Page 7 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
It doesn’t take long.
She’s up near the stage, working the floor in something that’s mostly rhinestones over fishnets over good intentions, and the bottom drops out of whatever I told myself this trip was about. The girl in the desert was a shape in the dark. A voice. A pair of eyes that wouldn’t quit. This is the whole picture, lit up, moving, and the whole picture is a problem for me specifically.
She’s soft in all the places this town spends a fortune carving off its women. Full. Curved. Built like something a man wants his hands full of, and she moves like she knows it but resents having to spend it on this room. Honey hair down her back. A mouth made for trouble. Skin under those terrible lights that I would very much like to learn the real color of, somewhere with better lighting, fewer clothes, more time.
So that’s where my head goes. Immediately. Like a much younger, much stupider man than the one I’m supposed to be.
I want her. I’ve wanted her since the desert, since she knelt in the dirt with a dead man cooling beside her and looked at me like she’d bite if I got close enough. Three days of telling myself otherwise only put teeth on the thing. I don’t lie to myself. Lying to yourself is how you end up the man on his knees instead of the man with the gun.
I order a drink I have no plan to touch. It arrives the color of antifreeze with a cherry doing its best. Whoever stocks this bar should answer for it in a basement somewhere. I tip the bartender a hundred anyway, because tonight I’m apparently a man who does things for no reason.
I watch her. I let myself enjoy it, this low pull sitting in me while she works a table of idiots who don’t have the first idea what they’re looking at. One of them lets his hand drift toward her hip.Something in me goes cold, then flat, then quiet, a small private promise of violence I set aside for another night.
She slides out of reach before I have to do anything about it. Smooth. Professional. Smile bright as a knife, parked a thousand miles from her eyes. Good girl.
Her heels are clear plastic, scuffed gray at the toes, the cheapest thing on her. That detail does more damage than the fishnets, because the fishnets are for the room, and the scuffed heels are just hers. She’s better at this than the room has earned.
Then a busboy leans in and tells her there’s a man in the corner asking for her. She turns. She sees me.
I watch it happen. The recognition. The exact second the club smile slides off her face, the blood draining out of her cheeks, that full stillness coming over her like the stillness of a rabbit when a shadow passes overhead. She knows me. She’d know me anywhere. I’m the last thing she saw before her whole life changed its shape, now I’ve walked into the one room she thought belonged to her. I can see what it costs her not to bolt. I respect that it costs her.
The desert girl crosses the floor because she has to. A girl on shift doesn’t tell the big man in the good suit no. But she comes slow, chin up the whole way, and there it is again, the flint under the fear, doing far more for me than the fishnets ever could.
“Dance for me,” I say, before she can decide what her face is doing.
She doesn’t flinch. “It’s twenty for a song. Forty for the booth.”
I take the banded brick of hundreds out of my jacket. I set it on the table between us. It’s more than this place clears in a week.More than she pulls down in a year of shaking it for men who don’t deserve the view, probably, and I watch her look at it. I watch her understand what it is. Around us the room goes quiet at the edges as the nearest men catch sight of the money, then do the only smart thing they’ll manage all night, which is find somewhere else to point their eyes.
“That’s not for a song,” she says. Steadier than I’d have bet. “What’s it for?”
“Sit down.”
She doesn’t sit. She stands there with her arms half crossed, daring me, so I lean back, look up at her, decide to quit circling the thing.
“You have a problem,” I tell her, low, pitched under the music for the two of us. “You saw something you can’t unsee. A man named Timur saw your face. His people are not the forgiving kind. Left alone, you’re a loose end, then one morning you’re not anywhere at all.” I give that a second to sink in. “My own people would tell me to handle that for them. A witness is a liability. You know what handling it means. You watched the demonstration.”
She’s pale again. But she nods. She gets it.
“So here’s what we do instead.” I tap the cash, once. “As of tonight, you belong to me. You stop being a witness, you stop being anybody’s problem. You’re my woman. Nobody touches what’s mine, not Timur, not his people, not the men I answer to, because the second I put my name on you, you stop being a problem to solve. You becomefamily. Family, we keep.” I tilt my head at her. “We also don’t talk to police. Not ever. Get that idea out of your skull right now, for your sake more than mine. Police can’t protect you from what’s coming. I can.”
“Your woman,” she repeats. Flat. Like the words taste of something gone off.
“That’s the story.” I gesture, small, at the room, at the brick, at the men already inventing the version they’ll tell their friends tomorrow. “Look around you. Far as anyone in here is concerned, I’m a rich man buying himself a pretty thing for a while. Happens on this street a hundred times a night. Nobody looks twice at a kept woman. That’s exactly why it works. You’re not a witness to anything. You’re somebody’s expensive girlfriend, dripping in a man’s money, dull as paint. Best disguise there is.”
I can see her hating it. All of it. The disgust sits right on top, the pride under that, then somewhere lower the part of her that wants to pick up the money, throw it in my face, walk out into a night that would eat her before sunrise. I’d half respect it if she did. I’d also follow her out, because I’m not in the habit of losing things I’ve decided to keep.
What she does instead is worse for both of us.
She holds my eyes. A flush climbs her throat, slow, warm, then her breath shifts, just slightly, just enough. Her face is at war with me. Her body is selling her out under the table. I’ve been reading men for whatever they’re hiding my whole adult life, long enough to know a tell when one walks up in fishnets, and that one is not fear.
That, more than the legs, more than the mouth, more than any of it, is what gets me. She’s beautiful, and brave to the point of stupidity, but the part I can’t put down is that she feels it back. She is standing in a club she despises, getting bought by a man she watched put a bullet through someone’s head, then some buried wire in her lights up for me anyway, then the disgustcrawls right back over it. I know the feeling intimately. I’m sitting in the matching chair.
“And if I say no?” she says.
“You won’t.”
“That’s a little arrogant.”
