The gunshot cracked through Club Pita like thunder splitting the sky.
For a heartbeat, the music still pounded. The strobing lights still flashed. Then chaos erupted.
Girls shrieked, stumbling over each other in their heels as they dove behind couches and tables. Someone knocked over a champagne tower, glass exploding across marble. Ruiz had ducked--pure instinct--his hand flying to his shoulder where warmth bloomed wet and sticky beneath his fingers.
The second shot rang out before anyone could process the first.
It missed. The bullet embedded itself in the leather headrest where Ruiz's skull had been a second earlier. His ears rang, vision tunneling as adrenaline flooded his system.
Then, Fernando came out of nowhere--a blur of motion--and slammed into the waiter with the force of an elite linebacker. The impact sent them both crashing to the ground, the gun skittering across the polished floor.
"Everybody out!" someone screamed from below. The message rippled through the club like wildfire. Downstairs, bodies surged toward exits, a stampede of panic and self-preservation.
But in the VIP section, a different kind of chaos unfolded.
The waiter hit the ground hard, cap flying off, but immediately rolled, blocking Fernando's first punch with a forearm that should've shattered under the blow. Fernando drew back for another strike when Carlos dove in, tackling the waiter from the side.
"Hold him down!" Lucas shouted, rushing in with Alfredo on his heels.
The waiter fought like a cornered animal. A knee caught Carlos in the ribs, an elbow cracked against Lucas's jaw. But there were too many of them. Hands pinned arms, legs, shoulders. Someone's fist connected with the waiter's ribs. Another blow landed near the temple.
Still, the waiter bucked and thrashed, gasping behind the fake mustache that was now half-peeled and hanging grotesquely from one side of the face.
"What the hell, man!" Alfredo yelled, drawing back his leg to kick.
"Move."
The single word cut through the frenzy like a blade--cold, deadly, absolute.
They all froze, turning to find Ruiz standing there. His fancy sleeves had been torn to apply pressure on the wound, but blood continued to run down his arm in rivulets. They dropped from his fingertips and pooled on the floor.
He was so mad. His face was a mask of rage, carved from stone and painted in blood. His dark eyes burned with something feral, something that made even his closest friends step back instinctively.
He stalked forward, snatched the gun from where it lay near an overturned bottle, and shoved through the loose circle his friends had formed. They patted without a word.
Ruiz dropped to his knees, straddling the waiter in one fluid, violent motion. He pressed the barrel of the gun against his attacker's forehead with enough force to make the head press back into the floor.
"You're dead," he said simply, voice eerily calm despite the blood loss, despite the chaos, despite everything. His finger moved to the trigger.
The waiter's arms were crossed over the face protectively, body trembling. And then--quiet, broken, barely audible over the distant sirens--came the sound of crying.
Tears. Streaming down from behind those defensive arms, cutting clean tracks through blood and grime.
Ruiz's hand wavered, his senses tingling. Something nagged at him, some instinct deeper than rage. "Look at me," he commanded, voice rougher now.
The arms didn't move.
"I said look at me!"
Slowly, so slowly, the waiter lowered shaking arms.
And Ruiz's world tilted.
The eyes staring back at him were amber--not brown, not hazel, but pure liquid amber that caught the light like honey held up to the sun. Gold-touched and luminous even through the tears, even through the terror. They were eyes that belonged in paintings, in poetry, in dreams.
He knew those eyes.
His mind lurched backward against his will to five months ago, or maybe six. He was at Souza High's parking lot after practice, and Aldo laughed at something on his phone, then looked up as someone approached. A girl. Pretty, with a backpack slung over one shoulder and those impossible amber eyes that made Ruiz forget what he'd been about to say.
"That's my twin, Reina," Aldo had said, grinning. "Ray, this is Ruiz."
She'd looked at him with those eyes—wary, assessing, clearly unimpressed—and said nothing. Just grabbed her brother's arms and pulled him away.
