Page 30 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
“That she throws like her opinions. Wide of the mark.” From the hallway comes a shriek of pure outrage, which means she heard, which means she was listening, which tells me everything neither of them knows yet. Two things hit me at once. The silent driver is funny. And those two are going to be a slow-motion disaster that I intend to watch every second of.
It’s the kind of thing only I seem to see, which figures, because it’s my whole skill set. Tasha calls Roma a humorless slab of a man at least once a day. Roma calls Tasha nothing at all, just lets her run out of steam, then hands her the exact thing she was reaching for before she has to ask, which makes her madder than any insult could.
I catch the way her eyes track him out of a room when she thinks no one’s watching. I catch the half-second his mouth does something almost like a smile at the back of her head. Neither of them has the faintest idea, which is the best part. I’ve spent my life unable to want a single thing out loud, and there’s an odd comfort in watching two other people be just as bad at it as I am.
“They’ve been doing that dance for three years,” Yelena tells me, materializing at my elbow with the silence of a much smaller,much more dangerous animal. “Place bets if you like. I’ve given up. Some men need a war to make them brave.” She gives me a look so pointed I feel it go right through me, then drifts off before I can decide whether she meant the driver at all.
So that’s the trap of the place. I came here to be a prisoner. Instead, somewhere in the first week, I look up from a kitchen table with Tasha laughing at one elbow, Yelena correcting my terrible Russian at the other, Roma deadpanning into his coffee across the room, and I feel something I haven’t felt since I was a kid in a town too small for a dot on the map.
I feel like I belong to something. A family, the kind you don’t get to choose, full of dangerous people who’d all, I’m fairly sure, kill for one another without blinking. Somehow I’m inside the circle instead of out in the cold looking in.
It scares me worse than the gun did. Wanting things is how you get punished. I learned that at nineteen with a shattered knee and a future that evaporated overnight. I know better than to let a place like this start to feel like home.
I let it anyway. A little. I’m only human, and I’ve been cold a long time.
The watchful part of me never switches off. While everyone here treats me like a problem with a perimeter drawn around it, I do what I’m actually good at. I watch the people. People tell you everything, if you let them, without ever opening their mouths.
I watch who won’t meet my eye. I watch whose warmth runs a half-second late, like it has to be remembered before it gets offered. I watch a guard linger near a hallway he has no real reason to walk. I watch the whole household orbit Sevastian, fearand love all braided together so tight you can’t pull one strand loose from the other.
One face keeps snagging me. At first I can’t even say why.
His name is Vadim, and everyone here loves him. The old soldier, the one who’s bled for this family his whole life, weathered down to scar and gristle, carrying a grief you could set a watch by. They told me, in the soft way people hand you sad things, that he loved Sevastian’s dead brother like his own blood.
I believe it. That’s the part I keep underlining for myself, because I keep checking it. His sorrow is real. I’ve sat across from enough genuinely broken people to know the real article when it’s in front of me, and the grief on that man goes all the way to the floor.
It’s the other thing I can’t account for.
It’s small. So small I keep telling myself I’m inventing it, that I’ve been scared so long I’ve started seeing knives in the silverware. But every so often Vadim looks at Sevastian, and for the length of a blink the grief on his face steps aside. Something else stands in its place, colder, flatter, something underneath the sorrow that doesn’t sit right on a man who’d take a bullet for the one he’s looking at.
Everyone else in this house reads that hardness as a grieving soldier’s stoicism, a man gone stiff from losing too much. I read faces for a living, and the thing I keep catching at the edges of his doesn’t look like grief turned inward.
It looks aimed.
It’s an instinct, not a fact. I couldn’t say a word of it out loud without sounding like a paranoid woman who’s been throughtoo much. So I tuck it away where I keep the things I’m probably wrong about, and I keep watching.
The rose garden is what finally cracks my careful distance open.
Because there’s a rose garden. In the middle of the Mojave, behind the cold glass house, somebody has coaxed an improbable acre of roses out of the meanest dirt in Nevada. It’s Yelena’s, naturally, a deliberate softness made in a hard place. Sevastian finds me out there one evening at the gold end of the day, walking the rows, because it’s the one corner of the compound where I can almost forget what I am.
He doesn’t speak for a while. He just walks beside me, big and quiet, the threat of him gone oddly gentle in the slanting light. The roses are ridiculous out here. That’s what gets me first, hundreds of them in graded rows, deep red down to a pink so pale it’s nearly an apology, all of it sweet on the dry evening air with the desert breathing in over the wall.
Somebody fights the Mojave every single day for this, and wins, on purpose, for no money. We don’t perform out here. There’s no audience to play to. It’s only the two of us and a thousand roses his grandmother grows in spite of the whole desert. Somewhere down the second row, without either of us deciding to, the conversation strips down to the skin.
“She planted these for my brother,” he says, out of nowhere, low. “Kostya. He loved stupid impossible things. Roses in a lakebed. She keeps it for him.”
I go very still, the way you go still when a wild thing wanders close and you don’t want to spook it back into the dark. Because I know who Kostya is now. The brother. The dead one. The namethis whole house tiptoes around. And I have never once heard Sevastian say it out loud.
“What was he like?” I ask, careful.
For one long moment in the failing light, the most guarded man I’ve ever met isn’t guarded at all. Something moves over his face I’ve never seen there, a crack, a glimpse of a younger man under the pakhan, and he starts to tell me. His brother. Funny, he says. Easy. Loved by everyone, the kind of person a room got warmer around. Then his voice snags on something beneath the words, some enormous dark weight I can feel the edge of without seeing its shape, and whatever he was about to say next, the real thing, the thing he hauls around behind that flat face, he stops.
He just stops. The crack seals over. The pakhan comes back across his features like a tide coming in. He looks away at the roses, and the moment is gone.
But I saw it. Not the secret, whatever it is, I didn’t see that. What I saw was the wound itself. The sheer size of it. The way a whole man has built himself around a grief he won’t put a name to, and it does something to me I didn’t sign up for. I came out here certain this man was a monster, and monsters don’t grow roses for their dead. They don’t almost break open in the gold light. They don’t stop themselves a half-second before they hand you the worst thing they own.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say.
“I know.” He looks at me then, and there’s something in it close to gratitude, which on this man is its own kind of devastating. “That’s why I almost did.”
