The street feels wrong. Address checks out, digits glowing sickly on the corner sign, but the building itself has changed its costume—no fogged glass, no eucalyptus promises.
Just a squat box with neon that stutters the word Club like it owes someone rent.
Empty lot. No thrum of bass leaking out, no cigarette cliques choking the sidewalk. Just silence stapled to the air, thick and curious.
Lucia noses the bike across the street, tires crunching gravel that shouldn't be here.
Kills the engine, listens to the tick-tick cooling down, a heartbeat trying to walk off.
She swings a leg over and crouches, glove peeling the seat's seam where she keeps the secret things. Out comes the roll—barbed wire, gray with old rust and old history, coiled like a sleeping eel.
She feeds it around the bat, spiral after spiral, each tug making the wood groan like it remembers something it doesn't want to.
By the end, the bat looks hungry.
Helmet visor down, face erased, she sets the bat across her shoulder like a burden she asked for.
Bulldog revolver slipped neat against the spine, jacket covering its confession.
One hand free, one hand holding the new animal she's made.
The door has a man.
Wide shoulders, shaved head, cheap black coat that wants to be expensive. Arms folded, weight balanced like he's memorized the act of saying no. His face stays impassive until she stops at the bottom step.
Her voice comes out filtered through the helmet, flat, mechanical.
— "Mitya. Is he here."
The bouncer doesn't answer. Just stares.
She tilts the bat, wire glinting like teeth under parking-lot halogen.
— "I asked you something."
This time he moves—chin jerks, spit hits the ground.
His hand flexes once, the kind of gesture you make when you think someone's wasting your night.
His lips peel back around words she doesn't need translated: get lost.
Maybe it's the meth, still sharpening the world like glass under a boot. Maybe it's the mother's voice still ringing numbers in her ear.
Maybe it's the simple fact that every man in a coat looks the same when he's in her way.
She doesn't count the reasons.
She just moves.
The bat arcs, barbs singing their ugly hymn.
Wire meets cheek—tears it open like wet paper, blood flowering across his teeth before he knows he's been written on. His hands shoot up too late, palms out, but palms are useless against history.
She swings again.
And again.
The barbs catch, drag, release. Flesh shreds, nose collapses sideways, his knees betray him. The sound isn't music but it has rhythm: thump, tear, breath, thump. The lot swallows his cries until they're just wet gargles.
Her shoulders move like pistons, steady, unbothered. Helmet hides her eyes but not the fact that she doesn't flinch. Calm—always calm—except now.
The bouncer's face is gone.
Replaced by pulp and rust.
His hands twitch once, then forget what they were supposed to do.
Lucia stands over him, bat dripping, wire gleaming, chest rising with the simple mechanical grace of someone clocking hours.
Still human, the ink under her shirt lies.
She takes a breath that tastes like copper and neon. Exhales a line straight enough to be a ruler.
The door gives under her glove. The club inhales her.
First floor: a bad diagram pretending to be a room.
Narrow throat of an entry vestibule with a coat rail no one uses, a dead ATM sulking under a NO CASH sign.
Then it opens—left wall is bar: six stools, two missing their vinyl, a run of cheap wood lacquered to the color of bad decisions; mirror behind it ghosted with old fingerprints; wells of vodka and regret; a speed rack of clear bottles glinting like teeth.
Right wall is a trench of booths—five in a row, vinyl split, duct tape silvering the wounds. Center: "dance floor," which is just scarred tile that got told a story about itself; sticky map of ancient spills; a dropped earring trapped like an artifact.
Back wall: a raised DJ box, plywood painted black, empty but humming a ghost loop—four bars of synth that never grow up.
Far back right: a short hallway to the bathrooms, doors painted over so many times they're smooth as lies.
Far back left: the stairs—two flights, metal treads, a red rope that wants to be taken seriously, a camera dome blinking like a lazy eye. Emergency exit sign to the alley glowing EXIT in that hopeful green no one deserves.
The air is wet with freon breath and sour sugar.
Lights strobe just enough to make shadows into actors. Nine shapes turn their heads in the slow, offended way men do when they thought the night owed them anonymity.
They're all wrong for Mitya. No linen jacket, no saint-bear ink, no gold canine flashing the pledge of a joke.
Just tracksuits unzipped to chain, shaved domes, cheap cologne arm-wrestling sweat.
Nine bodies arranged like bad furniture: two at the bar, two in the second booth, one alone with a pool cue he thinks is a personality, three clustered at the edge of the "floor," one by the bathroom hall taking inventory with his eyes.
No guns.
Her shoulders let a millimeter go.
If there were guns, this would be the part where fate gets lazy.
Helmet stays on. The world is edges and weight.
Her boots sound like verdicts.
