Page 47 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
It needs me watching faces with nothing else pulling at my attention, and at the moment I have nothing but other things pulling at my attention. So I bank it. Move on a suspicion in this much smoke and I’ll guess, and a wrong guess buries an innocent man and warns the guilty one. I’ll find him. Not today. But I will find him, and when I do, there won’t be enough left of him to bury.
Late in the afternoon, with the immediate fires contained and the floor of my casino taped off as a crime scene, I sit down for the first time in nine hours. That’s when I notice the blood on mycuff. Not mine. I don’t remember whose. And in the stillness that comes with finally sitting, the second realization arrives, the one I’ve been outrunning all day. It’s so much worse than the traitor.
I can’t win this clean. That’s the first half of it. Gleb has decided to burn my world down in order to take it, and a man willing to burn the thing he wants can’t be beaten by a man trying to keep it whole. I’m going to have to become worse than I’ve let myself be in years. Fine. I remember how to be worse. I built all of this on being worse, and I have only ever pretended to set it down.
Somewhere in Los Angeles an old man is hearing about my day in detail, from a voice I’d know if I heard it. I don’t have the voice yet. I have the certainty, which is worse company.
It’s the second half that stops my breath.
Because I sit there in the war room with another man’s blood drying on my shirt, going through every exposed point in my empire the way your tongue keeps going back to a cracked tooth, and the most exposed point isn’t a storefront, or a convoy, or a gap in my security. It’s a woman.
A blond dancer behind the walls of my ranch forty minutes north of here. A woman I’ve spent weeks calling an asset, a job, a problem to manage. A woman I lied about to myself in a count room with her still warm against me. A woman who fed my entire garrison one night and beat them at cards with their own faces, while I stood in a doorway holding my ration like a fool. And the truth I’ve been refusing to hold arrives now all at once, with the worst timing it could possibly choose.
I love her. I have been pretending otherwise, badly, the whole time. And in this life, the thing you love is not a private comfort. It’s a handle. It’s the exact place they reach for when they want tomake you do something you’d never otherwise do. The moment Gleb Morozov works out what that woman is to me, she stops being a stripper I claimed for a cover story and becomes the most valuable object in the state, the one lever in the world that can move a man who otherwise cannot be moved.
Gleb is good. As good as I am, on a bad day better. If I worked it out sitting here with a dead man’s blood on my cuff, he can work it out too. He has eyes. He’s had eyes on her since the desert. Sooner or later he looks at the woman the untouchable pakhan hides behind walls and tends like a secret. He understands what she is. Then he goes hunting for the softest way to reach her.
He won’t come at the walls. The walls are hard. He’ll come at the soft edges instead, the ones I can’t fortify, the people in her life who live out in the open with no detail and no gate. The whole world she had before me, the one I can’t drag behind concrete without telling her exactly how afraid I’ve become. Her dancers. Her landlord. The bartender who knows her usual. A whole city of soft doors with her fingerprints on the knobs.
So I make the calls. I order her locked down completely. No city, no leaving, the ranch and nothing past its gate. I already know she’ll fight me on it. I already know I’ll win, because on this one thing I have to. Then I do the colder thing, the one I don’t let myself look at straight on.
I put quiet eyes on the people in her life. Not a detail, nothing she’d ever notice, nothing that would frighten her. Just watchers, the way you watch the roads into a place you’re guarding. If I’ve found her soft edge, Gleb will find it too, and I would much rather have men already standing there when he reaches for it than be one move behind on the single piece of this whole war I cannot afford to lose.
Cover every angle, I tell myself. Protect the asset.
The truth is plainer. I just wrapped the full weight of my organization around one woman because the thought of her getting hurt does something to me that no burning building did all day, and that, more than the dead men, more than the lost ground, more than a traitor at my own table, is the thing that ought to frighten me most. A pakhan with a weakness this size is a pakhan with a clock already running.
I sit in the war room with the blood on my cuff, the screens full of my ruined day, and I let myself think it once, all the way through, the sentence I’ve been stepping around since the count room.
If they take her, I will burn this entire country down to get her back, and everyone who matters will see exactly how far I’ll go, which means everyone who matters now knows where to cut me.
I have just named the thing I can’t lose. Even alone. Even silent. Even only to myself, in a concrete room nobody else can hear.
It feels like painting a target on the one person I’d die before I’d lose, and the worst part is that I can’t take it back, because the truth doesn’t care that I waited until the worst possible day to admit it. It’s true now. It was probably true out in the desert. And somewhere past my walls in the dark, a patient old man is already searching for the place where I bleed.
I spent my whole life making sure I had nothing soft enough to lose. I gave myself one rule, the only rule that ever mattered, and I broke it. The break has a name. Cynthia.
God help us both.
22
CINDY
After the desert, after he said my name soft enough to break me, Sevastian disappears.
Not literally. The war won’t let him leave, so he’s still here, behind the same walls I am, the walls that went from feeling like a cage to feeling like the only safe place on earth and now feel like a cage again. But the man who held me against the hood of a car under a billion stars is gone.
In his place is the pakhan, formal, cold, a hundred miles away even when he’s across a room. He nods at me at dinner. He answers me in three words. The night I fed his entire household, I got two and the nod. He throws himself into the war like the war is a place he can hide from me, and maybe it is.
Meals come and go. The house tiptoes. Tasha overcompensates with gossip, Yelena watches the two of us over her tea like a critic at a bad play, and Petya at the gate has stopped meeting my eyes, which is how I know the whole compound has an opinion.
I know what this is. I watched him do it three times before he ever took me to the desert, the warmth draining out the second anything got real. I just didn’t think he’d do it after he meant it. We went deeper than we’d ever gone, and he answered by going further away than he’s ever been.
I spent nineteen years and one shattered knee learning the lesson. Never chase. Keep your face still. Never let him see what the leaving costs you.
So I don’t chase him. I eat dinner with my chin up. I let Yelena correct my Russian. I let Tasha gossip. I win eleven dollars off Kir at cards and make him pay it in quarters, for morale. Mine. I act like the coldest shoulder in Nevada is the last thing on my mind, and I almost pull it off.
I almost pull it off, right up until the morning I throw up in the guest bathroom for the third day running, and the thing I’ve been refusing to look at finally makes me look.
