
Seeing him in person was worse than seeing him in print.
He looked exactly like power looks when it doesn’t need to introduce itself, shoulders relaxed, eyes cold, one hand near his water glass like the whole city was an inconvenience he had already priced in.
The woman in pearls sat on his right, smiling with only her mouth.
Her champagne stayed untouched, and every time the front door opened she glanced at it first, then at Julian, then back to her phone facedown by her plate.
That should have warned me harder than the rifle did.
I didn’t know her name yet, but I remembered the shape of her stillness.
## I Broke The Bar Rule…
I set the beer glass down too hard and cracked it clean through.
Hannah looked up from the register and all the joking left her face.
‘Lena?’
‘Cover the bar,’ I said.
My voice sounded like it belonged to somebody who’d already decided to ruin her life.
Hannah saw whatever was in my face and didn’t waste another second arguing.
I went out the side door, across slick brick, around a delivery van, through sleet that felt like needles on bare skin.
The geometry kept arranging itself in my head: fourth-floor window, front glass, corner table, one line, one breath, one dead man.
The maître d’ at Marzano’s stepped in front of me with his hands politely open.
‘Miss, do you have a reservation?’ I walked around him before he finished the sentence.
Julian’s shaved-head guard rose so fast his chair legs scraped.
He put one hand inside his jacket and said, ‘One more step, sweetheart, and I break your wrist.’
I kept walking.
Julian looked me over once, cheap boots, black apron strings under my coat, sleet on my sleeves, and asked in a flat voice, ‘Can I help you?’
It was the calm that made my heart kick harder.
Men like him usually smell danger before the room does.
He hadn’t seen this one.
## The Kiss Was The Shield…
I didn’t explain.
There wasn’t time for that, and I wasn’t sure anyone in that room would’ve believed a bartender over a billionaire surrounded by men with guns and custom suits.
I caught Julian by the tie, yanked him forward, and kissed him hard enough to wrench his head off the kill line.
His chair slammed sideways into the table as my hip hit the white cloth and silverware jumped.
For half a second the whole room looked shocked for the wrong reason.
I