The first one by the door tries posture. Hands out, chest up, chin with an accent. He says something that contains "devushka" and "helmet" like they're a punchline.
The bat answers.
Downstroke. Fast enough that the strobe misses frames.
Wire opens his eyebrow into a second mouth; blood sheets his eye into a bad curtain. He crumples into the vestibule's throat, hands looking for a face that's moved addresses. That's one.
The two at the bar pivot slow, matching tattoos winking like counterfeit saints. One has a bottle—brown glass, full of optimism. He cocks his wrist. She's already there.
Hip into his space. Barbs kiss forearm; skin peels like wet label; bottle jerks up, slips, smashes his jaw in a shower that sounds like coins on tile. He staggers backward into the mirror—spiderweb bloom, bright cracks sprinting away from his skull like it owes them lunch.
He sits without meaning to. That's two.
His friend lunges from the stool, going low, arms wide. Tackle shape. It would work on someone else. Lucia puts the bat horizontal, lets him run himself onto wire.
Hooks. Cloth rips. Skin follows.
He howls the shape of a church bell and tries to reverse. She yanks. Meat sound.
He comes off in strips nobody ordered. The stools skitter, stool legs skreee across tile, someone swears in a country that isn't here.
She brings the bat down in a short, honest arc onto his collar; something in there surrenders. Two and a half and then three when he stops lifting his head.
Second booth erupts on a delay—like they had to get their permits in. One, a neck like a stump. One, a smile shaped like a cut.
Stump comes first, hands up, no plan.
She meets him at the table edge and uses the table like a hinge.
Boot to shin—his knee bends sideways into a question.
His mouth makes an O that forgets what sound is. She sweeps the barbed wrap across his cheek—wire combs out beard and a slice of history; he bleeds in a dumb, plentiful way.
He collapses over the table; plates bounce; a fork goes skating like a silver fish. She doesn't watch him finish.
Smile has a broken tooth he's proud of. He grabs for her helmet. Helmet bites back.
She throws her head forward—visor clicks his nose into a new direction; lights pop; his hands fly to his face in a mime of mercy. Bat answers. Up-cut.
The mouth of the bat kisses the hinge of his jaw; wire takes souvenirs. Blood beads along each barb like rubies on cheap prongs. He topples into the booth, legs caught under the table, heels drumming the wall in small, useless protests.
That's five.
Pool cue thinks he's in a movie. He twirls it. It looks like potential until it doesn't. He steps into range with a flourish.
Lucia steps past it.
Close is where the bat is a conversation.
Short swing, inside the arc, ribs like xylophone keys that never learned a song. Crack-crack. Air leaves him like a secret.
He hunches, presents the back of his neck the way prey does when it remembers the rulebook too late. She writes a note there. Wire scribbles. He drops the stick and tries to pick up his lungs.
That's six.
The cluster at the edge of the floor finally decide the floor includes them. Three men. One has a chain he thinks makes him heavy; one has hands like shovels; one is young enough to think he can still be somewhere else.
Chain comes at her. He makes a big circle with it like he's lassoing the night.
She steps through the circle. The chain smacks the back wall and slaps back toward his own face; he flinches at himself.
Her bat cuts a line across his forearm; he opens like a letter he shouldn't have read. He roars and swings with the other hand.
She lets the wire find his knuckles; bones pop like keys on a cheap piano.
He drops the chain, stares at his hands like a man who just found out he's mortal. Knee up, out. Groin. He folds to the shape of a suitcase.
That's seven in waiting.
Shovels is a grabber. He gets her around the waist from the side, tries to take her for a ride. She plants a boot, lets his momentum make the decision.
They hit the edge of the dance floor; she pivots, uses the turn to pop the bat backward into his temple—barbs ringing against scalp, a red halo.
He loosens.
She slips out, turns, and writes one long sentence down his face, from brow to cheek. He reads it with his hands and doesn't understand any words. He kneels. She stamps the story closed.
Eight.
The young one hesitates, takes one step back, one forward, can't pick which future he wants. His mouth loses the English he might have had.
He's shaking, and in another draft there's mercy, but this isn't that draft. He rushes. She meets him—quick, low, almost gentle—bat horizontal into the throat.
Cartilage folds like cheap plastic. He makes a noise like feedback and finds the floor with both hands, crawling for air that isn't there. She passes him.
Nine is coming; it just hasn't arrived yet.
Bathroom hallway man decides he's a hero late, which is when heroes get made into rumors. He has a knife he forgot to be good at.
Folding blade, vanity mirror shine. He brings it up like a new idea. The light licks it, remembers the nightclub from a different night.
Her collarbone twitches; the old seam under the shirt burns its match-head bright. Her hand moves the bat without checking with her head. Diagonal—forearm to wrist. Knife becomes floor decoration.
