Page 70 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
Kir’s red ears. Petya losing at cards. The horses. The garage at two in the morning, the work light, the smell of wax. A man who went to his knees, pressed his mouth to my belly, said my life in a language I don’t speak.
And I want that. Not need it. Not take it as a consolation prize because I’m pregnant, scared, out of options. I want it, clear-eyed, with the exit standing wide open behind me, my own two feet free to walk through it.
I forgive myself, too. Standing there. For the secret, for the fear, for all seven years of keeping a packed bag where my heart should have been. Crystal would not want me carrying that. Crystal forgave people their whole messy selves for a living. The least I can do is finally do the same for me.
We lower her into the ground. I throw the first handful of dirt. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Promise’s hand finds my shoulder. Lacey grips my other side. We stand there, the surviving women of a chosen family, and we let her go together. The dirt is the same pale dust as everywhere out here. Of course it is. She loved this stupid desert. She organized it like a cruise director, dragged us all into it with marshmallows and bad wine. It’s hers now, all of it, every grain, forever.
Afterward, the crew comes back to the ranch, because I asked, and because Sevastian said yes before I finished the question. And the strangest, most healing thing happens. My two worlds, the dancers and the Bratva, the family I made beside the one I fell into, sit in the same kitchen, eat the same food, tell the same stories.
Yelena pours Lacey more wine and pats her hand like she’s known her for years. Kir teaches Stevie a card game and loses immediately, gloriously, on purpose, the way the men of this house have learned to lose to grieving women. Roma mans the grill with the gravity of a state funeral.
By dark the kitchen sounds almost like a kitchen again. For a few hours the house is loud, full, alive in a way grief makes sharper instead of dimmer. Sevastian moves through it all evening with a bottle and a towel over his arm, refilling glasses, listening, getting Lacey’s whole life story whether he wants it or not.
At one point I catch him laughing, real, head back, at something Promise says, and Promise looks like she’s won a prize she intends to keep. Crystal would have loved it. Crystal would have been in the middle of it, organizing everyone. The empty chair sits at that table too. We keep it for her.
I find Sevastian later on the back terrace, alone, giving the crew their space, watching the desert go gold the way it does at the end of the day. He doesn’t ask me anything. He’s good at that now, the not-pushing. He just makes room beside him at the railing. We watch the light go long over the lakebed. Inside, somebody laughs, then catches themselves, then, after a pause, laughs anyway, which is the whole future in one sound.
I could tell him about the bag. The exit. The plan I’ve carried the whole time. Maybe someday I will. But standing next to him in the last light, what I say instead is the only thing that matters.
“I’m staying.”
He goes still. He doesn’t grab it, doesn’t crush me to him, doesn’t do anything that would make it about him instead of me. He justturns and looks at me, a question in it, because he’s careful with this now, careful in a way the old him never was.
“Not because of the baby,” I tell him, before he can wonder. “Not because I’m trapped, or scared, or out of road. I had a way out. I’ve had it the whole time. A real one. I could walk off this ranch tonight, disappear where you’d never find me, and a month ago that’s exactly what I’d have done.”
I take a breath. “I’m not doing it. Not because I can’t. Because I don’t want to. I looked at the clean empty free life I always swore I wanted. Then I looked at this, all of it, the danger, the grief, you. And I picked this. Eyes open. On purpose. Mine.”
Something moves across his face that I’ve never seen there, not in all these months. Like I’ve handed him a thing he never let himself pray for.
“You chose,” he says, low.
“I chose.” And it’s the first time since I was nineteen years old that those two words have belonged entirely to me, that I’ve reached for the thing I wanted instead of bracing for the punishment. “Crystal told me to save myself. I finally figured out what she meant. This is me, saving myself. By staying. By wanting something out loud for once in my life and not running from it.”
He reaches for my hand, slow, giving me every chance to pull it back. I don’t. I lace my fingers through his. We stand at the railing while the Mojave burns gold, then red, then soft violet, the same desert that started all of this in blood, and for the first time it doesn’t feel like a place where things end.
It feels like a place where I get to begin.
I’m not the woman who got pulled into this in the desert anymore, the witness, the asset, the rescued thing. I walked back to him on my own two feet, with the door wide open behind me, and I chose. The power was finally mine, and I spent it on this.
Somewhere, I think, Crystal is shrieking with delight, telling me it’s about damn time.
35
SEVASTIAN
In the weeks after the salt works, the thing I spent two years and a great deal of blood trying to prevent simply stops being a question.
I have been a usurper my whole reign. That was the word, the one Gleb Morozov spat at me across every proxy and every table for years, the boy who climbed over his own blood to take a throne he had no right to. It was the charge that justified his war, the thing that gave the old guard permission to wonder whether the Volkonsky empire might be taken back by someone with cleaner hands. And the reason it cut so deep was that some part of me always believed it.
It is over now. Not negotiated, not bargained out across a table. Over, the way these things end in my world, which is that the man who called me a pretender is dead by my hand in the ruins of his own stronghold, in front of enough witnesses from both organizations that the story tells itself.
A pretender does not walk into the fortress of the man who’s hunted him, kill him face to face, and walk back out with his woman alive. A king does that. Now there is no one left alive with the standing to question whether the throne is mine.
Vadim, who whispered the doubt from inside my own house, is exposed and gone, the betrayal named, the rot cut out. The war I spent two years maneuvering to prevent came anyway. I won it, and the winning answered the question for good.
I feel the shift in the way men look at me. The faint hesitation that lived under their loyalty for years is gone. The boy who maybe killed his brother for power is gone. In his place is the pakhan who burned an enemy’s stronghold to the ground to get one woman back. There is not a man in this organization who doesn’t understand exactly what that makes me, exactly what it would cost to cross me.
There’s a strange freedom in it I didn’t expect. For ten years I have run this empire braced, half-waiting for the moment someone with a longer pedigree decided to call in the debt of my brother’s blood. That moment is never coming now. With Morozov gone, the Los Angeles territory fractures into men too busy fighting each other to look north.
