Page 58 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
That’s the part I can’t get past. The patience of it. Hate that can pass the bread. Either way he’s believed it long enough to start selling all of us to Morozov as the bill.
I make it to a window seat at the end of the hall before my legs quit, and I sit there in the sun shaking, trying to make it be anything else. A guard passes. I smile at him. He smiles back. That’s how easy it is, I understand now, to be a liar in a sunny hallway in this house.
Anybody can do it. Somebody has been. I try, honestly, because the alternative is so much worse than I want it to be. Maybe it was a wife. Maybe an old friend from the army, somebody clean. Maybe I read it wrong, maybe all these weeks of paranoia have rotted my own judgment, maybe I want a villain so badly I’m building one out of a tired old man’s phone call.
But I don’t believe a word of it. The one thing I have never been wrong about is a room, and that voice through that door was a man at ease in a place he has no right to feel at ease. Nine words of Russian, none of them in that call, but tone is a language from before words.
I was fluent in it before I could walk. Every woman who’s ever worked a floor for tips is. I have spent my whole life trusting exactly this, and being right. I haven’t built a villain out of a tired man’s phone call. I’ve finally seen the one standing in plain sight the whole time, wearing the one disguise nobody in this house would ever think to look through. Grief. The best fake ID there is. Nobody cards a mourner.
The man Yelena treats like a son. The little iron-spined woman who sees through everyone, who saw through my fake romance in four minutes flat, and even she never caught this, because he aimed his whole life at not being seen. The man who has bledfor this family since he was a boy. The third boy in every story of Sevastian and his brother growing up, the one in all the old photographs.
The last man on earth anyone here would suspect. My gut handed me his name weeks ago and I didn’t want it. Now I’m standing in a hallway holding it, certain all the way down, with no one I can give it to without getting people killed, because the only people I’d tell are the people he’s closest to.
I should walk away. Every cell in my body that learned anything in nineteen hard years is telling me to walk away, to take this to Sevastian alone, in private, with the door locked, and let him handle a thing that is so far above my weight class it’s a different sport. I know that. I know it the way you know not to touch the stove.
Then I see Vadim come out of the office, and I touch the stove anyway.
He’s calm again. The soldier is back on his face, the gruff devotion, the tone folded away wherever he keeps it. He nods at me the way he always does, polite, a little gruff, the family friend. Something in me, some reckless furious thing that watched them put Crystal in the desert in pieces, can’t let him walk past me wearing that face like it’s clean.
“You must miss him,” I hear myself say. “Kostya.”
Vadim stops.
It’s a normal thing to say. That’s the cover I give it, the soft sympathetic voice, the grieving woman reaching out to the grieving soldier. But I aim it. I put it exactly where I think the wound is, and I watch his face to see if I’m right, because Icannot help myself, because the dancer in me has to know if she read the room correctly.
“Every day,” he says. Even. Careful. His eyes don’t leave mine. Somewhere down the hall a vacuum starts up, the house going about its morning, ten feet and a whole world away from whatever this is.
“Sevastian doesn’t talk about how he died.” I keep my eyes on his, soft, terrible, pushing. “But you were there, weren’t you? You’d know. What really happened to him?”
And for half a second, it drops.
Just half a second. The grieving soldier, the devoted growl, the thirty years of loyalty, all of it falls away from his face like a sheet pulled off, and the thing underneath looks straight at me, cold, ancient, patient, a hatred so old and so total it has its own gravity. It is looking right into my eyes, and it understands, in that half second, exactly what my question was, exactly what it means that I asked it. He sees me see him. He watches me watch the cover come off. And he knows, the way I know, that I know.
Then the sheet drops back. The soldier returns. It happens so fast that anyone else would think they imagined it, and that’s the worst part, that he lets me see he’s letting it go back, that he doesn’t even bother to hide the hiding from me anymore, because we’re past that now, the two of us, in the space of one question in a sunlit hallway.
The light through the windows is gold and ordinary. Somewhere outside a horse moves in the paddock. It’s the most peaceful-looking moment imaginable, and my blood has gone to ice water, because I understand at last, all the way through, what I’ve just done. I went looking for a witness to a murder, and I letthe murderer watch me find him. I’m not a frightened woman behind walls anymore. I’m the one person in this house who knows what he is, with no proof, no protection, nowhere to run, which makes me the single loose end he has to cut before it unravels him.
I made myself the thing that has to disappear.
Vadim smiles at me. It’s a kind smile, a gentle one, the family friend again, and it is the most frightening thing I have ever seen on a human face. My pulse is so loud I’m sure he can hear it. Down the hall, the vacuum is still running. Somebody’s phone chimes a cheerful little chime. The world will not stop being ordinary, no matter what stands in the middle of it smiling at me.
“You and I,” he says quietly, stepping closer, his voice pitched soft so it won’t carry down the warm bright hall, “should talk. Somewhere private. Just the two of us.” He tilts his head, almost fond. “Don’t you think?”
28
CINDY
Ihave to get to Sevastian. That’s the only thought in my head as I walk away from Vadim’s kind terrible smile, fast, not running, because running tells him I’m scared and scared tells him I’ll bolt. I keep my pace even all the way down the hall. Inside, everything is screaming. I need to find Sevastian, get him alone, get a locked door between us and the whole world, then tell him the thing I know, the thing that’s going to break his heart but maybe save all our lives.
He’s not in the office. He’s not in the war room. A guard tells me, polite, that the pakhan drove out an hour ago to deal with something in the city and won’t be back until tonight.
An hour ago. Right around the time I was overhearing the worst phone call of my life. The cold part of me, the part that survives, notes that the timing is too clean to be an accident, that the one man I need is conveniently gone, and I don’t let myself finish the thought, because finishing it means Vadim arranged it, meanshe’s been a step ahead of me this whole time, means he started moving the second he saw me know.
Fine. I can’t reach Sevastian. I’ll reach the next best thing. I go looking for Tasha, for Roma, for anyone whose face I trust, because if I can just say the name out loud to one person who believes me, it stops being a secret only I can be killed for keeping.
I don’t find them. What I find, at every turn, is that the house has gently, invisibly closed around me.
It’s so smooth I almost don’t catch it. There’s a man at the end of the hall to the family wing who wasn’t there yesterday, polite, blank-faced, who tells me Tasha’s gone into town for supplies. The door to the kitchen courtyard, the one I like to sit in, is locked, maintenance, so sorry. When I ask the young guard by the side door where Roma is, he says Roma drove the pakhan, which can’t be true because Roma is the one man who’d never leave me unwatched, except that’s exactly why they’d tell me he’s gone.
