Page 15 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
The worst part, the part I don’t say to anyone, is how close to true it already is. His cash on my nightstand. His card in mydrawer. His man outside my building. His name in my mouth at four in the morning. The lie is just the truth running a few days ahead of me.
I go out and work the floor. I’m halfway through a tray of well drinks for a bachelor party when the room changes.
I feel it before I see it, that drop in the noise, the way a crowd of drunk men goes quiet when something walks in that their animal brains flag as bigger than them. I turn. Sevastian is in the doorway of my crummy little club in a suit that has no business being here, filling the whole frame the way he filled my apartment, and every drop of blood I have goes somewhere I can’t use it.
He came. To my work. For me. I told him to leave me alone, so instead he put on a thousand dollars of wool and walked into the Wet Sunset like a wolf strolling into a petting zoo.
Before I can get to him, before I can do anything at all, Crystal gets there first.
I watch it happen the way you watch a glass tip off a counter. Too far away. Too slow. My sweet, fearless, no-filter best friend plants herself directly in front of the most dangerous man in Nevada, cranes her neck all the way up to look at him, and starts talking.
“Hi. Oh my God, hi. You’re him, right? The one taking care of Cindy?” She doesn’t wait. She never waits. “Okay, you should know some things about her, because she will not tell you herself, she’s the worst about herself. Her real name’s Cynthia. Cynthia Boon. Isn’t that pretty? She goes by Cindy but I think Cynthia’s gorgeous.”
I want the floor to open and take me. “And she’s not just a dancer. She was a real dancer, like nationally ranked, the actual real thing, before she wrecked her knee in a car accident. She was going to go pro. She’s too good for this dump, everybody knows it, she just won’t say it, so somebody had to.”
I am going to die. Right here, on the sticky floor of the Wet Sunset, holding a tray of warm vodka sodas, I am going to die.
He says nothing. That’s the part that makes it so much worse. He just looks down at Crystal with that still, attentive nothing on his face, and he listens. Takes in every careless word she hands him. My real name. My dead future. The whole shape of the person I’ve spent years not being. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t laugh her off. He collects it, all of it. I watch the two most private things I own walk out of Crystal’s mouth and straight into him, free of charge.
“Thank you,” he tells her, grave as a priest. “That’s very useful.”
“I know everything,” Crystal says, delighted. “Ask anybody.”
Crystal beams like he handed her a medal. Under my mortification, under the wanting-to-die, there’s a colder thing I don’t have time to look at, a small flicker of unease, because Crystal will say anything to anyone. She always has. She’d tell a stranger our address, our schedules, the pin to her phone, if the stranger smiled nice enough. It’s the most loveable thing about her, and tonight it just handed an armed man the keys to me. I don’t like the shape that makes, even while I’m dying of embarrassment over it.
“Crystal,” I manage. “Go check on table six.”
She goes, delighted with herself. Then it’s me and him in the middle of my own ruined night. I haven’t even gotten to be angryyet when the driver appears at the door, the big silent one from the club, the one who never says a word. Sevastian looks at me. “We need to talk. Not here.”
Nothing he says is ever a request.
The back office at Dust to Dust is bigger than my apartment and quieter than a church. Black walls, a desk you could land a plane on, a window over a gaming floor that glitters like a dragon’s hoard. It smells like leather and cold cash up here. Below the glass, a thousand people are losing their paychecks in perfect silence. He shuts the door. Now it’s just us, and three days of fear, helplessness, that man parked outside my home, all of it comes up my throat at once.
“No,” I say. “Whatever this is, no. I’m not doing it.”
“You’re already doing it.”
“I’m not your kept woman.” My voice shakes. I push through it. “I don’t want your money. I don’t want your card. I don’t want your guy reading the same newspaper outside my building for three days like I’m too dumb to notice him. I have a life. It’s a garbage life, but it’s mine. You don’t get to buy it out from under me because you feel guilty about not shooting me in the desert.”
Something moves across his face I can’t read and don’t trust.
“You think this is about my guilt,” he says.
“I think you’re used to people doing what you want.”
“They are.” Flat, no brag in it, just fact. “That’s not what this is.” He comes around the desk, slow, and I make myself hold my ground, chin up, even as he stops close enough that I have to look up at him. “Let me tell you what you walked into out there, since clearly nobody’s said it plainly. The man who put a gun toyour head in the dark. His name is Timur. He works for people who are at war with me. He is not dead, Cynthia.”
My real name in his mouth. Crystal’s gift, already being spent.
“He’s alive. Wounded, because of me. Humiliated, because of you, because a stripper watched him fail and lived to tell it. Men like that don’t let that stand. And the people he answers to do not leave a witness breathing, ever, for any reason. You saw a face you weren’t supposed to see, which in their world is a death sentence, signed, waiting on a date.”
He lets it sit. “That was true before I ever set foot in your club. It stays true whether you take my money or throw it back at me. The only thing on this earth between you and a grave in that desert is me, plus the story we’re selling that says you belong to me. Take the deal or don’t. But don’t pretend you’ve got a life to go back to. That lifeendedthe second you came over the rise and looked down.”
There’s nothing to say back, because it’s true. Every word. I’ve felt it since the desert, the cold certainty under all my fury that I’m not free anymore, that something out there has my name now. He just said it out loud, plain, the way you’d read someone their own autopsy. He took the thing I’ve been refusing to look at and set it on the desk between us. I’ve got no argument, because there isn’t one.
“Fine,” I say. It comes out small and I hate it. “Fine. What are the rules?”
He tells me the rules. The detail stays. The card stays. I call the number if anything feels wrong, anything at all, day or night. I play the part in public, his woman, taken care of, nothing to seehere. I never go to the police, because the police can’t save me from what’s coming and will only get me killed quicker.
