Page 13 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
There it is. He doesn’t look up from the glass when he says it, his voice mild as milk, an old soldier tidying up after his pakhan the way he’s tidied up a hundred times before. There’s a girl. He doesn’t know that yet, or he shouldn’t, and the smart move, the one every instinct I’ve sharpened over a lifetime is shoving at me, is exactly what I swore to her I’d never do. Tie it off. Make her a clean line in a clean report. One loose end, gone, and the desert stays sealed forever.
“None that matter,” I say.
He looks up then. Just a flick of those tired eyes.
“There was someone,” I go on, because a half-truth lives where a clean lie gets caught. “A woman. Out there by accident. She’s not a problem.”
“A witness is always a problem, Sevastian.” Gentle. Almost fond. The voice of the man who taught me half of what I know about staying breathing. “You of all people know that.”
“She’s mine now.” I let it sit flat on the table between us, the way I let everything sit. “I’ve claimed her. Publicly, at her club, in front of forty people. As far as this city is concerned, she’s the pakhan’s woman, which means she isn’t a witness to anything. She’s family. She’s protected. That’s the end of it.”
For a long moment Vadim says nothing. He turns the glass. His face gives me back nothing but that same worn sadness, the grief he’s carried so long it’s just the shape of him now, and I read it the way I’ve read it for fifteen years. As loyalty. As a tired old soldier watching my back.
“If you say she’s handled,” he says at last, “she’s handled.”
“I say it.”
He nods. He drinks. The matter is settled, because I’ve said it is, and nothing in my world stays open once I’ve called it done. Vadim bled for my brother. There’s no version of this world where I look at that face and see anything but a man who loves what I loved. I’ve staked my life on that for fifteen years. I stake it again now without thinking twice, the way I do every morning.
On my way out I catch Roma in the corridor.
“Put a detail on the woman,” I tell him. “Quiet. She doesn’t see them, she doesn’t know they exist. Two men, rotating, eyes only.”
Roma’s expression doesn’t move. “The stripper.”
“The woman from the desert.” I don’t have her name. I find that I want it, which is a problem I’ll deal with later. “Timur saw her face. Until I know what Morozov’s people do with that, she’s exposed. I want to know the second anyone but me comes near her.”
“Insurance,” Roma says.
“Insurance.”
“The men will notice,” he says. “They’ll say the pakhan caught feelings.”
“The men can say it to my face.”
“Nobody will say it to your face.”
“Then we have a system.”
It’s a good word. It’s the word I’m using, and I half believe it, the same way I half believe the coffee was why I came in early,the war the reason I left her bed before dawn. A man protects an asset. A pakhan keeps his claimed woman breathing, because a dead claimed woman makes him look weak in front of the families he’s trying to hold.
There are six clean reasons to park two men outside her building. Not one of them is the real one. I take the six clean reasons down the hall with me. I leave the real one where I left the rest of it, on a nightstand, in the dark, under a band of hundreds.
I take the back stairs down to the floor, because I don’t feel like the elevator, because some mornings a man needs forty concrete steps to put himself back into one piece. That’s where I find Vadim a second time.
He’s on the half-landing, his back to me, phone to his ear, voice low. I move quiet on stairs, a habit out of a life where it’s the whole difference, so he doesn’t hear me until I’m nearly on him. He ends the call when he turns and sees me, pockets the phone, gives me a tired smile.
“Pakhan. My sister. Her husband’s a fool with money again.”
“They usually are,” I say.
He laughs the old laugh, the one from courtyards twenty years gone, and for one second we’re just two men in a stairwell who buried the same boy.
He goes up past me toward the salon. I go down. A man’s allowed a phone call about his idiot brother-in-law without his pakhan reading anything into it, and I don’t. Vadim’s earned thirty years of not being read into.
I walk out onto my floor, into the black, the gold, the quiet, and I make myself think about a woman across town instead. She’s the easier thing to think about by a mile, which ought to worry me, if I were the kind of man who listened to that. I’m not. I’ve got a dead soldier, a stripper in my head, a war on my doorstep. I pick the stripper, because some mornings you take the soft problem over the hard one and call it strategy.
6
