Just a little vignette in the Chances universe, featuring Ray V in Vegas. At one point in time I'd planned to expand this into a whole other series, but I ran out of steam and this story stands alone. This fic contains major spoilers for the Chances series, so if you plan on reading Chances stop reading this fic now and go read through Chances 4 before you give this story a try.
Vegas Chances
When they offered her witness protection there had been a list of locations, places with names like Lebanon, Pennsylvania; Fayetteville, Georgia; Bozeman, Montana. Towns big enough that no one would notice a new arrival, but small enough that the chance of the wrong person stumbling on to her was virtually non-existent. Lebanon had a hospital, they said, Fayetteville a fairly significant mall, and Bozeman a sixteen-screen theater.
She had not been impressed.
The fact was that she was a city girl; she'd been born in a city, she'd grown up in a city, and if she had to die, she wanted to die in a city, even if that city couldn't be the city of her childhood. Besides - and this part she hadn't said out loud, because she only had so much say in where she ended up and she didn't want to find herself on the wrong side of her handler - there were more opportunities to do something important in a city. Teaching elementary school was all well and good for some poor soccer mom who'd accidentally seen a mob hit; Stella Kowalski had been an Assistant States Attorney on the fast track to the head office. She wasn't about to give up her ambitions just because her boyfriend turned out to be connected to the mob.
In the end, they'd compromised on Las Vegas. It wasn't the most immediately obvious choice, but as Stella had pointed out, the Las Vegas mob was very isolated from other crime families in the nation. Unlike most mobsters, who were continually looking for new and better sources for quick cash, the Vegas mafia had a steady, reliable, legal source of income, and they guarded their source of wealth fiercely. Competitors weren't welcome, not even to gamble.
The job they'd given her was a menial one: teller at one of the smaller national banks. It was a mindless, boring job with low pay and no potential for advancement (at least not with the credentials attached to her new, government-provided background); she lasted a year and three months before she began plotting her escape.
What she hadn't taken into consideration before suggesting her new home was the fact that Vegas was the world's biggest old boys club. The unofficial back-scratching infrastructure of the States Attorney's office in Chicago had nothing on the boys-only network set up in Vegas, and she didn't have access to her impressive education and experience to give her the boost she needed to win out against her male competitors. Eventually she bowed to the inevitable and created a new plan, one that had the potential to conquer from within. Worst case scenario, it would give her a new chance to start over.
With that mantra running in her head, Stella walked into the Gallant and walked out with a job as a waitress. The 'uniform' they gave her was skimpy and unflattering, but her income doubled. It also allowed her to work nights, so during the day she could take some very specialized classes at UNLV.
Because of the tips she'd gotten as a waitress (in exchange for being groped nightly), when she managed to qualify as a dealer on one of the quieter blackjack tables the move actually resulted in a pay cut. It was worth it, though, to wear pants and a shirt that could be buttoned up to the neck.
The new job also allowed her a glimpse into the seedier side of Vegas, and she was confident that, given enough time, those glimpses could be strung together into something she could use.
Then, unexpectedly, Armando Lagostini sat down at her table, and Stella knew she'd finally gotten her ticket out of this awful town.
oOo
His neck hurt and he desperately wanted to squeeze the muscles and tendons, brutally rubbing them till the tension bled away, but he couldn't. Armando Lagostini didn't show that kind of weakness, which meant Ray Vecchio playing Armando Lagostini couldn't show it either.
He'd known it would be difficult, going in. He'd known that he didn't have the kind of background for this work, that they'd only come to him because of how he looked. After a day on the job, he'd known that it was damn lucky that Lagostini had opted to cut his ties with his own family to move to Vegas, because playing a mobster was hard work and playing a specific mobster with said mobster's own family would have been impossible.
Somehow, knowing all of that, he'd still been surprised by how hard it had been to adapt. To hold himself still as a man was beaten before his eyes. To make his forced smile look natural when the men laughed about gang-raping a woman. To keep his voice steady when he ordered a man's arms and legs to be broken before having the man dumped by the side of the road next to the sign demarking Vegas's city limits, even knowing that he had to do it, even knowing that at least this way the man's life would be spared.
To never, ever be alone.
He'd wanted to throw up those first few nights, but he was never out of earshot of his bodyguards (hired days before Lagostini had been picked up and probably spying for Lagostini's family, but at least they weren't friends of the man himself) so he'd forced the bile down and made himself walk out of the bathroom with the hard, neutral expression he'd learned for this assignment. He was pretty sure he was developing an ulcer from holding this all in, but that was better than finding himself with a bullet in his brain.
Scariest of all, though, was the fact that after two months on the job he was starting to get acclimated. He no longer had to suppress a flinch when blood splattered on his skin during a beating. He barely registered the hastily smothered fear on the waitresses' faces as he ran a cool hand up their warm, scantily-clad inner thigh. His voice no longer shook when he placed the whispered calls to Agent Henderson, telling them to pick up another poor shmuck from the side of the road.
And then there were the women. There was a subtle irony in the fact that now that he could have any woman he wanted, he didn't want any of them. He stared into their wide-eyed faces and listened to their too-fast breathing, and all he could see was Frannie or Elaine and the thought of taking these poor terrified to bed hurt his almost-ulcer. There were a few that were safe: women who lusted after power, or who got off on the fear. Those were the ones he took to bed, as many and as often as he could (Langostini had a reputation to maintain), but the joy had gone out of the act and he never let them stay the night.
He'd gotten so used to the fear that when he sat down at the blackjack table and looked up into the eyes of the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, he took a second to recognize the look in her eyes: defiance.
Ray smiled and for the first time since he took this job, the smile was genuine.