Page 29 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
“Behave,” I tell her, for the second time this month, with exactly as little hope it’ll work.
“You behave. I’m not the one who just gave a whole room a financial education with murder eyes.” She straightens, smooth, the picture of a composed woman on a powerful man’s arm, and only I get to know that under the couture she’s as wrecked as I am. It’s the best secret I own. I make myself put the want away, because there’s still a knife to watch for in a room full of smilingenemies, and a man can’t stay sharp with his blood pointed somewhere this specific. Not well, anyway.
Then Vadim is at my shoulder, where he’s been all night, covering the pakhan’s blind side the way he has for fifteen years. He sets a hand on my shoulder and brings his weathered face close to say the thing a man’s oldest friend says at a moment like this. “Beautifully done, Pakhan.” There’s an old soldier’s pride in it, the warmth of the man who held me upright at my brother’s grave. “Konstantin would have loved to watch this.”
It catches me square in the one soft place I have left, because he’s right. Kostya would have loved this, the noise, the excess, his big brother taking an enemy apart for sport. For a moment the two of us just stand in the wreckage of the night I built, the last men who remember the boy by name. I let myself feel his scarred hand on my shoulder and be glad of it. There’s a short list of people I’d take a bullet to protect. He’s been on it since before I was old enough to shave.
“He would have hated the music,” I say. Vadim laughs, a real one, and the moment is good.
Then he turns back to the room. For half a breath the laugh empties out of his face ahead of the smile, something flat, cold, surfacing under it before the old warmth comes back up. Tired, I tell myself. He’s a tired man at the end of a long night, grieving the same boy I grieve. I wave it off, the way I waved off a phone call in a stairwell, and the night rolls on, loud, gold, mine.
I take Cynthia home through a city that belongs to me a little more tonight than it did this morning. She’s quiet in the car, watching me with a look I can’t fully read, something thoughtful, a little wary, like she saw something tonight she’s still turning over. I don’t ask. I’m too full of the win, too aware of the greendress and the warm length of her beside me, too sure for once that the ground under me is solid.
I have never looked more like a king than I do tonight. For one whole evening, surrounded by my enemy’s money, my oldest friend’s pride, a woman I have no business needing this much, I let myself believe the throne is steady under me.
I let myself, just this once, feel safe. It’s a feeling I haven’t trusted since I was a boy, and I was right not to trust it. I just can’t make myself care tonight.
13
CINDY
They move me to the ranch the way you’d move a witness or a hostage, which, when I think about it too hard, I technically am.
It sits forty minutes north of the city on a dry lakebed, nothing but Mojave in every direction. The drive in is forty minutes of nothing, then a wall, then a gate that opens like it’s been told about me, then a quarter mile of gravel announcing the car to the house.
Whoever built this place wanted to watch trouble arrive for a long time before it mattered. The first time I see it I almost laugh. The scariest man in Nevada apparently lives in a fortress of glass and pale concrete in the middle of the same desert where I watched him kill a man.
The joke writes itself. Sevastian doesn’t see the joke. He decided my apartment was too easy to watch, too easy to reach, so now I live behind a wall, a gate, a guard with a rifle who pretends not to look at me.
By day two I know the gate guard’s name is Petya and that he loses at cards to literally everyone, because Tasha tells me things whether I ask or not. I’m told it’s for my safety, in the same tone you’d use to tell a dog it’s going to the vet for its own good.
I decide to hate it here. I last about a day and a half.
Day one, I find out there are horses. Actual horses, three of them, out past the garage, plus a man whose whole job is their hair. I feed one a carrot under his supervision. The giant thing lips it off my palm gentle as a secret, and I have to walk away before anybody sees my face.
The trouble is the people. I came in braced for a prison, cold men in colder rooms. Instead I get Yelena.
She’s seventy, roughly the size of a bird, and she terrifies grown killers. She takes one look at me on the first morning, head to foot, the way you’d price a horse, and says, “So. You’re the witness my grandson claimed in a strip club instead of doing the sensible thing.” Then, before I can decide whether to be insulted, “Good. The sensible thing is boring. He is too sensible. Sit. You’re too thin, which is a strange way to be in a country this rich. Eat.”
I sit. I eat. It’s a stew with dill in it, rich enough that my eyes close on the first spoonful, and Yelena watches me eat it the way generals watch ground being gained. I’ve spent my whole life slow to trust anyone, walls up, waiting for the catch. This woman gets under all of it in about four minutes flat, and I let her, which is not a thing I do.
She sees through the whole act, is the thing. That first afternoon she watches me flinch when Sevastian’s name comes up, watches the careful way I hold myself near him at dinner,and she sets down her tea. “You may stop performing the great romance for me,” she says, dry as the lakebed. “I knew it was a transaction the night he announced it. A man does not fall in love at a card table.” A pause. Those eyes that see straight through you go sharp. “Though he’s working very hard to look like a man who hasn’t. The most interesting thing he’s done in years.”
“I’m supposed to keep pretending, though,” I say, testing.
“Pretend to them.” She waves at the window, the guards, the world. “Never to me. I’m old, my knees are bad, and lying to me wastes time I’m no longer rich in.” Then she refills my tea like we’ve just settled the seating chart at a wedding. Then she goes back to her tea and leaves me with my whole cover peeled off in under a minute.
Then there’s Tasha, who runs the house and talks twice as fast as anyone I’ve met since Crystal. She decides we’re friends before I’ve finished agreeing to it. She’s twenty-seven, warm, quick, a little nosy in the exact way I like, and inside a week she’s bringing me coffee the way I take it without being told, gossiping about everyone in the compound, treating me like a person instead of an asset.
After weeks of being handled, that small kindness nearly undoes me. She also talks. God, she talks, a warm road of gossip with no exits, who’s feuding in the kitchen, which guard cries at movies, why nobody mentions the east paddock to Yelena. I don’t have to say one word for an hour, and it’s the most restful thing that’s happened to me since the desert.
And there’s the driver. The big silent one who’s been hauling me around since the desert without a word, the man I’d half decided was furniture that happens to drive. Except at the ranchhe turns out to have a name. The name is Roma, and he isn’t furniture at all. He’s just quiet. The first time he says more than three words to me is when Tasha drops a tray and he catches it without looking up from his coffee. She snaps something at him. He says something back, perfectly deadpan, that turns her pink and sends her stomping out of the room.
“What did you say to her?” I ask, because somebody has to.
Roma considers his coffee. “The truth.”
“Which was?”