He stares at his hand like it betrayed him. She closes and lets the barbs walk up his cheek, over his eye, a line that will make strangers uncomfortable forever. He screams in a language without vowels.
She puts the bat into his stomach like she's putting away a tool. He folds around it and sits down in the hallway like a child who got warned.
That's nine.
Behind her, the mirror at the bar tries to hold all the red and fails; it's smeared to impressionism. The loop from the dead DJ booth keeps clearing its throat.
Four bars. Four bars. Four bars. The BPM clock in her blood says yes, sir. The room is a spreadsheet where cells keep turning the color of work.
Someone from the earlier count decides he's owed an epilogue.
It's the one who smashed the mirror with his skull and didn't learn gratitude; he comes up wobbling with a jag of glass clenched like a promise.
He lunges. She lets him have the side of the bat—wood meets glass meets flesh. The shard sticks in his cheek like a new idea; his hand forgets ownership. Barbs rake his scalp in a backward sweep; hair comes off in a comb's worth.
He sits in his own lap. Ten, if counting includes bad habits.
She hears her pulse count in the helmet's foam.
Meth turns the edges bright as testimony.
Her rings click the bat's handle. Little silver cuffs choosing to be jewelry.
She works the room like arithmetic. Left to right, she erases what's still moving.
The stool-kicker at the bar tries to crawl; she puts a heel between his shoulder blades and subtracts him back to ground.
The tackle who donated his chest to wire tries to roll; she taps his ribs like a man testing a watermelon; they answer hollow.
The chain-swinger moans in a minor key; she gives him a quietus in the form of a downward punctuation mark that silences the sentence.
Shovels snores blood.
The young one with the folded throat kicks his heels; she steps aside and lets the body spend whatever is left of panic.
Pool cue is dreaming about a simpler night.
The bathroom hero cradles his newest line and understands mortality in a fresh, private way.
She comes back to the door man who wished he was a wall. He breathes in bubbles. The bat is a metronome; she brings it up, lets it fall, brings it up, lets it fall until the song stops arguing.
The room stills the way a pond does after a fight—ripples softening into a flat, dishonest calm.
The loop keeps going. Four bars. Four bars. Someone's phone vibrates in a pocket with no owner; the sound is meek, embarrassed.
Helmet stays on. Face as unreadable as a blackout.
She steps through the bodies like they're furniture in a rented place. Blood strings from barb to barb in delicate threads, thin red web that the air pulls into lace. She does not look at her reflection in the mirror because there isn't one worth seeing.
She tilts the bat, lets gravity peel some of the night off it.
It patters to tile, coins in a jar.
The stairs sit where they were supposed to.
Rope sagging. Camera blinking its lazy dome.
She studies the angle of the lens the way she studies price tags. There's a blind slice near the post where the handrail bolts into the wall.
She files it in the part of her head labeled later.
She listens. Upstairs: voices that think they're safe.
A laugh with money in it; the clink of ice auditioning for a commercial; a door that seals like a secret.
None of the nine had a gold canine.
None of them had a bear that knew a cross.
Mitya's upstairs. Of course he is.
Lucia rolls her shoulders once; the knit under her collarbone ticks, that closed mouth remembering what it said.
Still human lies under cotton, taking notes.
She sets the bat against her shoulder. The ledger in her head draws a little box around nine and the total it makes.
The helmet turns the world into a tunnel where the only future is a set of stairs.
She climbs.
The stairs are steel with a hangover—treads slick, handrail greasy with hands that lied about washing.
Helmet on, visor down, bat against her shoulder, she climbs through the hum of a loop that won't die.
Second floor breathes different.
Cooler, quieter, rich with the fake velvet smell places buy in bulk.
A hallway waits, long and narrow, a rifle barrel of carpet runner with cigarette burns like constellations.
Left wall: framed posters for bands that never showed.
Right wall: padded panels that make sound behave.
Sconces throw a honey smear every twelve feet.
The ceiling sags a little in the middle like it remembers water. Halfway down, a service niche: ice bin, mop sink, a red fire extinguisher with a dent like a dimple.
Near the end: a side door marked OFFICE (the O tilting drunk), another marked STORAGE (padlock that looks like it's just for show).
The carpet rises to a small plinth where the hall pinches, then widens again at a stub of landing before the VIP door—a heavy slab with a porthole the size of a fist and a red LED blinking on the handle like a heartbeat that learned manners.
Between her and that door: two men.
Left: a Makarov riding his right hand like a bad idea he's made peace with. Shaved head, navy windbreaker squeaking at the shoulders, stance that says he's been told what to do in rooms like this and sometimes got it right.
Right: brass knuckles already home on the fist, thick-necked, forearms like rebar wrapped in meat, jaw that's never lost an argument without starting another.
