Page 55 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
And sitting there in the gray light, I understand the trap I’ve walked myself into. Because knowing this is so much worse than not knowing. Not knowing, I was just a sad woman behind walls. Knowing, I’m a woman holding the one piece of information that gets people killed, in a house where the man it’s about can reach me, where I can’t prove it, where telling the wrong person is the same as telling him. I went looking for the truth to feel less helpless. Instead I found the single most dangerous thing in this house, and I picked it up with both hands.
I’m in deeper than I can climb out of. The baby moves, or I imagine it does, too early to be real. I press my palm flat and stare at the lightening window.
I wanted to stop being the girl this happens to.
I think I just became the girl it happens to next.
26
SEVASTIAN
Iam tearing my own house down to the studs, and it isn’t working.
Five days since the desert handed Crystal back in pieces. Five days of the war, the lockdown, the cold standoff with the woman down the hall. Somewhere in those five days I have turned the full force of my organization inward, onto my own people, because the thing I named weeks ago in a concrete room is real and I can no longer pretend otherwise. There’s a traitor in my house. I’m sure of it the way I’m sure of few things. And I cannot find him.
So I do what I know how to do. I audit. I pull every access log going back a year, every door badged, every gate opened, every man who knew a route before it burned. I subpoena my own phone records through the people I own at the carriers, looking for the call that shouldn’t exist, the number that connects one of mine to one of his.
I lean on soldiers in rooms without windows until they weep, swear, give me nothing, because they have nothing to give. I follow the money, which is the thing I trust most, the cold honest paper trail that has never once lied to me, and I trace every dollar that moves through this family looking for the one that came back dirty from Los Angeles.
And I find nothing. Worse than nothing. I find that every record I own points at loyalty. The men with access are the men who’ve bled for me. The phones are clean. The money behaves. By every measure I can audit, there is no traitor in my house, which I know to be a lie, which means the traitor is a man whose every log reads loyal because he has spent years earning the kind of trust that doesn’t get logged.
That’s the thing I keep slamming into at three in the morning, surrounded by paper. My methods can catch a man who does something wrong. They cannot catch a man whose only crime, so far, is the look on his face when he thinks I’m not watching. I can audit a badge. I cannot audit a heart that’s gone bad behind a loyal one.
Three nights running I’ve fallen asleep over access logs and dreamed of paper. Paper with no faces on it. I wake angrier at the paper than at the traitor, which even I can tell is a bad sign. The one thing that would find him, the thing I’d need, is a pair of eyes that watches people instead of records, that reads a face the way I read a ledger.
I have exactly such a pair of eyes in my house. They belong to the woman I’ve locked in a room and stopped speaking to. The irony is not lost on me. It just doesn’t help, because I can’t imagine, in the state we’re in, asking her for anything.
The baby changes how I move through the days, even as everything between us has frozen.
I bring in Brown. He’s the family doctor, a dry, unhurried American we keep on retainer exactly because he’s not one of us, asks no questions, and has kept more Volkonsky secrets than the priest we don’t have. He confirms what a drugstore test already told her, what Morozov already threw in my face. There’s a child.
It’s real, it’s mine, it’s early but it’s holding. Brown delivers the confirmation standing in my study with his glasses in his hand, no chart, no preamble. “Congratulations are the custom,” he says, dry as the lakebed, “though I’ll take the room’s temperature first.” I let him have that. He’s not wrong about the room.
Brown starts coming to the house to monitor her, and I notice within a day that he’s the only man here she doesn’t look at like a jailer. He answers to my grandmother before he answers to me, and he treats Cynthia like a patient, like a person with a body that’s his job to keep safe, not like an asset under guard.
My grandmother, for her part, has stopped speaking to me in Russian, which is what she does instead of shouting. Breakfast is conducted in English, a neutral language for a house at war with itself. I should resent that. Instead some part of me is obscurely grateful that one person in this fortress is in her corner as a human being and not a soldier, because God knows I’ve made myself the opposite.
Brown corners me in the hall after the second visit, dry as ever. He tells me the pregnancy is sound but the stress is not, that a woman this frightened, this cornered, is a woman whose body fights her, and that whatever I think I’m doing for her safety, her nervous system reads the locked doors as a threat, not a comfort.
He says it the way he says everything, like he’s reading out lab results, no judgment in it, which is somehow worse than judgment. Then he goes back in to her. I stand in the hall with the closest thing to medical advice I’ve ever been given that I don’t want to take, because the only way to lower her stress is to open the cage, and the cage is the only thing keeping Morozov’s people off her. I have built a trap where protecting her body and protecting her peace pull in opposite directions.
The lockdown has set into something worse than a fight. It’s a standoff now. The guards stay on the doors. The gate stays shut. She does not get the city, does not get to leave, does not get an inch. She fights me on it every single day, in a hundred silent ways, exactly when I most need her to simply yield and be safe.
She moves the guards’ chairs two feet from her door every morning. They move them back. It’s the politest war this property has ever hosted, and she’s winning it, because the men have started pre-moving the chairs to where she likes them. I keep telling myself the locks are love. That a man protects what he can’t lose by any means he has, and the only means I have are walls, men, a closed gate.
But I watch her refuse to soften behind any of it, watch her treat every guard like an insult, while underneath my certainty something quieter keeps asking how love is supposed to live in a thing she experiences as a cell.
The rage is costing us. That’s what I finally can’t ignore. Five days of cold has worn us both down to something raw, and somewhere past exhaustion, in the smallest hours, the performance just stops.
I find her awake at two in the morning, in the dark kitchen, the same place I keep finding everyone these wretched nights. Shedoesn’t leave when I come in. That’s new. She just looks at me, gray with the same sleeplessness I’m carrying, and neither of us has the strength left to do the cold thing we’ve been doing.
“I can’t keep this up,” she says, and it isn’t a surrender, just true. “Hating you takes everything I’ve got, and I don’t have everything anymore. I used it on Crystal.”
I sit down across from her. It’s the closest we’ve been in days that wasn’t a fight. Up close she looks the way I feel, scraped, sleepless, running on the fumes of fumes. There’s a robe over her shoulders, a mug going cold between her hands, the kitchen’s one light haloing the loose hair around her face, and I have never seen anything I wanted to defend more in my life.
“I’m not asking you to stop hating me,” I tell her. “You have cause.”
“I know I have cause.” A spark of something almost like the old fire. Then it goes out, and she just looks tired. “But I’m so tired, Sevastian.”
