Page 64 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
I have no way to know. I’m betting her life and my child’s on the word of the man who sold them both, because it’s the only word I have. Standing still was never an option my body would accept. Roma drives like the road owes him Cynthia. Nobody speaks. In the second truck, somewhere behind us, Kir is checking a vest that was already checked.
Then my phone goes off in the cupholder, and I nearly drive off the road.
It’s a text. An unknown number, a burner or a stranger’s phone, no name. Three words.
Calder Salt Works.
I read it twice. The breath goes out of me in a way no gunfire ever managed. Because that is the name. The exact name Vadim coughed up with his eyes already going dark, the property I’m forty minutes from, and it has just arrived on my phone from a number I don’t know, in the desert, at night, sent by someone who knows where I need to be.
It’s her. It has to be her. No one else on this earth would send me three flat words like a thrown knife, no plea, no please, no help, just the address, the one piece of information that turns me from a man chasing a maybe into a man who knows. She didn’t beg me to come. She told me where to aim. Even now, even there, she’s the sharpest person in any room she’s in.
And the message under the message guts me even as it lifts me. She’s alive. She was alive minutes ago, alive enough to get her hands on a phone, alive enough to think, to plan, to send me the only thing that matters. My terror doesn’t leave. It just changes shape, from the formless dread of chasing a dead man’s lie into something with edges, a target, a direction, a place with her name written on the inside of it.
I call the lead car. “It’s confirmed. Calder Salt Works. She’s inside and she’s alive.” My voice nearly breaks, a thing it never does. I let it, because every man in this convoy needs to understand that the rules just changed, that we are no longer maybe raiding a maybe. “Full speed. We take it apart.”
Through the glass behind me, three sets of headlights change pitch at once, the convoy leaning forward like one animal.
The Calder Salt Works is a dead industrial sprawl out on the white crust of a dry lake, a place that processed salt until it didn’t, all bleached concrete and rusted steel under a sky with too many stars. I know it the way I know every property my enemy owns. What I don’t expect is what my forward men report as we close. Too many vehicles for a dead factory, heavy guns on the doors, the kind of security that only ever travels with one man. Gleb Morozov is inside it.
This is no safe house, no holding pen Morozov forgot about. He’s here. The old man came up out of Los Angeles himself, out of the city he almost never leaves, and there is exactly one prize worth drawing him into the open like that. Me, reduced to a thing he can finally break. He didn’t take my woman to ransom her. He took her to own the one lever that moves me, her and the child both. He wanted to be standing here in person when he used it. He came to collect me. He just doesn’t know yet that I’m coming through his front door instead.
We hit it before dawn, from three sides, hard.
We come to kill, and we do. The first charge takes the east doors off their frame. Salt dust comes down like plaster. The air goes white, then orange. Sound stops being sound and becomes pressure with opinions. The night turns to muzzle flash, concussion, men shouting in two languages. I go in at the front of my own assault, because there is no version of this where I wait outside and let other men walk toward her first.
We move room by room through the cold concrete guts of the place, clearing, breaching, the noise enormous, and I am looking, through all of it, past every man I put down, for one face, for blond hair, for her.
I find her in a corridor full of smoke.
And she is not cowering. That is the image I will carry to my grave, the one that undoes me right there in the middle of a firefight. My pregnant woman, barefoot, bloody, filthy, upright, a dead man’s gun shaking in her two hands, walking toward the gunfire instead of away from it. She got herself out.
She got out of her cell, out of whatever they did to her, and instead of hiding to be found she armed herself, came looking for the war, as if she knew I’d be in it. I have spent a decade believing I have to protect the people I love because they cannot protect themselves. She is walking proof I was wrong about her from the first night in the sand.
The relief nearly takes my legs. For one half second the whole murderous machine of me stops, because she’s alive, whole, ten steps away, and I am going to reach her.
That’s the half second the worst moment of my life uses to arrive.
He comes out of the smoke behind her, fast, gets an arm across her throat, a pistol to her temple, before I can close the distance, before I can shout, before anything. Timur. Of course it’s Timur, the man I shot in the desert and failed to finish, the hand that has reached for her at every turn. He drags her back against him, puts the barrel hard to the side of her head, grins at me over her shoulder through the smoke, that ruined pretty face, because he knows. He knows exactly what he’s done.
He’s made the shape.
The exact shape. The one that has haunted my sleep for ten years. Someone I love in the line, an enemy behind them, a shot that cannot be taken because the person you’d die for is in the way. The last time I stood here, a gun in my hand, someone I loved in the path of it, I fired and my brother went down.
My bullet. My hand. The worst second of my life, and Timur has just rebuilt it around me, in a burning salt works, the woman I love with our child inside her standing exactly where Kostya stood. Ten years of nightmares were rehearsal. The body knows this picture by heart. The body wants to do what it did last time, which is everything wrong.
“Drop them,” Timur calls, sing-song, delighted. Up close his vanity has survived everything, the scar kept neat, the hair in order in a burning building. A man who grooms for his own apocalypse. “Drop the guns, all of you, or I paint the wall with her. You know I’ll do it. You know what we do.”
And here is where the man I have always been would freeze. Where the memory takes my hands and turns them to stone, where I see Kostya falling, where I cannot, I cannot make myself put a bullet anywhere near someone I love, because the last time I did that it ended the only family I had. Freezing is the safe thing. Freezing is what the wound has trained into me for ten years. If I freeze, maybe we negotiate, maybe there’s another way, maybe I don’t have to be the man holding the gun when she dies.
But I look at her face. She isn’t begging. Her eyes find mine over his arm, steady, furious, alive, saying the thing she would say out loud if she could, which isdo it, you idiot, I trust your hands, take the shot.And I understand, in the space between two heartbeats, that the freeze is the thing that kills her. That the safe choice, the no-risk choice, the one where I don’t have to be the one who fired, hands her to him. That loving her is not a reason to keep my hands still. It is the only reason on earth to make them steady.
So I do what I have not been able to do since I was a younger man with my brother’s blood on me.
I trust my hands.
I raise the gun. I do not think about Kostya. I do not think about the angle or the dark or the smoke or the ten thousand nights this exact picture has jerked me awake. I think about her. I let everything else go quiet, the way it used to go quiet before the worst day taught me to flinch. I find the two inches of Timur that aren’t her, and I send the bullet exactly there.
It goes where I send it.