They clock the helmet and the wire-wrapped bat. The gunman's eyes narrow to ledger slots. Brass Knuckles smiles like he's glad the night finally gave him something to hit.
— "Stop," Gun says, mouth flat, accent a low bruise.
Lucia stops.
The hallway watches. Her breath taps the visor.
The knit under her collarbone ticks like it heard its own name.
Then everything happens at once and forever.
Gun brings the Makarov up. Brass Knuckles charges.
The hallway becomes two problems arguing in a narrow box.
She moves, but so do they.
The first shot cracks the air into bright ice.
The round kisses her visor—clean starburst, one spider vein sprinting toward the hinge. Her head whips from the slap; ears fill with hot sand; light steps one degree to the left. She keeps her feet because the floor forgot to trip her.
Brass is on her by then.
He takes the bat on his forearm, barbs biting through track marks of old scar. He doesn't scream; he grunts, the sound of a refrigerator deciding to move.
His other hand finds the jacket at her throat and shoves.
Back hits padded panel; the wall gives a little then returns the favor.
Helmet rings. Another crack from the Makarov; plaster sneezes dust past her cheek.
She tries to turn the bat horizontal and lever room into being. Brass slams a fist into her ribs. The world makes a camera-flash of white.
Air leaves, won't call a cab. She folds and he uppercuts the helmet—chin snaps, visor claps her nose, eyes water in a clean sheet.
Gun advances, feet patient over carpet, barrel steady now. He's not excited; he's working.
The bat drops.
It just falls.
Hands fail for one small second, and gravity cashes in.
The wire-clad wood hits carpet with a sad thud and stays where it lands, kissing the runner with its teeth.
Brass knows this song—he drags her helmet forward and down, tries to bounce her face off soundproofing. The foam mutes the violence like it's being polite.
She brings a knee up and finds nothing but hip bone; he's armored where it matters.
He laughs in her visor, breath sour with club sugar and old meat.
Gun sight glints. Inches.
Two men, one hallway, no exits that matter. She could draw the bulldog and make it a ternary problem, but the angle's bad; she'll lose time to leather and steel and kill the wrong echo.
So she sins in a different direction.
Her left hand pins Brass's wrist against the helmet chin, glove squealing.
Right hand comes off his coat, goes blind sideways into the service niche, finds cold metal by memory and hope.
The fire extinguisher handle bites her palm.
She squeezes like it owes her.
The nozzle coughs once, then roars. White dust erupts in a lungful blizzard at throat height, a chalk avalanche.
Gun curses; the muzzle blinks, blinds itself; his shot goes screaming into the light sconce, glass shatters glitter through the powder storm.
The hallway becomes a snow globe of lies: everything near, everything far, no one forgiving anyone.
Brass flinches half an inch. It's enough. Lucia drives the extinguisher cylinder up under his jaw with a mean little pop. Teeth click like dice.
He staggers, grip loosens, and she peels sideways out of the choke, helmet scraping foam, shoulder scraping wall.
Another wild crack; a hot wind kisses her left tricep; skin opens in a thin surprised line that stings like a name you don't answer to. Blood warms the sleeve and then stops caring.
She lets the extinguisher drop on Brass's foot. Metatarsals complain. He swears in a way that makes God cover His ears.
She dives on the bat.
Hand closes around tape; wire nicks across knuckles; pain writes its signature and she countersigns.
Gun's already moving to flank, clever enough to make angles in a narrow place. The powder cloud thins; his silhouette becomes a decision.
He squeezes again.
Carpet pops beside her boot and throws black crumbs into white dust. She doesn't give him a straight line: she rolls into the wall, shoulder first, helmet clapping paneling, then springs off with a hungry little step.
Bat up. Short, ugly arcs. Brass walks into the first like a man who forgot the ending. The barbs rake his cheekbone and write a red bracket around his eye.
He keeps coming because stubborn is a talent.
She gives him a second bracket on the other side. The eye becomes a wet coin lost in a fountain. He swings blind and finds helmet.
The world dings. She sees stars arrange themselves into a word she can't pronounce.
Gun is closer now.
He raises the Makarov to center mass that's trying to be a smaller target. She throws the bat at him.
Not a swing. A throw.
The whole thing leaves her hand with a feral wobble. Wire spins a brief galaxy. He flinches, instinct over training. The bat kisses the barrel and hand in a clang that jumps through his bones.
The pistol bucks sideways and clatters into the padded panel where it bites and lands. He grabs for it because of course he does.
She doesn't let him.
She's already inside his reach.
Helmet first—a headbutt delivered by a person-shaped bullet. Forehead to bridge of nose. Something crunchy signs paperwork. His eyes water on cue.
