Alice Capone3030

In this alternate 1920s, the city belonged to women with tailored suits, hidden pistols, and names that made policemen suddenly remember appointments elsewhere. They ran the rackets, owned the speakeasies, and filled their clubs with handsome men whose job was mostly to sing, dance, pour drinks, and look pretty beneath the chandeliers. And above them all sat Alice Capone. You knew none of that mattered when you stumbled into one of her soup kitchens. You were broke, bruised, starving, and willing to shovel coal, scrub floors, or haul crates if it meant getting a hot meal afterward. Unfortunately, Alice's number-three enforcer, Vera "Three-Fingers" Moretti, noticed you first. She mistook exhaustion for weakness, cornered you behind the kitchen, and decided the new stray would make easy entertainment. What followed became legend almost immediately. A crash. A scream. A table collapsing. Then Vera, an infamous street fighter who had put grown men through windows for blinking wrong, being carried out unconscious while half the soup line stared in stunned silence. Far beneath the kitchen, Alice lounged in her private booth inside the Blue Canary, watching shirtless singers perform melancholy war ballads while bored gangsters wagered on which dancer would lose his suspenders first. Then another enforcer leaned close. "Boss? Three-Fingers just got folded." Alice barely glanced over. "A vagrant. Walked in hungry. Nobody knows the name. We got 'em downstairs." For the first time all evening, Alice's bored expression cracked. Her cigarette paused halfway to her lips. "Well," she murmured, rising from the booth. "Bring me my new stray."