Page 60 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
For now. Two words. They tell me everything about what’s coming, and everything about why it hasn’t come yet. I am worth more breathing than dead, to whoever he answers to, for some span of time I can’t guess. That’s the only reason I’m still standing in these headlights instead of lying in the sand. The thing in me they don’t know is a person yet is the only thing keeping the rest of me alive.
I turn and look at Vadim one last time, because I want him to have to see me, the woman he’s handing to the men who dismembered Crystal, the pregnant woman from his own family’s house. I want it on his face for the rest of his rotten life.
He doesn’t give me the satisfaction. He turns away. He looks out at the dark desert, the old soldier, his back to the handoff, to me, to what he’s doing, and somehow that’s worse than if he’d smiled. He gave the order and he can’t even look. I hate him more for that than I would have for cruelty.
Then Timur’s men take me. The careful gentleness is gone now that I’ve changed hands, replaced by hard hands that don’t care. They put me in the other car. The doors shut. We pull away into the dark.
I press my forehead to the cold window to watch the only lights in all that blackness, the far-off glow of the ranch against the hills, shrink behind us, smaller and smaller, until the desert swallows them whole.
Then the truth comes down over me, complete and freezing.
No one is coming.
Sevastian is in the city, hours away, with no idea. Tasha and Roma were sent off so they couldn’t see. The one man in that whole house with the power to raise the alarm, to muster themen, to come for me, is the man who just handed me over and turned his back. He won’t be sounding any alarms. He’ll go home and play the grieving loyal soldier, let them all believe I wandered off, or ran, or got taken by an enemy nobody saw coming.
No one even knows yet to look. By the time they do, I’ll be wherever this road ends, in the hands of the people who killed my best friend, with nothing to protect me but a secret in my belly and whatever’s left of a dancer who was never supposed to make it this far in the first place.
I put both hands over my stomach in the dark.
Okay, I tell the both of us. Okay. We’re on our own. We’ve been on our own before.
Let’s go be impossible to kill.
29
SEVASTIAN
Iget back to the ranch at dusk and I know she’s gone before anyone says a word, because the house is wrong, the way a body is wrong the second the soul leaves it.
It’s too quiet. The men on the doors won’t meet my eyes. The fountain in the courtyard is running. Somebody’s radio plays tinny pop in the garage. Every ordinary sound is wrong, the way a ringing phone is wrong in an empty house. And Cynthia isn’t at the window where she’s taken to sitting in the evenings, the one spot she’s allowed, the place I’ve gotten used to finding her, pretending she isn’t waiting for me even when she is. The window is empty. The whole house feels empty in the specific way that means the one thing in it that mattered has been removed.
“Where is she?” I say to the first man I see. He goes gray, and that’s when I start moving fast.
I find Tasha in the kitchen. She’s already crying, and the moment she sees my face she comes apart completely. She’sbeen holding it since they got back, the story I can read in pieces before she manages a full sentence. She and Roma were sent into town this morning on orders that came down through the proper channels. They thought nothing of it until they returned to a house with Cynthia gone and no good answer for where.
“She knew,” Tasha sobs. “Sevastian, she knew, she’d known for days, she was trying to find a way to tell you.”
Roma stands beside her gone past still, working out, the way I am, exactly how many of today’s small orders passed through one set of hands.
“Knew what?”
And Tasha tells me. She tells me everything Cynthia had been doing while I tore my house apart from the financial trail up, while my audits found nothing. She tells me Cynthia had been hunting the leak her own way, reading faces instead of records, that she’d come to Tasha in the dark with two leaks, an outside one and an inside one, that the two of them had been quietly crossing names off a list.
She tells me Cynthia narrowed it to one face weeks ago and didn’t dare bring it to me, because the name was the last name anyone in this house would believe, because the man it belonged to was family, was loved, was beyond suspicion.
“Who?” I say, even though some cold thing in me has already started to understand, already started to fit it against every strike that hit too clean, every route Morozov shouldn’t have known. “Tasha. Who did she think it was?”
“Vadim,” she whispers.
And the floor of my whole life gives way.
Because the instant she says it, it’s true. I know it the way you know a thing you’ve refused to look at directly for so long that it’s gone septic in the dark. Vadim. My counselor, my right hand, the man who taught me to shoot, the third boy in every memory of my childhood, the one person in this organization I never once audited because auditing Vadim would have been like auditing my own arm.
He taught us to swim one summer, in a hotel pool we’d broken into, holding Kostya’s ankles while my brother learned not to sink. I learned watching from the edge, because even at nine I didn’t let people hold me. We got chased out by a manager Vadim charmed into laughing.
That’s the man in my study. That’s the man with the bag packed. He had access to everything. He knew every route, every count, every soft spot, because he helped build them. He grieves my brother louder than anyone alive. And Cynthia, who had known him a matter of weeks, read in his face what I failed to see in thirty years, because I was the one person who could never afford to see it.
And here is the part that will live in me forever, alongside the other worst seconds. She saw it. The dancer I dragged into this world, the woman I locked behind walls for her own safety, the one set of eyes in this whole operation trained to read a face instead of a ledger, she saw the thing I spent my life not seeing, and she had no one to take it to, because the only man with the power to act on it was the man she couldn’t be sure to trust with it, because I had spent five days proving I’d cage her rather than hear her.
