Page 59 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
One by one, without a single raised voice, every person who might believe me, every door I might leave by, has been quietly removed from my reach, and the removal is so polite, so administratively ordinary, that anyone watching would see a woman simply having a normal morning in a well-run house. Petya isn’t at the gate.
That’s the detail that turns my spit to dust. Petya, who loses at cards to everyone, who’d have heard me yell. Somebody rotated him to the far fence an hour ago, and an hour ago is exactly when Sevastian left for the city.
That’s when the real fear comes, the cold dropping kind. Because this isn’t muscle. Nobody’s grabbed me. Nobody’s even been rude. This is something worse, this is the machine of the house itself turning against me, the protocols, the schedules, the chain of command, all the careful systems that are supposed to keep me safe, redirected by the one man with the authority to move every piece on the board without anyone questioning it. He built this security. He knows every gap because he designed every gap. And right now he is using all of it, gently, like closing a hand.
I stop pretending to be calm and I run.
I go for the front of the house, for the big doors, for the drive, for anywhere with a sightline to the gate and the guard who actually likes me. I make it through the great room. I make it into the front hall, my heart going like a fist on a door. For one bright second I can see the tall front doors standing open to the desert light, and I think I’m going to make it, I think if I can just reach the gate, if I can scream the right name loud enough.
Vadim is standing in the doorway.
He isn’t even hurrying. He’s just there, filling the light, the old soldier, calm as a closed door. Two of his men are already behind me in the hall. And I understand in one sick lurch that he let me run, that he wanted to see which way I’d break so he’d know how much of a problem I am. Now he knows.
“Cynthia.” Gentle. He says it gently, the way Yelena says it, and that’s the obscene part, that he uses the warm voice while he does this. “You’re going to hurt yourself. And the baby. We can’t have that.”
“Don’t you say baby to me.” My voice shakes but I don’t back up. “You sold Crystal. You sold all of them. To the people who put her in the desert in pieces.”
Something moves behind his eyes, and for a second I think I see grief there, real grief, which is the worst thing of all, because it means he knows exactly what he is, that he does it anyway. “You don’t understand what was taken from me,” he says quietly. “You never could. So I won’t ask you to.”
“Yelena loves you. He loves you. You were his brother’s best friend, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t.” It comes out of him low and terrible, the only crack in the calm. I watch years of something rotten move under his face. “Don’t you say what I was to that family. You don’t have the right.”
I fight. I want it known, for my kid someday, that I did not go quietly. When the two men close on me I go for eyes and throats the way a girl learns to in parking lots. I get a fistful of one man’s collar, my nails into another one’s face. I get a knee where knees go, and the man folds sideways with a sound I’d enjoy in any other life.
I scream until something in my throat tears, loud, the gate, the guard, anyone at all. But the great room is far from the gate. The men who’d come running are the men Vadim sent away. The only people close enough to hear are the people doing this to me. A hand comes over my mouth that smells of cigarettes.
An arm like a bar locks across my chest, careful, deliberately careful, and I understand even through the panic that they are being gentle with me on purpose. I am being handled like something breakable, something valuable. The reason for thatcare is the one thing keeping me alive, the one thing I’d give anything to hide.
One of them says a word to the other, low, in Russian. One of my nine words. Careful. They’re being told to be careful with me, in the language Tasha taught me by scandal. I file the word away with the turns, the time, because everything is a weapon now or nothing is.
They take me out a service door I never knew existed. There’s a car in the back, engine running, far from the gate, far from the cameras, far from the one guard who’d have radioed the house. Vadim built this exit too. Of course he did.
They put me in the back seat between two men. As the car pulls down a service road behind the property, I twist around once and look back. I make myself memorize it, the angle of the house against the hills, the turn we take onto the highway, north, then the long empty road, because some animal part of me that refuses to lie down is already keeping notes, already planning, already certain that I will need to know exactly where they took me.
I am not going to be a body they find in the sand. I decide that in the back of the car, cold and shaking, the way I decided at nineteen that a shattered knee was not going to be the end of me. They will not get to make me into another Crystal. I have a kid to keep.
The drive is long. Nobody speaks to me. The men smell of cigarettes and fast food. The radio stays off. Outside, the day goes down slow, gold, then rust, then gone. The desert opens up the way it did the first night, the same emptiness, the same enormous indifferent sky, and the symmetry of it is so cruel I could laugh. This time I know exactly what the headlights mean.Knowing is better. Knowing has edges you can hold. I came into all of this in the desert at night with men who wanted me dead, and here I am again, the wheel come all the way around.
I think about Crystal the whole drive. I can’t help it. I think about how it must have gone for her, the friendly men who turned, the lot behind the club, the hours after that I will never let myself picture. I think about her popping that eleven-dollar champagne, swearing she’d be there for every second.
She was supposed to be the lucky one, the bubbly one, the one nothing bad ever stuck to. They took her apart in this same desert, left her for a stranger’s dog to find. She’d have talked to these men. That’s the thing I keep biting down on. Even taken, even terrified, she’d have asked the one with the lighter about his sister, because her heart had no doors. I’m in the same car staring at the same kind of men like a stone, and only one of us is alive to do it.
I am not going to be that. I decide it the way I decided at nineteen, flat on my back with my knee in pieces and a coach dead because of me, that the wreck was not going to be the last sentence of my story. They want me afraid. Afraid is what they feed on, what Timur feeds on, you could see it in his pretty ruined face.
So I make myself the one thing he won’t know what to do with. I make myself watchful instead. I memorize the turns, the minutes between them. I take stock of the men, the way they hold their guns, who’s nervous, who’s bored. In this car I am a problem they have not finished solving, and problems like me have a way of getting loose.
Then there are headlights ahead, parked, waiting. The car slows. Everything in me drops, because I know what a meeting in the desert at night means. I learned that the first night too.
We stop. They walk me out into the headlights’ glare, the cold desert air biting through my clothes, and a man gets out of the other car. He walks toward us, unhurried, taking his time, enjoying it. I know who it has to be before I can see his face. The man from the first night. The one who put a gun to my head in the sand and ran off wounded into the dark. Timur.
He’s prettier than a man like him has any right to be, and vainer, you can see it in the way he’s groomed even out here in the middle of nowhere. There’s a scar now, pale and new, running up the side of his face, the scar I know Sevastian gave him. He touches it without thinking when he sees me, like the sight of me makes it ache, and the look he gives me is pure personal hatred dressed up as a smile, the smile of a man who has waited a long, ugly time for this delivery.
“The little witness,” he says, savoring it. “You have no idea how much trouble you’ve been. Look what you did to my face.”
I don’t give him anything. I learned that the first night too. You don’t feed them your fear. I give him the face I gave a thousand drunks at the rail, pleasant, bored, bulletproof. His smile thins. Good. Men like him need the fear like rent, and I’ve just gone delinquent.
He looks past me to Vadim, and his smile turns into something colder, the contempt of one kind of traitor for another. “She’s whole,” he says, checking the merchandise. “He wants her whole. For now.”
