"Tell me, Diaz—are you a Catholic?"

The Syndicate man paused in his restless pacing and turned to stare at Mica, seated beside Nick on the marble stairs leading up to the poolside.

"What?"

"I just wondered if you're Catholic. Or if maybe you used to be."

Diaz may have looked more perplexed if she'd asked whether he was from Mars—but not much. "What the fuck kind of a question is that?"

"Well, your name is Spanish and most Spanish people have a Catholic background. Plus, there's...I don't know—just something about you. I don't quite know how to put it. It's sort of a...desperate denial. I saw it in some of my cousins, growing up back in the Philippines. They were good Catholic boys—until they weren't. And then, when they weren't, they had to go all out to prove they weren't. There was a kind of desperation to their badness."

"Yeah? Well, it ain't me who should be desperate." Giving the lie to his statement, he cast an anxious look at the closed door of the office back in the penthouse, before resuming his pacing.

"And yet I see that desperation in you, Diaz. I think perhaps you act bad to hide that—really, right down deep inside—you're not."

"Yeah? And I think perhaps you should shut the fuck up. Trust me, I'm as bad as they come, baby."

And to everyone's surprise—not least his own—Nick laughed. Brief and hoarse and a little painful, it just burst out—he couldn't help it. Maybe it was concussion, maybe it was oxygen deprivation from being dunked in swimming pools and having his windpipe punched by a scary Russian woman or maybe he'd just crossed Breakdown Bridge, hit Losing-It Boulevard and gone barrelling headlong into Insanity Town, but after the night he'd had there was just something inescapably hilarious about the idea of this scrawny blowhard thinking he was the baddest thing around.

"The fuck are you laughing at?" Diaz snapped, pointing his gun at Nick's head. "Huh? What's so funny, Mr Silent-Guy? You're not gonna be laughing so hard when Zima and the boss start tearing shreds off you in about five minutes time."

The Nick of just a few hours ago would have quailed in fear—the prospect of imminent violence, an enraged bad guy ranting at him, a gun pointed at this head—any one of these would have been enough to set him quaking. The Nick of now grinned the best cheeky grin his battered features would allow and gave Diaz a friendly bird. At the moment, given his immediate future prospects, getting shot was practically an upgrade. If nothing else, it'd at least sort his headache out.

Diaz cursed internally and, to his intense mortification, found himself fighting back tears. What the fuck was wrong with him? Why, no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, could he never, ever get any respect? He walked the walk, he sure as hell talked the talk and yet here he was—getting laughed at by the beat-up guy he was pointing a gun at. And, just as the cherry on top, instead of whimpering and crying like she should be, the crazy bitch who'd humiliated him, who'd kicked him in the nuts and made him run away like some girl, was now asking him what fucking religion he was.

Hugo never had to take this kind of crap. Right from when they were kids, running around the back lots of Miami, the big guy just had to flex and any fuckers who got in their way pretty much turned to mush. And if they didn't, well then, Hugo really did turn 'em to mush.

Trailing in his wake, Diaz had always tried to make like his bolder, bigger, badass cousin—it was just he'd never had a whole lot to flex. Oh yeah, sure, he'd tried hitting the weights, but no amount of pumping iron did anything about being five feet six in your socks or having the kind of chicken legs that got a hombre laughed out of the gym.

But he strutted and swore and big-noted himself and kept his head down when the heat was on, and with Hugo looking out for him, he'd managed to carve out a role for himself in the Syndicate. It was the role of the shit-kicker who everyone laughed at and bossed around, but given it came with a nice suit and a paycheck, not to mention the occasional choice piece of poontang, Diaz wasn't about to complain.

But there was the rub—Hugo wasn't looking out for him anymore. Hugo was dead. He wouldn't have believed it possible until that cold bitch Zima called him in to help with the cleanup. Him, of all people! Having to mop up his big cuz's blood while four other guys staggered away with the body.

A body, he couldn't help but notice, that didn't look like it had any right being dead. Yeah, there was the shot leg and sure, one of his hands was real messed up, but that was about it. Diaz was no doctor, but he was pretty damn sure it'd take more than a couple of scratches like those to take out a lug like Hugo. He was practically a fucking force of nature.

But not anymore. Maybe he checked out on his own, or maybe Zima gave him a nudge—after all, the bitch was pretty much running the show now, so she had motive—but either way, Hugo buying the farm was nothing but bad news for Diaz. With the snake-eyes and the snark she'd been shooting at him all night, it was pretty damn clear Zima had it in for him, and without the big guy's grudging but unfailing protection, he figured his days had to be numbered.

And, given Hugo's fate, he couldn't see his impending compulsory retirement coming with a gold watch and a handshake—more like a short ride in the trunk of a car, and a bullet between the eyes. While he didn't occupy a particularly lofty position on the Syndicate's corporate tree, it didn't really take a view from the top to get a handle on their approach when it came to loose ends.

