Page 23 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
I stare at the phone for a long minute after I hit send, already drafting the apology. The reply takes eleven seconds.
Nothing. Tomorrow night. They’ll be collected at eight.
Collected? They’re not laundry.
Eight, Cynthia.
That’s the whole negotiation. I braced for a no, for a lecture about visibility, about how the kept woman doesn’t get to requisition the kingdom for her girls. What I get is logistics. An hour later a number I don’t know texts to ask after my guests’dietary restrictions, signed by a man whose actual job title is casino host, like that’s a normal thing for a job to be.
I forward it to the group chat. Lacey answers inside a minute.Tell them I’m allergic to bills.
The car shows up at eight on the dot, the big blacked-out one with the driver who never talks, and I ride along for the pickups because I want to see their faces. Their faces do not disappoint. Joss comes down from the duplex she shares with Stevie dressed like a court date, gets in the way you’d get into a stranger’s van, scanning for the catch. Stevie, dressed like a prom, strokes the leather seat once, then sits on her hands.
Crystal stops dead on her curb, looks at the car, looks at me through the open door, and screams. A small one. A scream of manageable size.
“This is the one with the tiny fridge,” she announces, climbing over Stevie. “I’ve been in this one. There’s water bottles nobody’s allowed to drink. Watch, nobody will drink them.”
Promise is the last pickup, standing outside her building in her good coat with her arms crossed, half sure this is a scam. She gets in, takes one slow look around the cabin, then looks at me with twenty years of having seen everything there is.
“Baby,” she says. “What exactly did you catch?”
“A rich one.”
“Mm.” She settles back into the leather. “Don’t throw it back till after dinner.”
The driver takes us up the gold drive past the cab line, right to the doors, where two men in suits are already waiting to open everything we might conceivably touch. I’ve been here before. Ithought I’d gotten used to it. Then I get to watch it happen to my girls, the doors, the black marble, the ceiling painted like heaven’s waiting room, and the whole place hits me all over again, secondhand.
Stevie’s head goes all the way back. “That’s a painted ceiling. Who paints a ceiling?”
“Russians,” Joss says.
“It’s a cathedral,” Crystal breathes. “It’s a cathedral where God takes Visa.”
In the elevator, which is mirrored, gold, bigger than my old bathroom, the girls go quiet for the first time all night, watching the numbers climb. I watch them instead. Lacey’s fixing her lipstick with the focus of a surgeon. Promise has her chin up like she rides this elevator every day of her life, which is how Promise does scared. I catch my own reflection between them, a girl who used to split a six-dollar pizza with these women after close, standing in a tower of money like she has a right to be here. My eyes go hot with no warning at all.
Crystal sees. Crystal sees everything that matters and nothing that doesn’t. She doesn’t say a word, just hooks her pinky through mine down where nobody can see it, and faces front.
The suite is two floors above anything I’ve ever had a reason to visit. The host opens the double doors on a room the size of the Wet Sunset with a view of the entire burning Strip, and my family files in the way you’d enter a church or a crime scene. There’s champagne in a bucket. There are robes laid out on the bed, thick white ones, our sizes, which means somebody asked somebody who asked somebody. There’s a card on the table withmy name on it in handwriting I know, dark certain strokes.The floor is yours. Within reason. S.
“Within reason,” Joss reads over my shoulder. “That’s a dare.”
Dinner happens in a private room over the gaming floor, at a table that could seat the whole day shift, with a menu that has no prices on it.
“If there’s no prices,” Promise says, scanning it like a contract, “then we’re the price.”
“Tonight we’re not,” I tell her. “Tonight somebody else is the price. Order the lobster.”
She orders the lobster. She orders it the way a queen pardons somebody, gracious, suspicious, once. Crystal orders by pointing at the longest words and asking the waiter to surprise her, which is how she ends up with something involving gold leaf that she refuses to eat for ten minutes because it’s too pretty, then eats in four bites.
Lacey orders a steak, then a second steak to go, then asks if the to-go steak can also be a surprise for the morning version of her, and the waiter, unflappable, says he’ll see what the kitchen can do. Somebody pours champagne all around. I carry mine like a prop the way the smart ones do at his parties, one glass all night, going nowhere.
It’s the best meal any of us has ever had, which we know because Stevie says so out loud with her eyes shut, and nobody, for once, argues.
Then we hit the floor.
I expect to spend the night translating, keeping everybody clear of the velvet ropes. What happens instead is that the casinohas clearly been briefed, because everywhere we drift, the staff already have the look of men who’ve been told to make problems impossible. Chips appear. Drinks appear. A pit boss with a face like a closed fist calls Lacey madam until she has to go sit down.
Lacey is down forty actual dollars of her own actual money inside the hour, on a slot machine she swears is speaking to her. “It’s about to go,” she keeps saying, patting it like livestock. “I can feel it in the sounds.”
