Page 57 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
“Noted.”
“And if you stopped reading reports at four in the morning. Tasha tells me things.”
“Tasha,” he says, “is a security risk.”
“Tasha is the only functioning news service in this house. Leave her alone.” He sets down the cup. His eyes travel down the front of me, slow, unhurried, the oversized shirt I stole from somewhere, my bare legs, then back up. He doesn’t pretend he wasn’t looking. It’s one of the more inconvenient things about him. “You’re wearing my shirt.”
“Give it back when you’re done with it.”
“No,” I say, into my coffee. “It’s mine now. Spoils of war.”
He looks at me over his cup for a long second. “Keep it,” he says, like a man signing over a building.
“I’m wearing a shirt. The fact that it’s yours is a tragic laundry accident.”
“It’s enormous on you.”
“You’re enormous on everyone. It’s frankly a planning failure on God’s part.” I pour my own coffee, aware of him watching me do it, aware of the heat that’s been crackling under all the grief and the locks this whole time, never gone, just buried. Five days of wanting to claw his eyes out, and my body still hasn’t gotten the memo that we’re supposed to be at war.
He’s standing there in the morning light looking like something carved as a warning to other men. The truce is barely twelve hours old, and I want to climb him like the world’s worst decision. It’s deeply unfair. Pregnancy hormones, the books would say. The books haven’t seen him in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled. Science only explains so much.
“Stop it,” I tell him.
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You’re standing there. It’s enough. Have some decency. Be uglier.”
The corner of his mouth moves, the thing that on a normal man would be a grin, on him a seismic event. “We’ve wounded each other badly,” he says, dry as the desert outside. “I’ve been informed it’s too soon.”
“It is much too soon.” I drink my coffee. I look at him over the rim. “Ask me again after lunch.”
His eyes darken in a way that has nothing to do with the hour, the slow burn under all that wool showing me its pilot light again, and the kitchen is suddenly several degrees past its thermostat.
And there it is, that low dark spark between us, the thing that started all of this in an apartment I should have walked out of. Still lit. Still ours. It survived a dead friend, a cage, all of it, because apparently the universe handed us terrible judgment, excellent chemistry, no off switch for either. For one warm minute, in a kitchen in a fortress, we’re just two people who are bad for each other and can’t stop. It’s the happiest I’ve been in weeks.
An hour later I go looking for him, lighter than I’ve been in days, half a flirtation still warm in my mouth.
I don’t mean to overhear it. That’s the thing I’ll tell myself later. I’m looking for Sevastian, I take the back hall past the room they use as an office, the door is cracked, and Vadim is in there on the phone.
I don’t speak Russian. My weeks in this house have taught me maybe nine words, most of them rude. Tasha’s curriculum. She teaches by scandal, which is the only method that works on me. So the words mean nothing to me. The tone is another story. I’ve spent my whole life reading the thing under the words, and the thing under these words is wrong.
Vadim’s voice, the old soldier’s voice, the gruff devoted growl I’ve heard him use with Sevastian a hundred times, has dropped into something else. Low. Easy. Warm in a way that has no business existing. He’s talking to someone he isn’t afraid of, someone he doesn’t answer to, someone he’s comfortable with. There is no one in this family’s whole world that Vadim should sound comfortable with except the people in this house, and he is using a tone I have never once heard him use inside these walls.
It’s the voice of a man talking to his real side. And his face, in the slice of him I can see through the cracked door, has gone to the flat cold aimed thing, loose and unguarded because he thinks he’s alone, the grief gone out of it, replaced by something patient, hating, pleased.
I back away from the door before he can feel me there. My heart is slamming. The hallway is sunlit. There’s an arrangement of fresh flowers on the table by the window, Yelena’s roses, red as meat. I’ll hand it to my own body, it keeps walking, normal speed, normal steps, all the way down the hall, while everything above the neck comes apart. As I move down the hall on numb legs, my mind finally finishes the thing it’s been refusing to finish for weeks, laying it all out at once, every piece clicking into the one shape they were always going to make.
He was near every secret that bled. The stash house. The convoy. The routes. He carried my bags in, the day they moved me to theranch. He called me child, kindly, twice. I said thank you. I’m going to be sick. He sits at Sevastian’s right hand, he carries the whole operation in his head, he has access to all of it.
He grieves Kostya louder than anyone in this family, and everyone reads that grief as proof of his loyalty. The grief is real. It’s just not pointed where they think it is.
Because under the grief, under all of it, is the thing my gut kept snagging on and couldn’t make sense of. Now it makes a terrible kind of sense. The way he looks at Sevastian like a debt. The cold that comes up when the pakhan’s back is turned. The hardness under it has a target.
He blames Sevastian for the grief. Somewhere in the locked rooms of this family, in the thing nobody ever says out loud, the thing Sevastian’s whole face closes around whenever his brother comes up, there’s a wound about how Kostya died. Vadim has decided whose fault it was, and he has spent God knows how long making someone pay for it.
I don’t know the details. I can’t. It’s a sealed thing, a black box at the center of this family that only Sevastian holds the key to, and last night when he set a sliver of it on the table for me his voice went somewhere I’ve never heard it go. But I don’t need the details to see the shape of it.
As far as Vadim is concerned, by everything his face has been telling me since I got here, Sevastian killed his brother. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s the kind of thing that’s both. Last night, two feet from me at a kitchen table, a sliver of that wound opened in his voice. Today I heard the man who’s been pressing on it for years order takeout from the same hallway.