Basically, not to put too fine a point on it, Diaz was pretty sure he was fucked.

"You are, aren't you?"

For just the briefest moment he wondered how the hell Mica had known what he was thinking but then realised she must still be crapping on about the Catholic thing.

"And you can shut the fuck up, too."

"Oh, I'm sure you haven't been to Mass in a long time. Maybe not since you were a child. But you went. You were raised a Catholic. You learnt all about sin and damnation and hellfire, didn't you?"

He swallowed. He didn't need this now. This, of all things, he did not need. The fact she was right just made her words all the more galling.

"Don't think I won't shoot you. Keep talking and you're dead."

Features composed, Mica regarded him. "It soaks in, doesn't it? You can tell yourself you've left it all behind, all that nonsense about saints and apostles, fire and brimstone, all that stuff about heaven and hell. You can call yourself a non-believer, an atheist—a man with no God. But it's all still in there, isn't it? You can never quite get all the Catholic out, can you, Diaz?"

The gun began to tremble. "Shut your mouth."

"And if there's one thing a Catholic knows how to recognise, it's evil. The Syndicate is evil, Diaz. You know it as well as I do, don't you? You're part of the Syndicate. So, I guess that makes you evil, too—doesn't it?"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up! Shut the fuck up!"

Nick found himself observing this exchange with a kind of detached interest. His brain was firing on just enough cylinders to know it wasn't firing on all cylinders, yet it still retained the wherewithal to realise—or at least suspect—what Mica was up to. He rated her chances as somewhere between none and sweet fuck-all, but appreciated the attempt, nonetheless. She was a never-say-die type, that Mica. It was just one of the things he liked about her.

He found that after the shock of the revelation the police were in the Syndicate's pocket—and the consequent obliteration of his grand plan to take them down—his initial fit of anger and desolation had settled into nothing more than tired resignation. A calm acceptance that as much as he had striven and sacrificed and put his body on the line this night, time and again, it wasn't even in the zipcode of being enough. The Syndicate was too big, too bad and he was too...well, too Nick to even dream he might have had a chance of prevailing against them.

They had won. He was going to die. And given that had been his goal not so long ago, perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing. The only catch was Mica was going to die, too. That, he was finding a little harder to be calm about. His only consolation was the quick and relatively painless potential escape available to them both, just up the short flight of stairs upon which they sat, and then a mere run and jump away. With a strange mixture of admiration and sadness he watched her working away at Diaz, still clutching at straws, still picking away at the tiniest of loose threads, still refusing with every ounce of her being to even contemplate the merest thought of ever saying die. The girl was unquenchable.

Such a shame she was wasting her breath.

"It's not too late, Diaz. It's never too late. You know what's happened to me and what will...what will happen next. You know what's in store for those girls downstairs. You've stood by and watched it going on, for all this time. Maybe you couldn't do anything about it before, what with Hugo watching over you, or Jaime being around, or for any of a thousand other reasons. Maybe you really think you are bad—although I don't believe that."

"I thought I told you," Diaz growled, through gritted teeth, "to shut up."

"But you have the chance now, Diaz. The chance to do something right—to save your soul. It's just you and us, Diaz. Hugo's off nursing his wounds somewhere, Jaime's squirrelled away in his office with that woman, and everyone else is probably in that wretched dungeon, crushing the last little sparks of resistance from all those poor lost souls down there. It's just the three of us. Our lives are in your hands, Diaz. And do you know what that means? It means, if we die, the blood is on your hands. It's on your ledger—on your balance sheet. But it doesn't have to be that way, Diaz."

With a half-smile, Nick gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. So determined. And yet, so delusional.

"You can let us go, Diaz. You have that chance. The lift is right there. You have the chance to save two lives." Leaning forward, Mica fixed him with a wide-eyed gaze. "Maybe even three."

Despite himself, Nick swallowed. Damn, but she was good. Such a waste on this Syndicate scum.

"No." Gun still raised, Diaz closed his eyes. "No, no, no," he repeated, shaking his head.

"But—"

"No!" he shouted, cutting Mica off. "I said no, fuck you." For a few seconds more, he glared at her—and then holstered his gun.

They'd killed his primo. They'd treated him as a joke. There was every chance they were gonna kill him. This most definitely, 100% had nothing to do with the whole hell and damnation thing.

He reached into a pocket of his jacket, and after a moment's rummaging, held up a key.

"Not the lift—they might hear the chime. We can take the stairs, instead."

For a moment longer, the tableau held—the troubled gangster, the abducted student and the battered accountant—motionless in the light of the mist-shrouded moon. Then, with a groan, Nick got to his feet.

Great. Just what he needed.

More stairs.