Page 56 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
The way she says my name has no edges left on it. Just weight. I’d rather have the edges.
So I do the thing I do not do. I tell her a piece of the truth.
“When Morozov said it to me.” I have to stop and start again, because the words don’t want to come, they never want to come. “When I learned about the child from him, on the phone, the way he meant for me to learn it. It wasn’t the war. It wasn’t even the danger of it. It was that you told Crystal and you didn’t tell me.”
I look at my hands on the table, at the plain steel ring that used to belong to a man I don’t talk about. “I have spent my whole life making sure I needed no one’s trust. I built all of this so I’d neverhave to ask for it. Then there was you. You were the one person I ever actually wanted it from, and I found out from my enemy that I didn’t have it. That’s what gutted me. Not the baby. The proof that even you kept the realest thing from me.”
She’s quiet for a long moment.
“I didn’t keep it from you to hurt you,” she says finally. “I kept it because I was terrified. Of being trapped here forever, a baby making these walls permanent. Of trapping you, because I know what your code would make you do, I know you’d cage us both and call it honor. Of bringing a kid into this.”
Her voice cracks. “Into a war that just sent my best friend home in pieces. I looked at those two pink lines, and the first thing I felt was joy. The second thing I felt was that I had to protect it from everything, including you. So I told the one person who couldn’t trap me with it. That’s not because you don’t matter, Sevastian. It’s because you matter too much. You’re the one who could turn it into a prison.”
“I know,” I say. It’s all I say, because the proof of her point is standing on every door in this house, wearing guns I assigned.
It isn’t forgiveness. Neither of us pretends it is. But it’s the first true thing we’ve said to each other since the desert, and we both feel the difference in the air, the way a fever breaks without curing the thing underneath.
And then, because we’re already further out on the ice than we’ve ever been, I say the rest of it, the word I’ve spent this whole time refusing.
“I love you.” Flat. Bleak, like a confession to a crime. “I worked that out in a war room with another man’s blood on my shirt, which tells you everything about the kind of man you’ve gottenyourself tangled with. I love you, and the very fact of it is the most dangerous thing in your life, because now everyone who wants to hurt me knows exactly where to reach. I didn’t want to love you. I knew what it would cost you. It cost Crystal first.”
She doesn’t say it back. I don’t expect her to. But she doesn’t flinch from it either. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, over the ring. It’s the first time she’s touched me on purpose in five days, and we sit like that in the dark, two people who’ve wounded each other badly, not healed, just done bleeding for the night. Her hand is small over mine, cold from the mug, certain anyway. Neither of us moves for a long time. The refrigerator cycles twice.
“I’m going to end this,” I tell her, and I mean it down to the floor of myself. “All of it. The war, Morozov, the man in this house who fed him. I’m going to find the traitor. And I’m not going to hand him to anyone. I’m going to put him in the ground with my own hands. Then you and this child are going to be free of all of it. I swear that to you.”
And that’s when I see it.
Something moves across her face and then shuts. I’ve spent my life reading people across tables, in worse light than this, with more at stake, and I know the exact shape of what I just watched. It’s the look of a person who has a thing in their mouth and decides, in real time, not to let it out. A held breath. A small flinch around the eyes when I said the traitor. Then a door closing, smooth and deliberate, somewhere behind her face. Whatever was about to come out goes back down and stays there.
She’s keeping something from me.
I can read that much. I can’t read what. After everything we just said, after the first honest hour we’ve managed in days, there’s still a locked room behind her eyes, and she just quietly checked that the door was shut when I swore to kill the man who betrayed us. I don’t understand it. It makes no sense that the thing she’s holding would surface right there, on that word, in that breath.
I could press her. Part of me wants to, the part that audits, that rips up floorboards looking for the hidden thing. But I’ve pressed her on everything else for five days and gotten only colder. We just clawed our way to one fragile honest hour, and I am not going to burn it down chasing whatever she swallowed.
So I let it go. I tell myself it’s trust, finally, the thing we were just talking about. I tell myself she’ll come to me when she’s ready, that whatever she’s holding she’ll set in my hands in her own time, the way I just set my own dead on the table for her, a little.
I tell myself that. I almost believe it.
But I take that closed look to bed with me, and it keeps me company next to all the audits that found nothing. Somewhere out past my walls a patient old man is still moving pieces. Somewhere inside them a traitor I can’t find is still smiling at my table. And the woman I just told I love is sitting on a secret she won’t give me, holding it behind a shut door.
We bought one honest hour. The war didn’t stop for it. Whatever she’s hiding didn’t stop for it. And the oldest instinct I have, the one that’s kept me alive this long, lies awake in the dark telling me that an hour is not enough, that the ground is still moving under all of us, that something is coming I haven’t seen the shape of yet.
27
CINDY
The morning after we stopped hating each other, I wake up actually rested for the first time since the desert took Crystal, and the feeling is so foreign it takes me a second to place it. It’s hope. Stupid, fragile, completely unearned hope. I lie there in the gray light and let myself have it for exactly as long as it lasts, which turns out to be until breakfast.
He’s already in the kitchen when I come down, and the look he gives me over his coffee is not the look of a jailer. It’s the other look, the one from the desert, the one I’ve been starving for behind five days of cold.
“You slept,” he says.
“Don’t sound so shocked. I’m told it’s a thing people do.”
“In this house? I wouldn’t know.”
“You’d sleep if you ate dinner sitting down like a mammal.”