She hooks his ankle with hers and twists an old dance into a new floor. He folds backward into the wall, ass first, breath knocked out.
He reaches for the dropped Makarov with a hand that's suddenly someone else's.
Her boot finds his wrist and tells it a different story.
Bones don't break, exactly; they shrug and decide to write with the other hand next week. He yelps in a small, sharp octave that doesn't match his shoulders.
Brass comes back on a different axis, hands out like a man greeting a long-lost friend with murder in it. She catches a fist on the forearm and the fancy rings there carve her glove into confetti.
The follow-up hook sneaks past her block and lands in her side—just under the ribs, where breath keeps its spare keys. White flashes again; bile asks a question; she swallows no and keeps moving.
She goes low, tackling a tree trunk. It's stupid; it's necessary.
He sprawls over her back and the world flickers sideways—the two of them caroming into the service niche, ice bin flipping, cubes skittering like teeth across the runner.
They slam the extinguisher off its bracket; it clanks, spins, and bites her shin. She grunts, helmet smashes the wall again; the visor crack grows one more leg. Helpfully.
They thrash.
He's heavier and built to win arguments with gravity, but the hallway narrows and makes his shoulders a problem.
She palms his face.
One eye is a blackout; the other is feral.
She shoves his head into the padded panel and the panel doesn't help him.
He brings the knuckled fist up and down, up and down, a piston with bad manners. She eats two, three—helmet taking most, the rest finding neck, collar, bruises she hasn't met yet.
The fourth she catches on the rim of the visor. The brass scrapes and squeals and skids off. Sparks snap bright in the powder haze.
Gun groans behind her, rolling toward the Makarov like it owes him backpay. She can't be in two places. She chooses the one that's touching her.
The bat is three body-lengths away, chewing carpet. The extinguisher is at her shin, dented but optimistic. She grabs its hose.
The nozzle hits Brass in the mouth and he eats dust at point-blank.
The stream chalks his throat, packs his nose, fills his lungs with homework.
He gags, staggers, palms clutching his own face like he wants to pull it off. She keeps the trigger down until the handle bites back and the cylinder wheezes dry.
Gun has the pistol.
He does. She hears the metal come home under his fingers.
The click is a sentence she hates.
She throws the empty cylinder.
It's not elegant. It's a desperate bowling ball. It takes him in the temple with a sound like a door deciding not to open.
He staggers into the OFFICE door and the O gives up completely.
The Makarov fires from nowhere—wild, uncontrolled, the round chewing a piece out of the carpet runner and spitting it at her cheek.
Sting, heat, copper taste.
She blinks hard and doesn't check for blood because looking is a luxury.
She dives, shoulder skidding on ice, hip barked by metal edge. Hand finds the bat's tape. The wire greets her like a thorny pet.
She rolls up to a knee, comes across the narrow space in two hungry steps, and spends the rest of her night in the next three seconds.
First second: Brass comes forward, blind with dust, swinging by faith. She goes under the arm and comes up inside his reach.
Short chop to the sternum.
Wire bites shirt, skin, and makes a signature about lengthwise pain.
He folds.
She brings the bat across the back of his neck. Not full force; just enough to change his mind. It does.
He kneels by accident. She steps off his calf and makes him choose prone.
He chooses.
Second second: Gun has the sights on her belly now, eyes watering, teeth red around a split lip.
He squeezes. Misfire? No—he flinches.
The round kisses the wall at her shoulder and takes a garnish from the sconce.
She's already closing, bat low.
She chops the wrist. Wire meets tendons and writes an angry note.
The Makarov falls by instinct. She kicks it and it skitters under the STORAGE door like a mouse that paid rent.
Third second: Gun tries to be fists.
He's not bad at them.
He catches her chin with a straight that clips the helmet rim and bites her lower lip. Blood prints itself on the inside of the visor like a bad autograph.
She answers with a bat end into his solar plexus. His breath leaves again and slams a door. She brings the bat up, then down, and the down is a period the sentence can't argue with.
His head rebounds off padding once, then decides it's better not to. He slumps, slides, comes to rest on his own shoulder like a man trying to listen to his chest.
The hallway detunes. White dust hangs in the air like a lie it wants her to believe. The extinguisher hisses its last quiet breath. Ice cubes freeze against carpet hairs and look like glass eyes.
The sconce that lived dies with a soft incandescent sigh.
Lucia stands crooked in the aftermath, one boot on brass, one boot on carpet, bat cabled in red sewing thread from barb to barb.
Her body takes inventory without asking. Ribs a ringing bowl.
Left arm stung open, sleeve stippled dark. Shin a throb with a dent's voice. Jaw busy with copper's small applause. Breath saw-toothed. Heart double-time but steady.
