Page 67 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
Every other time, with her, with anyone, the second it’s over the walls come slamming back up and I get out, physically or behind my own eyes, because the after is when a man goes soft, when softness gets him killed. Not tonight. Tonight I stay inside the moment, inside her arms, not reaching for the door, because there is no door anymore, because the thing I was always running from already happened, and I survived it. I gather heragainst my chest, both of us wrecked and breathing hard, her ear over my heart. I hold on, finally done fighting the thing I want.
“Stay,” she says, already half asleep, a word she’s never once let herself use on me.
“I’m staying.”
Two words. The old budget, spent on the opposite thing now.
We lie tangled in the dark a long time, her leg over mine, my hand spread on the small swell of her belly, her breath evening out toward sleep.
And somewhere in that dark, I make the choice.
I have spent my whole life making sure I never loved anything enough to be destroyed by losing it. I built an empire to wall myself off. I buried my brother’s truth so deep it rotted a man I trusted into a traitor. I called this woman a job, an asset, a problem, anything but the thing she actually was, because naming it would mean I could lose it.
And tonight I learned that I was always going to be able to lose her whether I admitted loving her or not. The loving doesn’t create the danger. It was always there. All the not-loving ever bought me was a colder life with the same risk underneath.
So I stop. Lying there in the dark with her heartbeat under my hand, I choose her. Fully, consciously, with both eyes open and no illusions about what it could cost me someday, the way it costs every man who lets himself love a mortal thing in a dangerous world. I choose it anyway. I choose her, the child, the terror that comes bundled with them, because the alternative is the man I was a year ago, and that man was already dead, he just hadn’t been told yet.
She sleeps. I don’t. I lie awake and watch the gray turn to gold at the edges of the curtains, watch the light come up across her face, the lashes on her cheek, the slight part of her lips, Brown’s advice to rest being ignored in two languages, the pulse in her throat that I keep checking, still not convinced of my luck. I have spent a decade planning my exit from every room, every deal, every person, always one move from the door, always ready to cut and survive.
For the first time, watching dawn break over the woman carrying my child, I have no exit planned from anything. I am exactly where I want to be, and I am going to stay. The only thing left in me that feels anything like fear is the good kind now, the kind that means you finally have something worth being afraid for.
She stirs, half-wakes, finds me watching her. “Creep,” she murmurs, not opening her eyes, smiling, burrowing into my chest.
“Guilty,” I say, in English. Then I tell her in Russian what I’m actually guilty of, the whole indictment, every charge, safe in a language she sleeps through. Someday I’ll say it where she can hear it. Tonight the saying is for me.
I hold her while she falls back asleep. I watch the sun come up. I do not move, and I do not leave.
33
CINDY
Winning doesn’t bring her back. That’s the thing nobody warns you about. The war is over, the men who killed her are dead in the desert they left her in, and I keep waiting to feel something like victory. What I feel instead is the same hole I went to sleep with. Crystal is still gone. All that blood, and not one drop of it un-killed my best friend. Her last text is still the last text. Her contact photo still laughs at me from my favorites, between Lacey and Promise, the heart emoji she added herself. The phone doesn’t know yet. I can’t make myself teach it.
I sleep most of a day. When I surface, the grief is sitting on my chest like an animal that moved in while I was out. Tasha has left soup outside the door twice. The second bowl comes with a note, just a heart and her name. The heart is lopsided. She was crying when she drew it. I read hands for a living. I know. I lie in Sevastian’s bed in the gold afternoon light and brace myself for what comes next.
Because I know how this man handles a mess. I have watched him do it since March. I’ve already drafted my half of that fight, a skill this house has perfected in me. What I’ve never once seen modeled, anywhere, is whatever he does instead. He throws money at it. He goes cold, competent, far away, manages the problem from behind glass, sends flowers, lawyers, silence, never once letting the thing actually touch him.
That’s what I’m waiting for now, the part where the warmth of last night turns out to be the adrenaline talking, the pakhan comes back polite and remote, writes me a check for my dead friend.
He comes in near sundown with two cups of coffee, sits down on the edge of the bed, and he doesn’t do any of that.
He hands me a coffee. He looks at me a long moment, and there’s something working behind his eyes I’ve never seen there before, something that costs him. He looks like he’s been carrying something heavy up stairs all day, deciding which floor to set it down on. Then the most guarded man I have ever known opens his mouth and starts giving me the truth.
“I need to tell you something I have never told anyone,” he says. “Because you almost died for the lack of people in this house telling each other the truth, and I am done being one of them.”
And he tells me about his brother.
Kostya. He says the name like it has edges. Then he keeps saying it, deliberately, four times, five, the way you walk on a leg that’s just come out of a cast, testing what it carries now. He tells me there was a brother, younger, the warm one, the funny one, the one Sevastian protected his whole life. He tells me about an ambush years ago, close quarters, dark, smoke and muzzle flash,two sides closing in. He tells me his brother moved at the wrong instant, moved into the line of fire, and that the bullet that killed him came from Sevastian’s own gun.
I go very still.
“It was an accident,” he says, and his voice is flat in the way I’ve learned means he’s holding something at gunpoint to keep it from showing. “The worst second of my life. I have lived it ten thousand times and it ends the same way every time. But I let everyone believe the enemy did it, because I could not survive them knowing. I took the throne over his body. I built all of this as an apology to a dead man who will never hear it. And the man who just sold you to Morozov, the man who got Crystal killed, that was Kostya’s best friend, who spent years certain I murdered my brother for power, because I was too much a coward to ever tell him the truth.”
He sets his coffee down, untouched. “My lie put the gun in Vadim’s hand as surely as I ever held one. Crystal is dead at the end of a lie I told to protect myself. You should know that, before you decide anything about me.”
The room is very quiet. Outside, somewhere, a horse moves in the paddock, that ordinary sound, while this man hands me the thing he’s been carrying alone for a decade, the thing he killed a part of himself to keep buried.
And I understand, sitting there with the coffee going cold in my hands, that he has just made himself completely defenseless in front of me. He’s given me the one thing that could destroy him. No money, no glass, no cold remove. Just the truth, ugly and whole, laid in my lap like an offering.
