Page 52 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
It isn’t long.
She goes rigid in my arms. Then she shoves at my chest, hard, both hands. I let her go. She staggers back from me with her face wet and wild, her grief already turning into the only thing strong enough to stand on top of grief, which is rage. She points it exactly where it belongs.
“Your war.” Her voice shakes so hard the words barely hold together. “Your enemies. Your world. She was nothing to anybody. A dancer who liked diamonds, who tipped the busboys, who never hurt a soul in her whole life, dead in the desert because she knew me. Because I let you pull me into this. They couldn’t get to me behind your precious walls, so they got to her, because she was soft, because she was mine. You knew. You knew this could happen, you said it yourself, then you let me bring her through that gate.”
Every word is true. She doesn’t understand that part, that there’s nothing in it I can argue. I sat in this same war complex weeks ago and named her soft edges as the place they’d cut me. I putquiet watchers on her people. I still wasn’t fast enough, careful enough, ruthless enough to put one on a bubbly girl who came through my own gate with snacks. I knew the exact shape of the danger. It killed her anyway.
“You’re right,” I say.
It stops her. She wanted a fight. A man defending himself is a thing she could push against, and I won’t give it to her. She’s standing in the truest accusation anyone has ever leveled at me, and it happens to be the story of my entire life.
“Everything I touch,” I tell her, and my voice is very quiet now, very level, the voice I use when I’ve gone somewhere cold to keep from going somewhere worse. “Everything I put my hands on dies, Cynthia. Everyone I’ve ever let close. I have known that about myself for a long time. I let myself forget it for a few weeks. Crystal paid for my forgetting. So yes. Your fault is mine. All of it. I won’t insult her by pretending otherwise.”
I mean it as the only honest thing I have to offer her, the one gift in my possession, the truth. It doesn’t comfort her. Of course it doesn’t. It just confirms for both of us that the man she let into her life is exactly as dangerous to the people in it as she’s now screaming he is.
My phone rings.
I almost don’t look at it. There is nothing on this earth I want less in this moment than my phone. But the number that comes up is one I know, one only a handful of men alive would dare to call me from, and the cold professional part of me that never fully goes offline understands before I answer that this is not a coincidence of timing. He waited for this. He timed it to the hour. He wants to be in the room for it, by wire, listening.
I step away from her. I answer it.
“Sevastian Andreevich.” Gleb Morozov’s voice is an old man’s voice, unhurried, almost warm, the voice of someone calling to discuss a shared business interest over good cognac. He has called me by my patronymic since I was young enough for him to pretend he knew my father well enough to use it. “I won’t keep you. I know it’s a hard day in your house. I only wanted to extend a courtesy, one pakhan to another. It seems congratulations are in order.”
Everything in me goes still.
“You’ve nothing to say. That’s all right. I understand the surprise. A man should hear this kind of news in a happier way, from the woman herself, in his own home.” A pause, and I can hear the smile in it, the patience, the relish of a man who has waited a very long time to say exactly this. “But she didn’t tell you, did she? Your little dancer. She told her friend. And her friend, in the end, told us. So allow an old man the pleasure. Congratulations on the child, Sevastian. I do hope you take very good care of it.”
The line goes dead.
I stand in the middle of the room with the phone in my hand, the whole floor gone out from under me, and I understand several things at once, each worse than the one before it.
She’s pregnant. There is a child. My child.
She knew, and didn’t tell me.
She told Crystal instead. Crystal, who is dead in the desert in pieces, was the one person alive she trusted with the largest truth of both our lives, and I was not.
And the man who tortured it out of a murdered girl knew that I was going to be a father before I did. My rival in Los Angeles held the central fact of my life in his hands and called me to hand it back to me as a weapon, gift-wrapped, because he understood before I did what it would do to me to learn it this way.
I have kept the circle small my whole life for exactly one reason, so the things that matter most cannot be used against me. And the thing that matters most, the thing I didn’t even know existed until an enemy told me, was being kept from me by the one person inside the circle, while traveling out through a dead girl to the one person I’d least want to hold it.
I turn around. Cindy is staring at me. She heard one half of the call, my half, which was almost nothing, but she’s reading my face again, and whatever is happening on it now is enough.
“Sevastian.” Careful. Frightened in a new way. “What? What did he say?”
“You’re pregnant.” I watch the words hit her, watch her go white, watch the confirmation cross her face before she can stop it, and that’s my answer. “You’re carrying my child. I just learned it from Gleb Morozov, on the telephone, because your friend told it to him under torture before he cut her apart, before he left her in the desert for me to find.”
She doesn’t deny it. There’s nothing to deny. She just stares at me, one hand drifting toward her stomach in a gesture I’ve apparently been watching her make for weeks without understanding it, and the silence between us fills up with everything that can’t be taken back.
And then the cold thing in me, the thing that has run this organization through every crisis of the last decade, the thingthat does not feel so much as solve, takes the wheel completely. It’s the only part of me still working, so it does the only thing it knows how to do. It assesses the asset. It secures the asset.
“You don’t leave these walls again.” My voice has gone flat. Final. I hear myself from a long way off. “Not the grounds, not the gate, not for any reason. You don’t stand near a window. You don’t take a meeting I haven’t cleared. There will be a man within sight of you at every hour of the day. The thing you’re carrying is now the single most valuable object in this war. Morozov knows it exists, which means it gets secured the way I secure anything he wants this badly. Completely. Without exception. Your feelings about it are not a factor I’m able to weigh anymore.”
I watch what I’m doing to her even as I do it. I watch the woman who just lost her best friend hear herself, and the child she hasn’t even decided how to feel about, turned in the space of one breath into a possession to be locked down. I see how it looks. I do it anyway. The alternative is to feel the thing I’m holding off. If I feel it I stop functioning, and if I stop functioning she dies too.
She finds her voice. It comes out low, shaking, completely certain.
“This.” She laughs, a terrible wet broken sound, with no humor anywhere in it. “This. Right here. What you’re doing right now. This is why I didn’t tell you.”