The stitch under her collarbone—closed mouth—smiles a thin red smile that threatens to go wider and then doesn't.
Still human breathes under sweat and powder.
She checks nothing, because checking is a ceremony for people with spare minutes.
Helmet fog clears; the crack on the visor maps itself clearer, a new continent.
She raises a forearm and smears the inside ghost with the back of a glove. It just changes shape.
Fine.
The VIP door waits at the end of the hall, red LED dot blinking with the patience of a metronome that never learned mercy.
Behind it: ice clink, a man's laugh, a woman's sigh that's not a woman's.
The porthole is black glass. The threshold is a line that believes in itself.
Lucia steps over the two men like furniture someone left in the wrong place.
The bat settles on her shoulder with a tired metal purr.
Powder creaks under her boots; the carpet runner scuffs a chalk print she doesn't stop to read. She walks until the door fills her world.
She stands in front of the VIP room. The LED blinks. The ledger flips a page.
The red LED blinks like a patient insult.
Lucia's empty hand becomes not-empty: bulldog revolver out of the jacket, weight like a short sentence with no adjectives.
Bat on her shoulder, visor fogged and cracked, ribs counting wrong. She shifts the bat into her left, keeps the gun low and close. Breath in. Breath out.
The stitch under her collarbone ticks like it remembers the knife and the lesson.
She kicks.
The latch doesn't negotiate—it detonates in splinters; door swings wide and rebounds; frame coughs wood dust into the hallway.
VIP layout snaps into her like a blueprint she woke up knowing: a rectangle fat with money's lies.
Left wall: velvet banquette hugging two corners in a U, low table of smoked glass in the middle, ashtray like a black planet tipped with red stars.
Right wall: a mirror with a bevel, throwing the room back with a flattering memory; a bar cart glinting chrome, crystal decanters amber-thick, cut glass sweating; a curtained slit to a private bath barely worth the paint.
Back wall: a short platform—fake dais—with a pair of high-backed chairs in crocodile vinyl like thrones rented by the hour; behind them a blackout drape that pretends there's a view.
Ceiling: low, ribbed with black-painted beams, pin-spot cans drilling white circles into tables; a small disco ball stuck like gum above the middle of the room. Floor: plush, red, full of other people's secrets ground thin.
She doesn't say anything.
She dumps it.
Five flashes punch holes in the room.
The gun bucks polite and vicious; the muzzle bloom whitewashes faces; sound is a hand clapped over the club's mouth.
First round kisses a shoulder in the near banquette; meat sprays the backrest; the man pinwheels sideways, chain jumping; his glass jumps, breaks.
Second round takes the mirrored wall at angle and ricochets a hornet through cut glass; a decanter explodes into wet diamonds; whiskey leaps into air and dies as rain.
Third round finds a throat—small, precise crater; the sound that tries to follow never makes it; he slumps like someone unplugged him.
Fourth round catches a cheekbone over the low table; the whole head snaps left, blood paints the beveled mirror with a red parenthesis; the body folds into the glass top and the top cracks with a surprised moan.
Fifth round drills the high-backed throne's occupant in the sternum—linen jacket, gold flash at the canine, mouth open on a laugh that turns into an O with nothing behind it. He makes a soft, shocked sound like the end of a record.
Silence raises its head, ears pricked.
Downstairs music bleeds up in a thin outline, four-bar loop doing its ant parade.
The revolver hangs empty, cylinder yawning like an exhausted mouth.
The room smells like cordite and overripe fruit; smoke draws lines only her eyes can read.
Bodies talk after they're done talking.
They twitch; they collapse in chapters.
One from the banquette makes a prayer shape and tries to get off his knees; another clutches a stomach that's trying to leave through the front door.
Someone's heel kicks a scatter of ice; a glass rolls a slow circle, looking for a place to be.
She stands in the doorway one half-breath longer, feeling the subsidence.
Satisfaction rises in her like warm bathwater.
Not joy—sharp, close, private—just that clean notch in the ledger clicking into place. Back soon, she told the room that loves her.
She never lies about numbers.
Lucia steps in.
The cracked mirror throws her back in jagged slices—helmet and hole-starred visor; wire-wrapped bat slung lazy; gun slack at her thigh.
She moves to the high-back first.
The man in linen has crumpled forward against his throne, jaw hung slack; the gold tooth winks inside a mouth filling with coughs he can't finish.
His right hand is inked—bear with an Orthodox cross jammed into its paw, teeth out like it learned to smile from a knife.
Box checked. She angles, looks for wedding band: none, skin pale where one never circled. His eyes climb toward her visor as if there's sky in there.
There isn't.
She taps the bat against the chair—not hard.
He flinches on reflex; a pink foam darkens.
Satisfaction blooms one more petal and stops.
