Page 44 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
But here’s the thing he can’t undo, no matter how cold he goes. It happened. I felt him mean it. I heard my name fall out of him soft and helpless. A flat voice afterward doesn’t unsay it.
The desert gave me a body in the dirt the first time. Tonight it gave me a man who loves me and would rather die than say so, the warmth of him still on my skin while the cold of him fills the car back up. The same sand, both times. Death, then this.
I don’t know which version of him climbs out at the ranch. I’m terrified it’s the cold one. I’m more terrified that I’ve gone and fallen in love with both.
20
SEVASTIAN
Three words a day. That’s the ration I’ve put myself on with her, because somewhere around the fourth I start telling the truth.
Since the desert I’ve held the line. Good morning. Eat something. Not now. She takes each delivery with her chin up. She doesn’t chase. The dignity of a woman walking away from my three words, every single day, is its own punishment.
The reasoning behind the ration is sound. Out on that highway I said her name with everything in me showing. I’ve spent the days since putting it back in its box, because Gleb has gone too quiet, because the war is leaning in, because a man who lets the soft thing out of the vault in wartime is gift-wrapping it for his enemies. That’s the speech. I give it to myself several times a day, the way you’d take a pill. It’s a good speech. I’ve nearly stopped noticing it’s also a coward’s one.
Roma has started looking at me sideways when I issue my three words, which from Roma is an intervention. Yesterday heobserved, to the windshield, that the Cullinan’s suspension was developing a squeak, and that things which get ignored develop worse ones. We understood each other perfectly. The squeak is not getting fixed either.
I spend the day in the city doing the work of a man bracing a house. Moving money. Doubling drivers. Re-cutting routes that were fine last week. Mostly I spend it listening to the silence out of Los Angeles, which has stopped sounding like caution. It sounds now like a held breath. I get back to the ranch after nine with my head full of roads, and the first thing that reaches me when I step out of the car is the smell.
Garlic. Butter. Meat that’s been doing something slow since the afternoon. My fortress smells like somebody’s home, which is a security breach no consultant ever warned me about.
The kitchen, when I reach it, is a hostage situation.
My grandmother is sitting on a stool at the counter with a glass of wine, doing nothing. I have not witnessed Yelena Volkonskaya do nothing in a kitchen in thirty years. Kitchens reorganize themselves around my grandmother the way water reorganizes around a dropped stone. Tonight she’s perched at the counter like an empress reviewing a successful campaign, wine in hand, pointing occasionally, being cheerfully ignored.
At the stove, in an apron she found God knows where, barefoot, hair tied up off her neck, stands Cynthia. There’s flour on one forearm. Four pans are going at once, plus the oven, plus something on a board that smells like dill. She’s running the room the way she ran the baccarat table, the whole operation visible to her at one glance. Tasha takes orders like glad junior staff. Roma stands at the counter trusted with nothing butthe bread knife, wearing the expression of a man who’s been insulted in a way he respects.
I stand in the doorway of my own kitchen like a guest.
Here’s what nobody tells you about a woman cooking in your house. It does more damage than the couture ever did. I’ve put her in silk that needed armed transport, then watched a salon full of powerful men lose their places in their own sentences. None of it put a dent in me like this.
The dishtowel. The bare feet. The one loose curl stuck to the back of her neck. I run an empire on the principle that I can’t be ambushed inside my own walls. The back of a woman’s neck just disproved a decade of doctrine, and I have built entire interrogations on less than what that curl is doing to me right now.
Yelena sees me first.
“Seva.” She lifts the wine an inch in my direction. “You’re late. We started without your permission.”
“I can see that.”
“The girl cooks,” she says in Russian, with the satisfaction of a general whose long campaign has turned. “Real food. Your brother would have eaten the pan.”
There’s no ration that covers that, so I don’t answer it. The old needle goes in the way it always goes in. It comes out easier than usual, though, in a kitchen that smells like this. That’s new. Kostya was the one who belonged at tables. Every memory I have of my brother with food in front of him is loud, his elbows everywhere, talking with his hands, stealing off other people’s plates because his own was never as interesting.
The family table died with him as far as I was concerned. I’ve eaten standing up for ten years. Tonight my house is setting the long table without me, for no occasion at all. The dead get mentioned over wine like they’re allowed back in the room, and I find I don’t hate it. What I feel is too big for the ration. Three words won’t hold it.
Dinner is the long table with every chair taken. Guards rotate in off the wall in shifts, eat like wolves trying to remember their manners, rotate back out. Kir has seconds, then thirds, then hovers near the pot until Cynthia hands him a fourth without being asked. The boy goes red to the ears and looks at her like she invented food.
The table is loud in two languages. Somebody tells a story about a goat from a childhood in another country, which loses nothing in translation because the goat is the hero in both. The story turns out to have a sequel. The sequel is worse for the goat. Kir laughs so hard he has to leave the table, comes back, hears the word goat, leaves again.
My grandmother laughs until she has to put her glass down. My house, the one I built with sightlines, setback distances, glass rated against rifles, is full of steam, noise, people leaning back in their chairs, and not one piece of it was my doing.
I take the seat at the end because it’s mine. She plates for me without asking, sets it down, doesn’t linger. I give her the nod, because the whole table is watching us without watching us, and a nod is what the pakhan has.
Partway through, Yelena stands, taps her glass once, and the table goes silent so fast it would impress a drill instructor.
“To the cook,” she says, in English, for exactly one person’s benefit, and seventy years of iron stand there daring anyone to be slow about it. The table comes up like a wave. Vodka, wine, water glasses, Kir nearly knocking his chair over. Cynthia goes pink to the roots of her hair, waves them all off, mutters something about it just being braised short ribs.
I drink to her with the rest. From the end of the table, over the rims of a dozen raised glasses, she looks at me, just for a second, and I keep my face neutral. That’s the discipline I have left, the face. The rest of me drank like the boys did, all the way down.
