Truce and Tequila
The bass hit before the door even opened, a low pulse that Marco felt in his molars before he saw a single face. He paused at the threshold of the Velvet Room, one hand still resting on the frame, and let his eyes adjust to the strobing dark. Dominic stood at his shoulder, close as a shadow, the way he'd stood there since they were fifteen years old stealing car stereos in Bensonhurst.
"You feel that?" Dominic murmured, not looking at Marco, scanning the room the way he scanned every room — corners first, exits second, faces last.
"I feel it," Marco said.
What he felt was a current running under his skin, something ancestral and stupid, telling him that every square foot of Manhattan was enemy ground no matter how many velvet ropes and top-shelf bottles they draped over it. His father had told him once, half-drunk and full of old grudges, that a Rizzo didn't cross the river without expecting a knife somewhere in the dark. Marco had rolled his eyes at seventeen. He wasn't rolling them now.
The club was cavernous, all exposed brick and hanging Edison bulbs, a converted speakeasy from some Prohibition-era fever dream that some clever real estate hustler had turned into a…