Someone in the near corner decides life is still an option.
Track jacket with white stripes lurches behind the U of the banquette, hand finding a bottle by instinct, hurling it like a bridge that didn't hold. It whines past her ear and atomizes against the frame.
Liquid kisses her cheek through the visor crack; alcohol stings; the smell is nightclub sweet and nausea mean.
She strides and brings the bat down over the table's edge into his wrist.
Wire tugs flesh off knuckles like a butcher with a timetable; bones clack; a string of skin hangs in a wet ribbon across the glass top.
He reels.
She gives him the crosswise follow-up—ear to jaw—barbs comb away a piece of ear and a piece of night. He sits, surprised to find himself sitting.
She gives him the period.
The mirrored wall shows a second man under the bar cart, hand flooding around a broken bottle's neck like a bad idea.
She steps; he jabs from the carpet like a stingray.
The blade kisses her boot and skitters; momentum flips him; he scrambles backward, slicing his hands on crystal gravel and lying to himself about leverage.
She shoulders the cart.
It wheels and slams him back into the wall with a glassy crunch; decanter shards grind under metal; another bottle tips and baptizes him sticky.
He hiccups a sob and tries to stand. She puts the bat's business end into his collar as if the room required coat check.
Movement on the dais.
The second throne is empty; the woman draped over its arm—a silver dress like logic's mistake—slides to the carpet, eyes rolling slow as hubcaps.
She huffs a sound that's trying to be "help" and lands on her hip, palm squeaking on plush. Her mouth is pink and smeared and expensive.
Lucia's eyes skate over her like a hand over a turned-off burner. Discretion.
The contract's voice had said it. Two companions. She counts. Linen's right-hand man stands to the left of the chair, hands out empty, shock sucking the red out of his face.
He's younger than his suit promised.
He bleats in Russian, a vowel-stuck word that sounds like someone's name trying to be a plan.
He runs.
She doesn't sprint; she angles.
He makes the bath door—a handle; a shove—and vanishes into tile.
She goes after him, the revolver now a paperweight in her fist, the bat singing along her thigh.
Private bath: tight, tiled in off-white that pretends to be cream, mirror too clean because no one believes it, sink too small, a chrome hand dryer that roars like a cheap god.
He fumbles with a toilet lid like there's a gun under ceramic; there isn't.
Panic makes people dig. He swings the lid like a shield. She bats it aside. Ceramic shatters into teeth; a shard bites her thigh through fabric and leaves a hot wet that doesn't ask for permission.
She ignores it. Bat up, under, into diaphragm.
He folds; she grants him the floor.
She paints a line across his cheek with wire and leaves him with a map he'll never use.
He crawls; she closes the door very gently with the toe of her boot and the heel of his hand in the jamb.
The howl that arrives is an animal. She lets the door be heavy until the howl drops two notes.
Then she opens it; he's cradling his fingers like they used to be something.
She writes him a small mercy: sleep. The bat gives it.
Back in the room, a hand grabs her ankle—the banquette man who donated his throat and wanted change. Blood makes everything slippery.
She stamps without looking.
The hand becomes something in a museum no one visits.
Downstairs, the loop keeps clambering up the staircase on its little legs. Din—DIN—din—DIN. The bass isn't heavy; it's insistent. Her heart steps to it because hearts are obedient when the right voice tells them.
She leans over the high-backed chair again.
The bear tattoo is there.
The gold canine flashes in the pin-spot like it's voting.
His breath is a thin paper bag being crumpled in slow motion.
He turns his head, mouth working around a word stuck under his tongue. She lifts the bat and places the wire against the linen lapel like a tailor measuring ruin.
— "Mitya," she says through foam and crack.
His eyes widen because hearing your name from a stranger's helmet is a small sacrament.
The bat comes down in an arc that feels older than she is.
The barbs push linen aside like grass and find meat; the wood's mass speaks in a low register. It's less a strike than a subtraction.
He leaves a piece of himself on the chair and the rest follows. She watches the light go out of the gold tooth like a party deciding to move next door.
Satisfaction doesn't climb; it settles.
She is not happy; she is correct.
Someone behind the bar cart rips a scream out of a hurt place and charges because grief makes us dumb.
He hits her between the shoulders with a two-armed push that would have moved a different body.
She stumbles forward three steps, hand on glass table, ribs sharpening their complaint. The helmet saves her nose; the visor crack gains a cousin.
He tries to drag her backward by the jacket and learns about industrial thread. She reverse-elbows; finds rib cage; he grunts a vowel he didn't plan to share. She whips the bat backward, low, across shin.
Wire catches pant leg, skin, tendon whisper; he goes down like a puppet whose strings forgot which way gravity faces.
He grabs her boot; she peels free and signs his temple with the bat in a short, impatient stroke.
