Page 31 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
We walk the rest of the rows in a quiet that isn’t uncomfortable at all, which frightens me more than the gate, the guard, the rifle.When he leaves me at my door he doesn’t touch me. He looks at my mouth, then at the door, then says good night in a voice with gravel in it, the kind of good night that’s mostly a different sentence wearing a coat. I lie awake half the night anyway, and that’s its own answer.
Here’s the wreckage of my careful evening. I’m half in love with a criminal who grows roses for his dead brother, which is a catastrophically stupid thing to be. I’m part of a found family I have no business loving, locked in a fortress I’m not allowed to leave. And somewhere inside these walls, eating at the same table, smiling the same smiles, there is a liar.
I don’t have proof. I don’t have a name I could defend to anyone. But I’ve trusted this gut my whole life, and tonight, lying in the dark in a rich man’s guest room with roses on the air through the window, I’m as certain as I’ve been of anything that I already know which smile in this house is the false one.
I just hope, for all our sakes, that this is the one time in a hundred my gut has it wrong.
14
SEVASTIAN
She asks me for one night, and she asks me in the worst possible way, which is reasonably.
“The apartment got packed up without me,” she says, across the long table, after Yelena has gone up and the staff have melted off the way they do when the two of us drop our voices. “My building, my lease, my mail, all of it handled while I stood behind a wall. Fine. I get it. But I’ve worked at the Wet Sunset for seven years. I’m not going to vanish off the schedule like the girls who get a bad boyfriend and a bus ticket. I want one last shift. I want to say goodbye to my bar.”
I have a list of reasons ready. The watchers. The second set of eyes that found her in a boutique. The general principle that the safest version of her is the one nobody can find. I open my mouth to start down the list, and my grandmother’s voice comes from the stairs, where she has clearly been standing for some time, in Russian, mild as tea.
“A woman buries her old life herself, Seva. Or it doesn’t stay buried.”
Then she continues up to bed, satisfied, a general who has spent exactly one bullet.
So that’s how I come to spend a Tuesday turning a dive bar into the most secure building in Nevada. My advance team sweeps the Wet Sunset at four in the afternoon and reports back with what I can only describe as bafflement. The rear door locks with a chair. The camera system has been decorative since before the pandemic. There’s a fire exit painted shut and a ceiling tile that comes down if the bass gets ambitious. Roma walks the place twice and emerges with the expression of a structural engineer leaving a sandcastle.
“It’s a deathtrap,” he reports.
“It’s her deathtrap. Fix what can be fixed quietly. Leave the rest.”
The manager is called Dale. I have heard a great deal about Dale. He greets me at the door at nine with a wet handshake and a rehearsed speech, of which he delivers one half-sentence before abandoning it to tell me the booths were wiped down twice. There’s a sheet cake on the bar with CONGRATULATION CINDY piped across it in blue, one letter short, perfectly Dale. I tell him the cake looks excellent. He sweats through his shirt with relief and goes to stand somewhere else. I find I can’t hate him. He kept a roof over her for seven years. The roof leaks, but he kept it.
The crew arrives like a parade. Joss first, casing the room out of habit, finding my men at their posts one by one with little satisfied nods, an inspector confirming the gossip. Stevie with a gift bag. Promise in her good coat, who looks at me a longmoment on the threshold and says, “You’re buying the top shelf tonight,” not a question, then goes behind the bar like she owns it, which in every way that matters she does. Lacey arrives loud, already celebrating, wearing shoes I’d classify as a structural risk. And Crystal comes in carrying balloons, a full bouquet of them, because somebody told her once that big news takes balloons and she has never questioned it.
There’s also a busboy named Marco, who I’m told runs the information economy of this entire establishment. He spends the first hour documenting the night on his phone, for the archive, until one of my men materializes at his elbow and explains, pleasantly, the concept of no photos. Marco takes this better than expected. A story he can’t prove, I will come to learn, is worth more to Marco than one he can.
The regulars trickle in and are vetted without knowing it. By ten the room is what it must always be on a good night, dim, loud, sticky, the sound system thumping like the one organ this body kept healthy. I take the corner booth. The same booth.
Twice during the evening my earpiece murmurs. A car that takes the block slowly, twice, turns out to be a rideshare hunting a house number. A man at the door with a bag turns out to be the ice delivery, on Tuesdays, like always. I let my shoulders down a centimeter each time. The watchers are out there somewhere, that hasn’t changed, but tonight the perimeter holds, the room is bought, the exits are mine. Tonight is the one night I can afford to give her, which is why it has to be perfect, which is why I’m checking the door again.
Last time I sat here, I put a brick of money on the table and bought the room’s story. Tonight nobody brings me anything but a glass of soda water with a lime in it, because Promise decided that’s what I drink. I look at the lime. I drink it.
Then Dale kills the floor lights. Her last set starts. I learn the difference between watching a woman work and watching a woman say goodbye.
I’ve seen her dance for tips. Rhinestones and engineering, a smile aimed two feet over everyone’s head, pretty the way a shop window is pretty. This isn’t that. The girls crowd the stage rail with their drinks, the regulars stand, somebody starts the clapping early. Cynthia comes out in the costume she wore the night I first walked in, and she dances the whole history of this room. The early years in it. The bad nights in it. Seven years of rent, tip-light, getting back up. None of it is for sale tonight. She’s giving it back.
Halfway through, the crew starts throwing money. Singles, the dancer’s salute, the girls raining the stage with their own tips for one of their own, Lacey standing on a chair to get more height on it, Promise peeling bills off a roll with the gravity of a head of state. Crystal weeps openly and throws the contents of her entire purse, which includes a coupon book.
I don’t throw anything. The man who bought this room once knows better than to put money near this. I stand with the rest of them. When she comes up out of the last turn, flushed, shining, looking for one second directly at me, I do the only thing the moment will hold. I put my hand flat over the spot where the want lives, and I bow my head an inch.
Her eyes go bright. The whole bar howls. The set ends in singles and noise.
After close is the family part. Dale’s cake gets cut with a box cutter from behind the register. The gifts are dancer gifts, a robe, terrible joke earrings, a framed photo of the crew that makes the room go wet and loud at once. Promise’s gift comeslast, no wrapping. Behind the register, screwed to the wall in a dollar-store frame, there has hung for seven years the first dollar Cynthia ever earned on that stage. House tradition, every girl has one up there. Promise takes it down with a screwdriver she produces from somewhere queens keep screwdrivers, and hands it over without ceremony.
“You’re not on my wall anymore,” she says. “You’re somebody’s whole house now. Go be that.”
Cynthia doesn’t cry until that exact moment. Then the whole bar is doing it, including, I’m fairly sure, two of my men by the door, who will both deny it under questioning.
The locker takes her ten minutes. Seven years fits in one cardboard box, costumes, a spare set of work heels, a coffee mug, a paperback with the cover gone. She carries it out, sets it on the bar like a casket the size of a cat, and Promise puts a hand on it without a word.
Dale, on his fourth attempt at a speech, finally sticks one, two sentences this time. He announces that her song, the one she opened with for seven years, is retired from the rotation, effective tonight. Nobody plays it after this, he says, hand on the register like a man swearing on something. The whole bar goes up. It’s the dive bar version of hanging a jersey from the rafters. Cynthia laughs through it with her eyes shining, and I revise my opinion of Dale upward for the second time in one night.
