Page 65 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
His head snaps back. The pistol drops away from her temple. He is dead before his vain ruined face finishes its surprise. He folds away from her, hits the concrete, and she is standing there untouched, swaying, whole, staring at me across the smoke with her hand coming up to where his gun just was. There’s blood on her feet. Bare feet in a building full of glass, and she walked toward the guns on them.
I fired the gun I could never fire. And this time it saved the thing I love instead of taking it.
There’s no time to feel it. There’s a roar to my left. I turn, and there he is.
Gleb Morozov. The old wolf himself, out from whatever room he’d been running this from, an old pistol in his fist, his men dead or scattering around him. He looks at me across the wreckage of his stronghold with the face of a man who genuinely cannot believe the upstart has come this far. He knew my father.
He has called me a usurper for years, a boy who climbed over his own blood to take a throne he had no right to, and the worst of it has always been that I half-believed him. He took Crystal. He took Cynthia. He drew himself out of his city to break me withthe two of them, and now his enforcer is dead at my woman’s feet, his house coming down around him.
He raises the old pistol. He’s slow. He’s sixty-one, slow, out of men, but the conviction in his face never wavers, because from where he stands he is still the rightful order and I am still the disease.
“Your father,” he begins.
He doesn’t get the sentence.
I don’t give him the shot. I cross the space between us before he can bring it up. I take it out of his hand. I do the thing I have wanted to do since a man put a gun to her head in the desert and started all of this. I do it myself.
Face to face, close, no crossfire, no proxy, no distance to hide behind, the way these things are meant to be answered in his old world and mine. I look the man who started this war in the eyes. I end him, and I end the war in the same motion, because a pakhan who kills the man calling him a usurper, with his own hands, in front of both their organizations, is a pakhan no one will ever again call a usurper.
The legitimacy I’ve bled for my whole life. It was never going to come from my father, or from a clean record, or from the child I didn’t know I’d have. It comes from this. From standing over Gleb Morozov in the ruins of his own stronghold and being the one still breathing.
Then it’s quiet. Not all the way, there’s still fire somewhere, still my men calling clear room to room, still the ringing of the last shots. But the center of it goes quiet, a small still circle with me at the middle. I stand there over the body of the man who shouldhave been the most frightening thing in my life, and I wait to feel the thing I’ve always felt standing over my dead.
It doesn’t come. What comes instead is her name in my own head, just her name, the whole of my interior reduced to one word with smoke around it.
I turn, and she’s there. Cynthia. Barefoot in the smoke, filthy, shaking, alive, her hand on her stomach, her eyes on me. Unhurt. Both of them unhurt, the two lives I was certain down to my bones that I would destroy the way I destroy everything I love, standing in front of me undestroyed, because for once in my life I did not freeze and I did not lose them.
The curse I have carried since the worst second of my life, the bone-certainty that loving a thing is a death sentence I sign for it, doesn’t break with a sound. It just isn’t there anymore. I look at her standing in the wreckage with our child inside her and I understand, all at once, that the thing I believed about myself for ten years was a lie I told to keep from having to risk this. I can love something and not kill it. I just proved it, with the gun I swore I’d never pick up again.
I go to her across the bodies and the smoke. I don’t say anything. There aren’t words yet, in either of my languages, for what just happened in me. I just put my hands on her face, careful, like she’s the only real thing left in a burning world.
“You’re late,” she rasps, smoke in her voice, her hands fisted in my shirt hard enough to tear it.
“Traffic,” I say. Her laugh breaks in the middle. I hold the breaking. She lets me, and we stand there in the ruin of Gleb Morozov’s stronghold, both of us alive, the war over, neither of us destroyed.
For the first time since I was a boy with a future, I’m holding something I love, and I’m not afraid it’s already dying in my hands.
32
SEVASTIAN
We get back to the ranch in the gray before dawn. It isn’t until the gate closes behind us, until Brown has looked her over, called them both unharmed, that the thing I’ve been holding off all night finally arrives and nearly takes me down where I stand.
I almost lost her. I almost lost both of them. I held the truth of that off through the drive, the assault, the killing, because a man running a war can’t feel it and keep functioning. But the war is over. Morozov is dead in his own ruins.
Vadim is gone. There is nothing left to point myself at, nothing left to do with the enormous black thing I’ve been carrying, so it comes for me all at once in the quiet of my own bedroom, and it isn’t relief, not yet. It’s the delayed terror, the full weight of how close the dark came to taking the only thing I’ve ever been unable to live without.
She’s standing by the window in one of my shirts, scrubbed clean of the blood and the salt, alive. Her hair is wet. The room smellsof my own soap on her skin, and no perfume she’s ever worn has hit me harder. Just alive. Breathing in my room in the gray light. I cross to her. I take her face in both my hands, careful, the way I did in the smoke, and I find I can’t say any of the enormous things. So I say the small one.
“You’re alive.”
“I’m alive.” Her voice is rough. Her eyes search mine. Whatever she sees there makes something in her go soft. “Sevastian. I’m right here.”
“Your feet,” I say, because they’re bandaged, because Brown got there first, because apparently the enormous things won’t fit through my mouth tonight, only the smallest ones.
“My feet are fine. Brown gave them a medal.”
Then I’m kissing her, and it is nothing like any of the other times.
