Page 49 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
For one hour, in a guest room in a fortress in the desert, I’m not alone with it. Crystal makes me laugh through the snot and the tears. She tells me my baby’s going to be terrifyingly gorgeous with that gene pool. She makes me promise to name it something she can pronounce. She drinks both glasses of her own warm champagne, since I can’t.
“More for me,” she says, solemn, toasting my stomach. “To Peanut. May it get your brains, his face, and somebody else’s entire life situation.” And for that one hour the war, the cold man down the hall, the whole impossible mess of my life shrinks down to two girls on a bed who love each other, the way they have since two broke dancers decided to be each other’s family.
Crystal leaves at dusk. She hugs me at the door long enough that the guard clears his throat, makes me swear to text her every day. “Every day,” she repeats, backing toward her car, pointing at me with both hands. “Pictures of the rose garden. Updates on Peanut and the hot Russians, in that order.” I watch her little car kick up dust down the long drive until the gate swallows it, and I go back inside lighter than I’ve been in weeks, the secret shared, the weight halved, almost happy.
Then the guard at the gate calls up to the house, and the lightness ends.
Something’s been left at the gate. No car, no person, just a box, set down on the road outside the fence sometime in the last hour and found by the man on watch. They bring it up the drive and set it on the kitchen island. Tasha frowns at it. Roma’s face goesflat and careful. I stand there with my hand drifting toward my stomach again as someone slits it open. An hour ago this counter held contraband champagne and the best secret of my life. Now everyone in the room is standing one step further from the island than they need to.
It’s a gift. Wrapped, even, in nice paper, the kind of thing you’d send to congratulate someone. Inside is nothing dangerous, no bomb, no threat spelled out in words. Just an object, placed there for me to find, plus a small mark on the lid that makes Roma go very still. He says one word into the phone, a name I last heard in the desert on the worst night of my old life, the night before the worst night of my new one.
Timur.
The man who put a gun to my head in the sand. The one who ran off wounded into the dark and never stopped being out there somewhere. He left me a present at the gate of the fortress where I’m supposed to be safe, wrapped pretty, signed with his mark, and the message under the paper is so clear it doesn’t need a single word.
I know exactly where you are. I know they’ve put you behind walls. And I’m enjoying how long this is taking.
The lockdown was supposed to feel like protection. Standing there with that wrapped box on the counter and Roma already on the phone in fast low Russian, I understand for the first time what it actually is. A box. A fortified, guarded, gorgeous box. Now I know my name is on the outside of it, and the man who wants me dead knows exactly which box to come find. I put my face in order before anyone can read it, because that’s the other thing that changed in a bathroom this morning. It isn’t only my own skin I’m keeping secrets behind anymore.
I put both hands over my stomach this time. Over the secret nobody can take from me, the one good thing I’ve got, the thing that could save my life or end it. I haven’t decided which.
Mine to keep. For now.
23
CINDY
The call comes mid-morning, and I know it’s bad before I even answer, because the only people who have this number are people I love.
It’s Lacey. She’s crying. She’s trying to talk through the crying, the words coming in pieces, the pieces falling in this order. Crystal didn’t come home last night. Crystal didn’t show for her shift this morning. Crystal isn’t answering her phone, hasn’t answered since last night. Her car is still in the lot behind the club where she left it, doors locked, purse gone, like she walked away from it in the middle of getting in. Behind Lacey’s voice I can hear the club’s daytime quiet, a vacuum running somewhere, a radio, the world going on like it hasn’t noticed.
I’m standing in the kitchen of the fortress when the bottom drops out of me. I don’t fall. I just go very cold, very still, the way I went still in the desert with a gun at my head, the way your body locks up when it understands something terrible a half second before your mind will let you.
The fear hasn’t even taken shape yet, just a weight, dropping. Some animal part of me already knows. The rest is still catching up. My hands have gone cold around the phone. Outside the window the desert is bright, flat, going about its business. It stays bright all day, which I hold against it.
“Tell me about the regulars,” I hear myself say, in a voice that isn’t mine.
Lacey sniffles. “What regulars?”
“There were new guys. Weren’t there? The last week or two. Friendly. Buying drinks.” I already know. I’ve known since the wordgonecame out of her mouth. “Buying Crystal drinks. Asking her things.”
“Yeah.” A wet pause. “Two guys, real nice, big tippers, been coming in all week. They loved Crystal. Everybody loves Crystal. They kept asking about, I don’t know, they were interested in her life, her friends, the whole, you know how she gets, she’ll tell anybody anything.” Lacey’s voice breaks all over again. “Oh my God. Cindy. Were they?”
I can’t answer her. Because the thing I’m seeing, the thing assembling itself behind my eyes with a clarity that’s going to live in me forever, is the whole of it, the whole stupid simple cruelty of it.
They didn’t come for me. They couldn’t get to me. I’m behind walls, behind a gate, behind a man with a rifle, behind the full weight of the most dangerous organization in the state. They can’t reach me. So they reached for the one place I’m soft, the one thing I couldn’t fortify, and they did it by being nice to a girl who never in her life met a stranger.
Crystal told them everything. Of course she did. That’s not her failing. That’s her gift, the thing I loved most about her, the open uncomplicated heart that trusted the whole world. Picture it. Two friendly men buy her drinks for a week, ask about her life, and she lights up the way she lights up for everyone, tells them all of it, because telling people things is how Crystal loves.
She told them about her best friend who’d run off with a rich scary boyfriend. She told them where I went. She probably told them I was happy. She’d have shown them pictures. She had no idea she was handing me to the people who want me dead, because nobody told her there was anything to guard, because the danger was supposed to be on me alone. Crystal was just an ordinary girl outside all of it who happened to love the wrong person.
She had no detail. No gate. No man with a rifle. Nobody watching her back at all, because watching her back was never the plan, because she was never supposed to be in this. So when the two nice men she’d been laughing with for a week were waiting in the lot after her shift, there was no one to stop them. That was all it took. A week of free drinks. A dark parking lot. A girl who trusted everybody. It’s so small and so cruel I want to be sick on the kitchen floor.
I don’t remember crossing the house. One second I’m in the kitchen with the phone going dead in my hand, the next I’m in the doorway of Sevastian’s study, the look on my face stopping every conversation in the room.
“They took Crystal,” I say.
He’s on his feet before I finish the sentence. I have never seen him move like this. The pakhan, the cold, the careful, all of it burned off in an instant. For once I don’t care what’s behind hisface. I only care what he does, and what he does is start a war machine I’ve only ever seen the edges of.
