Page 27 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
I pay whatever it costs, which is a great deal, and I feel nothing at all about the number, because for once the money is buying something I actually want it to buy.
Then I say nothing.
Saying nothing, for the record, is agony. I draft six texts. I delete six texts. A man who has ordered executions with a nod cannot compose one sentence about an orthopedist.
Every instinct I have wants credit. Wants her to know it was me. I do it anyway. I leave the appointment to find its own way to her through the household, a confirmation she’ll stumble across with no card, no note, no flowers, no me standing in the doorway waiting to be thanked.
Let her discover on her own that the throwaway thing her friend blurted out to embarrass her, the dead dream she’s spent seven years refusing to name, lodged in me and stayed.
I know exactly what it’ll do, which is why I’m doing it, and also why it’s the most dangerous thing I’ve handed her yet. Cash she can wave off. A kept woman knows what cash means. This isI was listening.This isI know the shape of the thing that broke you. I went and found the one man who might fix it.You can’t tie a bow on that. You can’t keep a woman at arm’s length with that. It does the exact opposite of distance, and I’m doing it with my eyes wide open, like a fool stepping off a roof to find out whether this is the time he flies.
It’ll frighten her worse than the gun did. I’m counting on that too. Some broken wiring in me would rather scare her with tenderness than say out loud what’s happening to me.
Late that night I’m alone in the penthouse with a glass I’m not drinking, the city laid out gold and stupid below the windows. My phone lights up.
Two messages, nearly on top of each other.
The first is from the man handling Pasha’s affairs. A casualty confirmation, the cold logistics of a death, a widow’s name, an envelope to be hand-delivered, a soldier reduced to a line of gray text on a screen.
The second is the clinic, confirming the standing weekly appointment for one C. Boon.
I look at them sitting there together on the same lit glass. The dead man and the dancer. The war I’m losing the cold way and the woman I’m losing the warm way, two halves of a man I haveno idea how to be at the same time. A pakhan who feels things gets people buried. I learned that in the worst second of my life.
I don’t delete the second message.
I sit there with both of them glowing in the dark, and I feel it. The first hairline crack in something I’ve kept welded shut for years, thin, quiet, completely catastrophic. The leak I should be most afraid of isn’t the one that got Pasha killed in a stranger’s street tonight.
It’s this one. The one with her name on it.
I turn the phone face down on the glass. It doesn’t help.
12
SEVASTIAN
Gleb wants to call me a usurper. A boy who climbed over his own blood to take a chair he didn’t earn. So I throw a party that costs more than some countries make in a year, and I invite the whole city to watch me prove him wrong.
The reasoning is simple. Out here, legitimacy is a performance, renewed nightly, in front of an audience that can smell weakness through three feet of marble. Gleb is whispering to the families that I’m soft, that I’m overextended, that a man who built his throne on a dead brother can be pushed off it. Whispers like that turn true if you let them sit. So I don’t let them sit. I answer the loudest way I know, with a spectacle so excessive that nobody who sees it could believe for one second the man behind it is anything less than a king.
The salon is full to the gold-leafed walls. Every face that matters in this town, plus several flown in from elsewhere. The oil men. The not-really-a-prince. The Macau brothers. A senator who’ll deny he was here to anyone who asks, currently losing hisdeniability at five figures an hour. Champagne towers catch the light in every corner, poured for whales who won’t remember drinking them.
A string quartet I’m paying a frankly criminal sum plays under the noise, more set dressing than music. Waiters move through the crush carrying things that cost more than cars, and nobody so much as looks at the trays, which is the look I paid for, a room so rich that excess has stopped registering as remarkable.
On the floor just outside, on my cue, a slot bank I rigged weeks ago screams to life and pays a planted ally a jackpot the whole salon can hear through the doors. A manufactured miracle. Proof the house is generous. Proof the house is rich. Proof the house is mine. The planted man earns his fee, whooping, clutching his head, letting the showgirls drape him in the manufactured joy of a fortune that was never at risk.
Forty feet away a real tourist in a golf shirt watches him win and feeds another hundred into the machine next door, which is the entire economy of my city in one image. Every real whale in earshot feels the tug, the ancient stupid hope that the next pull is theirs, and drifts a little deeper into my floor to chase it.
It’s vulgar. It’s Vegas turned up well past the point of sense. That is the entire point. My father would have hated every inch of this room, which is a smaller, more private point.
On my arm, turning every head in the room, is Cynthia.
She’s in something deep green tonight, couture, cut to make grown men forget their own names. A few weeks ago she wore my money like borrowed plate mail, suspicious of every thread. Tonight she wears it like she was poured into wealth at birth.The dress is deep green, backless, engineered by somebody who hates men.
Every time she leans down to murmur a read, the table loses its thread, including, twice, me, which she logs both times, the menace. A few weeks ago she flinched at this room. Tonight she walks it like she holds the deed. I keep my hand at the small of her back, a lie neither of us has bothered to believe since the count room. I let the room see exactly how settled she is at my side. A king with a woman this composed on his arm is a king who has nothing left to prove.
“The senator’s wife wants your jeweler,” she reports, smiling at the room. “I told her he’s exclusive.”
“I don’t have a jeweler.”
