Page 11 of Dirty Game

My father used to say real power doesn’t need to announce itself, but he was full of shit.

Power doesn’t announce, it warns.

The way a wolf snarls before it lunges.

The leather sofa behind me creaks with memory.

Last week, two men in suits, one from Chicago, one from New York, sat there and tried to outbluff each other over a warehouse full of guns.

They both left alive. It was an off night.

I walk the room again, tracking from the matte black shelving, lined with photographs of my brothers in various stages of bloodied youth, to the antique desk.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Heavy, uncompromising.

I inherited it from my father, Viktor Bane, along with the city and the legacy of shit he left in my name.

On the desk, a single folder.

Thin, manila, unremarkable except for the contents: ledger pages in Rosalynn Lombardi’s hand.

Numbers so tight and neat, you almost wouldn’t believe such an abused girl would have the mind for this.

I flick the folder open and scan it.

There, in the margin, a note: $426,000 discrepancy flagged in red.

My men had missed it.

She hadn’t.

Rosalynn.

Taking up bandwidth in my head when I should be strategizing.

The girl is a ticking time bomb wrapped in trauma.

The night she arrived, fresh off the Lombardi trade, she didn’t so much as blink at the blood spatter in the elevator.

She didn’t shrink when she saw me carving up her old family’s rat accountant, either.

She just looked at the mess, looked at me, and asked, “Do you want the hard drive decrypted by morning?”

Like she was asking something as simple as if I took my coffee black.

Maybe that’s what fucks with me the most.

Not the smarts, not the steady hands, but the way she refuses to be afraid of the monster in the room.

Not even a flinch.

I don’t know if that excites me… that she’s not afraid of me.

The phone rings.

I let it buzz twice.