Page 53 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
And I have no answer.
That stops me, standing there in the wreckage of the worst day either of us has ever had. For the entire length of whatever this is between us, every time we’ve gone to war with each other, I’ve had the better of the argument, or at least an equal share of it.
Not now. Now she’s looking at me having predicted me exactly, having known to the letter what I’d become the instant I found out, having kept the most precious secret of her life from me for the specific reason that I would do this with it. She was right. She read me weeks ago and protected herself accordingly. I have just proven her correct in front of her own eyes, on the day her friend died for the secret she was right to keep.
She was wrong to hide a child from its father. I know that. Some part of me will hold that against her for a long time, the deceit, the fact that my enemy knew before I did.
But she was also right about what I’d do. We are both standing here knowing it. There’s no version of me that can open my mouth and make that untrue.
So I don’t try.
I leave the room instead. I give the orders that turn her cage from a figure of speech into a fact, men on the doors, eyes on the windows, the gate sealed. I tell myself it’s protection. I tell myself a dozen things on the way down the stairs, not one of which touches the real thing.
Which is this. I have just lost something I didn’t know I had, gained something I don’t know how to hold, driven the only person I’ve ever wanted into the far corner of a room she now hates, all in the same ten minutes. All of it my doing. Exactly the way it has always been my doing, with everyone I have ever made the mistake of loving.
Upstairs, behind a door I’ve ordered watched, she’s alone with her grief, with her secret that isn’t a secret anymore, with a man posted outside who’ll note it if she so much as crosses to the bathroom.
Downstairs, I am alone in a different way, which is the only way I’ve ever really known.
Crystal is in the desert in pieces.
There’s a child.
And the woman I’d burn the world for is sitting twenty feet above my head, certain past arguing that I’m exactly the disaster she always feared, holding a grievance as real as the one I’m holding against her, neither of us with the first idea how to set it down.
I always knew it would come to something like this. I just didn’t think it would be the desert that brought it, the same desert that started all of it, handing everything back to me in ruins.
God help her. She let me in.
She should have known better. They all should have. I tell every one of them, in the end, in one language or another. I’m the thing in the dark their mothers warned them about.
She just had to learn it the way they all learn it.
Late.
25
CINDY
Everyone in this house is waiting for me to break. I can feel it, the careful way they move around me, the soft voices, the trays of food left at my door like offerings to something fragile. They think grief on top of a baby makes a woman who shatters. They’ve never met me.
I spent my whole life learning what to do with the kind of pain that wants to take you down with it. You don’t lie under it. You get up, you find the thing that did it to you, you make that the job. Crystal is dead because of a leak. Somewhere a mouth opened that shouldn’t have, and my best friend got taken apart in the desert for it. I am not going to sit behind these pretty walls being fragile while the mouth that did it keeps eating breakfast.
Because here’s what I’ve worked out, lying awake in a locked house. The walls Sevastian built to keep the danger out have a flaw he won’t look at straight. They keep the danger in, too. Whoever fed me to the wolves is on this side of the gate. I’m sure of it before I have a shred of proof, the way I knew the desert waswrong that night before I ever came up over the rise. The traitor isn’t out there somewhere in Los Angeles. The traitor sleeps under this roof.
So I do the only thing left to a woman who can’t leave her own house. I hunt from inside it.
I’m good at exactly one thing that matters here, and no file ever taught it to me. I read people. A dancer learns it or a dancer starves. Right now I’m locked in a house full of faces, with nothing to do all day but watch them.
I start where my own gut first pinged, weeks ago, before any of this mattered. The watchers. Not Sevastian’s men, the other ones, the second set, the ones I caught photographing me on the shopping day and the ones who tailed me before I was anything worth tailing.
I pulled a watcher’s name off a valet ticket once like a paranoid lunatic, and I was right to. Roma ran the name for me last week, no questions asked. It came back a shell, an employee of a parking company that doesn’t exist. Even the fake was professional. Those were Morozov’s eyes, on me from the outside, from the very beginning. That part I can explain to myself cleanly. Morozov had me watched out in the open, in the city, at the club, which is how his people knew exactly where to find a bubbly blonde who’d tell two friendly strangers her whole life story over a free drink. An outside watcher could learn all of that. An outside watcher only needs to sit at the bar.
But that’s the shallow wound, and it’s not the one keeping me up.
Because some of what hit this family couldn’t have come from a man on a barstool. I’ve sat quiet through enough tense dinners now to catch the shape of it. The stash house that got raided,where Sevastian’s men walked in expecting a quiet night and found people waiting for them. The convoy that got torn apart on the one empty stretch of road, by men who knew the route, the timing, the exact count of guns.
You don’t learn those things at a bar. You don’t photograph those from a parking garage. Those are things only a handful of people inside this family carry around in their heads, and somebody handed them to Los Angeles.