"Your sister doesn't like me," Ruiz had observed.
"Can you blame her?" Aldo had replied, still grinning.
Now, Ruiz stared down at those same amber eyes in a face smeared with blood and tears, half-hidden behind a pathetic disguise that was falling apart. The fake mustache hung by one corner. The eyebrows were askew, and the wig had shifted to reveal strands of actual hair underneath.
His gaze traced the features—the slope of the nose, the shape of the lips, the high cheekbones. Beneath the masculine costume, beneath the violence and the blood...
Recognition slammed into him like a physical blow.
His finger eased off the trigger.
"Let her go," he said quietly, not looking away from those amber eyes.
Silence. His friends exchanged confused glances.
"What?" Fernando asked, certain he'd misheard.
"Her?" Lucas repeated, incredulous.
Ruiz blinked, as if surfacing from deep water. "Him," he corrected, voice flat. He slowly stood, the gun still in his hand but no longer aimed. Blood continued its steady drip from his shoulder. "Let him go."
"Are you insane?" Carlos stepped forward, grabbing Ruiz's good arm. "That psycho just tried to kill you!"
"I said let him go." The words came out harder now, edged with warning.
"Ruiz, man, you're losing a lot of blood. You're not thinking straight—"
"I'm thinking fine." Ruiz shoved Carlos away with more force than necessary, nearly stumbling from the movement. He steadied himself, jaw clenched against the pain. "Nobody follows him. Nobody touches him. Spread the word to our guys downstairs."
They stared at him like he'd grown a second head. Alfredo opened his mouth to argue, saw the look in Ruiz's eyes, and closed it again.
The waiter—the girl, the ghost of Aldo's twin—hadn't moved from the floor. She lay there breathing hard, arms wrapped around her ribs, fake mustache finally falling away completely. Her amber eyes which now tracked Ruiz's every movement, were filled with something that went beyond hatred. Beyond grief.
It was emptiness. The kind that came after you'd already lost everything.
Slowly, painfully, she rolled onto her side and pushed herself up. Her disguise hung in tatters. Blood trickled from her split lip, from a cut above her eyebrow and her hands shook as she braced against the floor.
Ruiz stood above her, towering, bleeding, gun hanging loose at his side. For a long moment, they simply stared at each other—predator and prey, hunter and hunted, murderer and avenger. The lines blurred and shifted between them like smoke.
Her eyes blazed with defiance even as tears continued their silent fall. His dark ones remained cold, unreadable, but something moved behind them—recognition, memory, or perhaps even understanding.
"Go," he said again, softer this time. Almost gentle.
She didn't need to be told twice. She pushed to her feet, stumbled, caught herself against a table, and even shoved aside one of his friends. Reina glanced back at Ruiz one last time, with a look that promised this wasn't over. That she would come for him again, that death was patient—and then she ran.
She limped toward the emergency exit, leaving behind a trail of blood drops and the scent of her failure. Fernando moved to follow, but Ruiz raised his good hand, stopping him. Angrily, they watched her disappear through the door, watched it slam shut behind her, and then turned to Ruiz.
"What the hell was that?" Fernando demanded but Ruiz didn't answer. He stood there swaying slightly, pressing his hand harder against his shoulder, watching the door where she'd vanished. Those amber eyes were burned into his retinas. It was Aldo's sister—his twin.
In the distance, sirens wailed closer.
"We need to go," Lucas said urgently. "Now."
Ruiz finally turned away from the door, his face pale beneath the blood. "Yeah," he murmured. "We need to go."
But even as his friends rushed to gather their things, to wipe down surfaces, to prepare their story for the cops who would inevitably come asking questions, he stood frozen for one more heartbeat.
Those eyes...he'd known them once, briefly, in passing—beautiful and wary.
But now, he knew them for what they truly were. The eyes of someone who had nothing left to lose. The eyes of someone who would not stop until one of them was dead.