Page 20 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
I do not laugh. It costs me real effort not to laugh.
The emissary’s smile holds, but something behind it stumbles, regrouping, because he came to rattle a kept woman and got handed his own hat with a curtsy. He thought he was reading a pretty ornament. He just discovered the ornament reads back, and faster than he does. I let the silence run half a beat too long, long enough for him to feel it. Then I answer his pleasantry with one of my own.
“Tell Gleb the room is open to everyone,” I say, easy, mild, final. “Even old men who confuse a long drive with an invitation. He’s welcome to come lose his money in person. I’ll have a chair held for him. Near the door, so it’s a short walk back to California when he’s finished.”
The emissary inclines his head, the smile gone waxy. He murmurs something gracious and empty, then withdraws into the crowd. The moment closes. But the message has been sent now, both directions. They’ve seen her. They’ve also learned the man who keeps her doesn’t flinch, and neither, it turns out, does she.
“That went well,” Cynthia murmurs, still smiling, the pulse going visibly fast in her throat, the only tell she owns. “Was that a real threat? That felt like a real threat.”
“That was a real threat.”
“Cool. Cool cool cool.” She sets down the champagne she’s been nursing, untouched, like it personally offended her. “I’m going to need you to define my dental and vision situation if this is the job now.”
“Dental.”
“And vision. I stared down an old wolf for you. That’s eye strain.”
God help me, I want her so badly in that moment. This ridiculous, brave, mouthy woman cracking jokes with the wolves circling. I have to turn my eyes off her, onto the room, to keep my head straight. I’ve spent twenty years making sure nothing ever shows on my face. She’s been undoing that one afternoon at a time, with no idea she’s doing it.
I steer her to a quieter corner with my hand low on her back, lower than strictly necessary, my thumb finding bare skin at the edge of all that red, and I feel her breath change under my hand. Her skin is warmer than the room, which is a feat, because I keep this floor at the exact temperature of a winning streak. She doesn’t pull away. If anything she leans the half inch back into it, which is going to kill me.
“People are watching,” she says, not a warning, almost a dare, her voice dropped low enough that only I get it.
“Let them. That’s the point of you tonight.” I keep my face flat, my mouth near her ear, and I have the satisfaction of watching a flush crawl up the side of her throat I’d very much like to put my teeth on. “Although for the record, the way you’re breathing right now is going to ruin the bored-billionaire thing I’ve got going.”
“You started it. Hand. Lower back. Very handsy for a fake boyfriend.”
“There’s nothing fake about the hand.”
She doesn’t have a comeback for that. I watch her not have one, watch her look around for a drink that isn’t champagne, and I count it as the only clean win I get all night.
I get her a glass of water, which she actually drinks. While she catches her breath, I do the thing I came here to do, which is take the temperature of the room, because the emissary was only the message. The message has a sender, and I need to know how deep Gleb is willing to dig.
Vadim catches my eye from across the salon, near the high-baccarat table where he always plants himself at a thing like this, and lifts his glass an inch, an old soldier toasting his pakhan. I tip my chin back. Thirty years of shorthand in a single inch of glass. With him watching my flank, I can give the rest of my attention to the room, and the room is telling me Morozov is testing, not yet committing. The emissary was a knock on the door, not a battering ram. Good. That buys me time I intend to use.
I look back at Cynthia. She’s watching the emissary’s retreating back over the rim of her water glass, her eyes narrow, bright, working, taking the old man apart detail by detail for a later she’s already planning. Two things come clear to me at the same time.
The first is the obvious one, the one I’ve been losing to since the desert. The want, sharper in that dress than is fair to a working man.
The second is newer, and it rearranges something I’d rather leave where it was. Watching her read this room the way I read a room, missing nothing, three moves ahead of an old killer who’s been doing this since before she was born, I understand that I stopped, somewhere in the last three weeks, thinking of her as a problem to manage. She isn’t a liability I keep breathing out of guilt or lust or both. She’s an asset. A sharp, dangerous, untrained asset who walked into the worst world there is and started winning on day one.
That should reassure me. It does the opposite. A liability you let go of when the heat dies down. An asset you keep. A woman you want this badly, who is also a woman you’d be a fool to keep, you don’t let go of either, and I have never once been good at the wise thing when the wanting gets this loud.
The war knows her name now. So do I. I stand in my beautiful poisoned room with my hand finding the small of her back again, theater that stopped being theater somewhere around the desert. I think about that dimple at the base of her spine, about the blade she just slid between an old wolf’s ribs with a smile, and I understand I’m in deeper trouble than the emissary will ever be.
I take her home that night. I do not take her inside. It is the single hardest piece of restraint I manage all year, and I already resent every hour it’s going to cost me.
9
CINDY
Four days after the salon, Sevastian calls me himself, which he never does, and says exactly one sentence. “Wear something that makes men stupid and come read a card game for me.” Then he hangs up before I can get a word in.
I stand in my kitchen deciding whether to be insulted. I decide to be insulted at the casino.
So that’s how I end up back at Dust to Dust on a slow weeknight, except this time there’s no party. No chandeliers. No audience in couture. The floor sits half empty, quiet, just the slot banks chiming to themselves, a few insomniacs feeding them their last twenties. Sevastian is waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator in a charcoal suit with no tie, collar open. The first thing I think, the very first thing, is filthy enough that I’m glad it can’t be heard.
Here’s the problem with this man. He’s a criminal. He kills people. He owns me on paper and I hate every inch of that. None of it does one single thing to stop my body from doing a slow, hotroll the second I see him, because he is, objectively, unfairly, the best-looking thing I’ve laid eyes on in my whole sorry life.
