Chapter 3
SEVASTIAN
Three nights. That’s how long I last before I do something I have no good reason to do, which is get in a car and drive to a sticky little club off the Strip to look at a woman I should have already forgotten.
I don’t forget her. That’s the problem. I’ve spent three days running an empire with half my attention.
Signing off on shipments. Sitting through a meeting about a dead soldier, nodding along while my men talk, and the whole time some back room of my skull keeps playing the same loop.
A girl on her knees in the sand. Furious.
Soaked with tears. Refusing to look away from me when every sane instinct should have had her begging.
I’ve had men beg me for their lives in nicer settings than that. None of them stuck. She stuck.
It’s a stupid reason to be here. I know that.
A man in my position does not drive himself across town over a stripper, because I have people who would have made her disappear three nights ago and saved me the trip.
That was the smart play. Vadim said as much, in his careful way, the way he says things when he thinks I’m about to do something idiotic but values his teeth too much to come out and say it.
A witness is a problem, Pakhan. Make her go away. He’s right. He’s almost always right, which is why I keep him close and ignore him about half the time.
This is one of the half.
So here I am, parked outside a place called the Wet Sunset, which is exactly as classy as the name promises. Roma kills the engine. He says nothing.
“Wait here,” I tell him.
“You sure about this?” He’s known me long enough to ask without expecting an answer he’ll like.
“No,” I say, then I get out.
Inside, the place hits me like a wet towel.
Bad music, too loud, bass I can feel in my back teeth.
Cheap colored lights washing everything in red, then purple, a smell of spilled liquor losing a war with somebody’s vanilla body spray.
A long bar down one wall. A small stage.
A scatter of men who all have the same look on them, which is the look of a man spending money he told his wife he didn’t spend.
A bouncer takes one look at the suit and decides, correctly, that I am not his problem tonight.
Smart kid. He’ll live longer than the ones who guess wrong.
I find the best booth in the house. The corner one, with sightlines to every door, because some habits you keep even on a night you’re pretending is about pleasure. I sit. I look for her.
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 become family. 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 disgust crawls 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.”
“People keep telling me that.”
“And where are they now?”
The second it’s out of her mouth she hears it, hears exactly where the people who lecture me end up, and her eyes go wide, then narrow, daring me to make it weird. I make it weird. I smile.
“It’s not arrogance if I’m right.” I stand.
I’m a great deal taller than her. She has to tip her head back to keep the eye contact going, then she does it, refusing to give me the inch.
I like her for that too. I’m collecting reasons to like her at a rate that should worry me.
“Saying no doesn’t make Timur forget your face.
It only means you go home tonight with nothing between you, him, but a deadbolt off the hardware aisle.
I’m the better offer.” I look down at her. “I’m aware that’s not saying much.”
Her shift ends an hour later. I wait. I’m a patient man about most things in this life.
Tonight I am not patient at all, but I sit in the booth, I nurse the drink I’m not drinking, then I make myself watch the room instead of the door she went through.
A bachelor party three tables over gets loud, then louder, then a bouncer drifts close, then they remember they have manners.
A man at the bar keeps glancing over at my booth, then thinking better of it, then glancing again. He never comes over. Smart.
A busboy whose name tag says MARCO keeps finding reasons to wipe the table next to mine, working up a story for tomorrow’s shift.
I let him look. By noon this room will be telling it for me, which is the entire point of the brick.
The night grinds on like that, small and ordinary, while I sit in it wanting one specific woman with a focus that would embarrass me if I were the type to get embarrassed.
I’m not. I gave that up around the same time I gave up the idea that wanting things made you weak. Wanting things is fine. Letting people see how much, that’s the part that kills you, so I keep my face bored, my glass full, my eyes off the back hallway.
Eventually she’s done for the night. I watch her peel out of the costume into jeans, a jacket that’s seen better decades.
I watch her say her goodnights to the other girls.
One of them, a loud one with too much paint around the eyes, throws me a look across the room like she’s memorizing my face for the police sketch.
I nearly smile. Loyalty. Hard to buy in my world. Apparently it grows for free in this one, between broke women who have nothing else to give each other. There’s something almost decent in that. I don’t get to keep things that are decent. Neither, as a rule, do the people I touch.
When she comes back out, I’m already on my feet.
I set a hand at the small of her back, light, just enough for the room to understand what it’s looking at.
I walk her past her gawking friends, out the door, into the cleaner dark of the parking lot, where Roma has the car waiting with the rear door open.
She stops at the curb. Looks at the Cullinan, black, armored, big as a hearse. Looks at me.
“I’m not getting in a car with you,” she says.
“You are. But you’ll want to do it knowing it’s the safer choice tonight, not because I made you.” I hold the door. “I’ll take you home. That’s all this is.”
It is not all this is, not even close. From the look she gives me, she knows it as well as I do. She gets in anyway. That tells me everything I came here to learn.
I slide in beside her. The door shuts, sealing us into leather, quiet, the faint scent of her coming off the warm skin of her throat, cheap vanilla over warm skin I want to get much closer to. The car pulls out smooth into the night. The Strip slides past us, gold, gaudy, stupid through the glass.
She sits as far from me as the seat allows, arms wrapped around herself, eyes locked straight ahead, working very hard at pretending I’m not three feet away.
I look at the line of her throat. I look at the way she won’t look at me.
I think about how this was supposed to be a simple piece of business.
A problem. A solution. A story to keep the wolves off her until the heat passes.
It is not going to be simple. I knew that the moment she didn’t look away out in the sand, I know it now with her this close in my car, every part of me pulled toward her like a hook set under the ribs.
I want her in a way that is going to cost me something before this is done.
I have never once in my life let the cost of a thing stop me from taking it.
The car turns toward her apartment. I lean back. I watch her. I wait.