Page 8 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
“People keep telling me that.”
“And where are they now?”
The second it’s out of her mouth she hears it, hears exactly where the people who lecture me end up, and her eyes go wide, then narrow, daring me to make it weird. I make it weird. I smile.
“It’s not arrogance if I’m right.” I stand. I’m a great deal taller than her. She has to tip her head back to keep the eye contact going, then she does it, refusing to give me the inch. I like her for that too. I’m collecting reasons to like her at a rate that should worry me. “Saying no doesn’t make Timur forget your face. It only means you go home tonight with nothing between you, him, but a deadbolt off the hardware aisle. I’m the better offer.” I look down at her. “I’m aware that’s not saying much.”
Her shift ends an hour later. I wait. I’m a patient man about most things in this life. Tonight I am not patient at all, but I sit in the booth, I nurse the drink I’m not drinking, then I make myself watch the room instead of the door she went through. A bachelor party three tables over gets loud, then louder, then a bouncer drifts close, then they remember they have manners. A man at the bar keeps glancing over at my booth, then thinking better of it, then glancing again. He never comes over. Smart.
A busboy whose name tag says MARCO keeps finding reasons to wipe the table next to mine, working up a story for tomorrow’sshift. I let him look. By noon this room will be telling it for me, which is the entire point of the brick. The night grinds on like that, small and ordinary, while I sit in it wanting one specific woman with a focus that would embarrass me if I were the type to get embarrassed.
I’m not. I gave that up around the same time I gave up the idea that wanting things made you weak. Wanting things is fine. Letting people see how much, that’s the part that kills you, so I keep my face bored, my glass full, my eyes off the back hallway.
Eventually she’s done for the night. I watch her peel out of the costume into jeans, a jacket that’s seen better decades. I watch her say her goodnights to the other girls. One of them, a loud one with too much paint around the eyes, throws me a look across the room like she’s memorizing my face for the police sketch.
I nearly smile. Loyalty. Hard to buy in my world. Apparently it grows for free in this one, between broke women who have nothing else to give each other. There’s something almost decent in that. I don’t get to keep things that are decent. Neither, as a rule, do the people I touch.
When she comes back out, I’m already on my feet. I set a hand at the small of her back, light, just enough for the room to understand what it’s looking at. I walk her past her gawking friends, out the door, into the cleaner dark of the parking lot, where Roma has the car waiting with the rear door open.
She stops at the curb. Looks at the Cullinan, black, armored, big as a hearse. Looks at me.
“I’m not getting in a car with you,” she says.
“You are. But you’ll want to do it knowing it’s the safer choice tonight, not because I made you.” I hold the door. “I’ll take you home. That’s all this is.”
It is not all this is, not even close. From the look she gives me, she knows it as well as I do. She gets in anyway. That tells me everything I came here to learn.
I slide in beside her. The door shuts, sealing us into leather, quiet, the faint scent of her coming off the warm skin of her throat, cheap vanilla over warm skin I want to get much closer to. The car pulls out smooth into the night. The Strip slides past us, gold, gaudy, stupid through the glass.
She sits as far from me as the seat allows, arms wrapped around herself, eyes locked straight ahead, working very hard at pretending I’m not three feet away. I look at the line of her throat. I look at the way she won’t look at me. I think about how this was supposed to be a simple piece of business.
A problem. A solution. A story to keep the wolves off her until the heat passes.
It is not going to be simple. I knew that the moment she didn’t look away out in the sand, I know it now with her this close in my car, every part of me pulled toward her like a hook set under the ribs. I want her in a way that is going to cost me something before this is done. I have never once in my life let the cost of a thing stop me from taking it.
The car turns toward her apartment. I lean back. I watch her. I wait.
4
CINDY
The Cullinan stops outside my building, which looks worse than usual through a window worth more than the building. Cracked stucco. The dead palm nobody waters. The security door that hasn’t latched since March. Sevastian sees all of it. That’s the name I have for him now, Sevastian Volkonsky, because a man doesn’t put a bullet in someone right in front of you and stay a stranger for long, not when half the Strip flinches when you say it.
I watch him take in the place I call home, this man in a suit that probably has its own tailor on retainer, and I wait for the curl of the lip. It never comes.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say, which is insane, because he didn’t give me a ride. He annexed me. “You can go now.”
He gets out of the car.
“That wasn’t an invitation,” I tell him over the roof.
“I’m walking you up.” He says it the way other people say the sky is blue. Not a request. His driver stays behind the wheel, eyes front, a man who has clearly learned to see nothing on command. Then it’s just the two of us crossing the cracked lot toward my door, my heart back to that hard knock against my ribs I keep mistaking for fear.
It is not entirely fear. That’s the problem I’ve had since the desert. That’s the problem I have climbing two flights of stairs with him a step behind me, close enough that I can feel the size of him at my back, close enough that the hair on my neck stands up for reasons that have nothing to do with the dead man I watched him make three nights ago.
On the landing my upstairs neighbor’s TV leaks through the wall, a laugh track, canned and cheerful, the most normal sound in the world. It feels like it’s coming from a different planet than the one I’m standing on. I get my key in the lock on the second try. My hands aren’t steady. I tell myself it’s the cold, the same lie I’ve been telling myself all night, the one I’ve stopped believing.
Inside, my apartment is exactly as embarrassing as I expected to feel about it. One room that’s a bedroom pretending to be more. A kitchenette the size of a closet. The good lamp, the bad couch, the wall of secondhand paperbacks I keep instead of furniture. He fills the doorway, has to duck slightly to come through it, and once he’s inside, the place shrinks around him until there’s no air in it he isn’t standing in.