The sound is small and final.
Movement in the mirror—banquette far end.
A man who played dead too early sits up slow, pressing the hole in his shoulder like he can screw it closed. His eyes are huge, shocked to find survival such a bendable thing. He lifts his other hand, palm open—surrender's mime.
The contract in her head doesn't include math for "open." The ledger has columns for target, companions, witnesses, mistakes. She checks the ink and finds no space. The bat says what she doesn't, in two short phrases.
He goes down into the red plush and hands the carpet his heat.
The woman in silver is still a pile, eyes glassed by terror's varnish.
She looks at Lucia like a mirror held the wrong way.
The helmet looks back like a moon.
Lucia doesn't touch her.
She doesn't have to.
Discretion, the machine-voice had said; there's no number value for her.
Lucia steps past her, tracks a bright half-print through the spill of whiskey and blood and broken glass that turns the red carpet black.
She circles the room once like a surgeon doing a count.
The bathroom door hangs ajar; tile shows a joint of red creeping into grout. The bar cart leans against the beveled mirror like a drunk who can't keep a secret, chrome scratched and proud. Ice melts into the carpet and then decides not to.
A phone on the low table buzzes itself face-down into silence; another never will.
She goes on finishing, because motion is the discipline that pays.
Anyone with breath left gets it taken; anyone with a hand on something sharp gets reminded about open palms.
The bat is tired of mercy; the room stops offering.
One man tries words—"pozhaluysta"—and she remembers the bat kissing barbed wire in a different room and a different neck.
She gives him the less complicated ending he didn't get then.
When it's all counting instead of arguing, she stands very still.
The revolver is dead weight in her right hand; the cylinder yawns complaint and apology.
She could reload.
She doesn't.
The bat drips in thin threads that draw lace from barb to barb.
The mirror shows her like a saint a poor church would be embarrassed to hang.
"Still human" thumps once under sweat like a lie that knows the teller.
She stays long enough to confirm the facts that buy silence.
Gold canine: no light. Bear and cross: ink dark under sluice. Linen jacket: ruined. Two companions: accounted for in the math of the floor. Sconces blink, try to remember their cues.
The disco ball hangs there, useless, beading sparks off glass that smell like the end of something.
The music below keeps its tiny sermon. Four bars. Four bars. Four bars.
The clock in her blood says we're late for a place that only exists if you keep moving.
Lucia walks out.
Back down the hallway: powder settled into the carpet runner like chalk signatures, ice cubes dulled into pearls, extinguisher dent curving a new shadow at the niche.
Brass Knuckles is a lump where she left him;
Gun is a picture of nap with wrong colors. Her boot prints pick up and lay down a soft trail. The bat rides her shoulder like a tired animal that trusts her anyway.
Stairs.
Each tread gives its small thunk and takes it back.
Down on the first floor, the air is thicker, warmer, almost relieved. The nine are arranged as she wrote them; there's a new quiet in the room that makes the loop sound nervous.
The mirror behind the bar is a crime scene in search of a painter.
She steps through, not fast, not slow.
Someone under a booth coughs foam; she changes his mind with a small, exact stroke.
The door man outside is a smear on the night's face, cheeks rewritten. She doesn't look twice; the sky already did.
Out into the street—the cool takes her like a sober arm.
Neon flinches off the helmet; the crack in the visor holds a thin line of club light that won't let go. The bike is where she left it, patient as a dog that knows its master's ledger. Key in. Switch up. Fuel pump whine like a throat clearing.
Engine coughs, catches, smooths—heartbeat learning to be a drum.
She throws a leg over, weight a confession the bike accepts.
The bat slips into the bungee on instinct, wire still singing its small, metal hymn. The revolver disappears into the jacket's dark again, just weight, not shape, not now.
She looks once across the street: black door, splintered edge; upstairs windows holding still like nothing happened behind them; EXIT sign glow like hope no one paid for. Satisfaction sits in her chest like a coin that isn't counterfeit. The ledger flips a page.
Mom's twelve is a small number in a bigger column; shoes are an easy purchase in a hard world. Discretion hums in the bones of the building and won't tell.
Lucia twists the throttle.
The bike lifts its head and goes.
Asphalt pulls under her like a ribbon willing to learn knots. Lights spool past and fall away.
Downstairs music fades into the inside of her helmet; upstairs silence keeps its outstretched hand.
The city exhales salt and diesel and somebody's dinner, and she takes it because the night doesn't offer alternatives.
The visor catches a streetlamp and writes a pale halo across her eyes. It doesn't ask who she is.
The helmet doesn't answer.
The road does what roads do when you teach them. She speeds off, and the world erases the scene behind her as if it's ashamed of how easy it was to be rewritten.