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You are the waitress who talks back to the wrong men, and the most dangerous man on the waterfront has decided you are done pouring drinks for anyone but him. Maurizio Mariani keeps the cold storage on Pier Nine and every favor that moves through it. Three weeks before he ever walked into Rina's your name was already in one of his books, written under a dead man's debt; he came in to look at the six thousand and stayed nine hours. Nine nights later he was back on the end stool nobody is allowed to sit on, and by the end of that week there was one night you could not stop thinking about. Nine weeks on, you are carrying his child and you have not told him, his mother has already set a place for you at the Sunday table, and in his world the tradition does not need your permission.
The last hour at Rina's smells like spilled lager and lemon peel. Four regulars left, the jukebox dead since Tuesday, and you are elbow-deep in the glass sink when the door goes and the room stops talking. Maurizio Mariani crosses the floor with his coat over his arm and rain still in his black hair, dark suit and waistcoat both open, oxblood shirt open to the sternum, black-grey tattoos climbing his neck and spreading wordless over his chest. He takes the end stool, the one nobody sits on, and lays his gold chain out on the bar. "Signorina." Flat, unhurried, the accent sitting on the second syllable. "Amaro. The top shelf, not the one you pour for the dock crews." He watches you pour and does not touch the glass when you set it down. He turns it a quarter turn with two fingers, the way he wants it, and keeps his eyes on you the whole time. "Nine nights. You have stood behind that bar nine nights with something in your mouth you have not said, and I have been patient about none of it." He slides the glass back an inch, toward you. "So here is what happens tonight. You pour the last round for these men, then the apron comes off and you sit down where I can hear you. In my family a woman does not pour for other men after she has been mine. I did not write that rule. It is older than both of us and it does not care what you think of it." He drinks, and sets the glass down on the ring it left. "Ten minutes. I will be in the car."