Chapter 5
SEVASTIAN
Ileave before she wakes.
I tell myself it’s practical. I have a city to run, a body in the desert, a second body that turned up overnight in a parking garage downtown wearing one of my men’s faces.
So the truth is I don’t have time to lie in a stripper’s bed watching the light come up.
That’s the version I take down the stairs with me.
It’s a good version. It has the advantage of being mostly true.
The other part, the part I leave on the nightstand with a brick of cash so I won’t have to look at it, is that I don’t trust what staying would mean.
I have spent a very long time being a man who wants nothing he can’t walk away from.
I walked away from her bed at four in the morning with my chest doing something I did not authorize.
I’m furious about it in the only way I let myself be furious anymore, which is quietly, completely, my face giving back nothing at all.
By six I’m at Dust to Dust, and the casino does what the casino always does. It makes me feel like myself.
She’s a beauty at this hour, my gold-veined monster, empty of whales and noise.
The floor sits dim and hushed, the slot banks sleeping, the domed ceiling overhead painted like a cathedral I’ll never set foot in for any honest reason.
A few servers drift through in last night’s costumes, killing time before their shifts end.
The cleaning crews work down the slot banks with their carts, scrubbing last night out of the carpet, perfume, smoke, spilled gin, the faint cold metal smell of money that’s been through ten thousand hands.
They go quiet and polite when I pass, the way the whole world tends to when I pass.
I built a palace to wash dirty money through.
I named it Dust to Dust because I have a sense of humor about what I am, even if nobody else is allowed to laugh.
Roma falls into step beside me at the elevator. He’s been awake as long as I have. You wouldn’t know it. He hands me a coffee I didn’t ask for, which is the nearest thing to affection either of us permits before noon.
“You look like hell,” he offers.
“You’re fired.”
“Okay.” He produces the second coffee he was holding behind his back and gives me that one too. I rehire him.
“They’re all upstairs,” he says. “Vadim got in twenty minutes ago. Everyone’s twitchy.”
“They should be twitchy. We lost a man.”
“Yuri.” Roma says the name flat. “Found him in the Sands garage, level four. Two in the chest, one in the head. Professional.”
“Morozov sending a thank-you note for the desert.”
“That’s what the room thinks.”
I drink the coffee. It’s good. Roma knows how I take it, knows a hundred small things about me, and he is the only man alive I’d turn my back on without thinking twice.
There’s a short list of people in this world I trust. It fits on one hand with fingers to spare.
Most days I’m grateful it’s that short, because a short list is a list you can keep alive.
The high-limit salon on the mezzanine is where I hold council when I want my men reminded what we’re protecting.
It’s the prettiest room I own. Black marble, gold leaf, a card table that’s seen more money cross it in a night than most men touch in a life.
This morning there are no cards. There are eight of my brigadiers around the felt, and the air in here is exactly as ugly as a room full of armed men who just lost one of their own.
Vadim sits at my right hand, where he’s sat for fifteen years.
He’s older than the rest of us, weathered down to gristle and scar, a soldier who has bled for this family in more places than I’d care to list. He looks up when I come in, his eyes doing what they always do, meeting mine with that worn, steady sadness he’s carried since the day we put my brother in the ground.
Vadim loved Kostya. Everyone in this room knows it.
It’s the thing that makes him easy to trust, a man whose grief you can see plain on his face, and I have leaned on that grief for years without once questioning the floor under my feet.
“Pakhan,” he says, and the room settles.
I take my seat at the head of the table. I let the quiet stretch until it belongs to me. Then I open my hand on the felt.
“Tell me about Yuri.”
They tell me. It’s bad in the usual way, which is that it’s a message.
The message is clear. Morozov reached into my city, lifted one of mine off a parking level a half mile from where I’m sitting, left him for me to find.
The desert was me answering an incursion.
This is Gleb answering my answer. We’re in it now, the slow opening moves of a war I’ve spent two years trying to price out of happening, and the table wants blood. It wants direction. In that order.
“We hit back tonight,” says Pasha, who has a young wife at home and talks like a man with nothing to lose anyway. “While they think we’re still licking it.”
“With what?” Dmitri, oldest man at the felt, spreads his hands. “Half our drivers are sitting on warehouses. You want to start a war with the tank on empty.”
“The war started. It started in that garage.”
The table starts talking over itself in two languages. I let it run. You learn more from men arguing than from men reporting. The young ones want blood by morning. The old ones want walls. The vodka in front of Vadim sits untouched while he waits, last of everyone, longest.
“Pakhan.” His voice quiets the room without rising. “Gleb wants you loud. A loud man shows his men, his routes, his face. Bury Yuri properly. Pay the widow. Make the old man come further out of his hole to provoke you. Patience has put more men in the ground than bullets ever have.”
Around the felt, the older heads nod. It’s good counsel. It’s always good counsel, which is why the room loves him, and the room is right to.
“He’s calling you a usurper,” says Kir, down the table, young, hotheaded, not wrong to be.
“To the Tarasovs. To the Bratva back home. Says you took the chair over your own blood. Says a man like that can’t hold the Southwest, and the families are listening, because he’s old, you’re not, old men like other old men’s stories. ”
The room goes careful. They always go careful when someone says it out loud.
“Let them listen,” I say.
“Pakhan, with respect. If the families decide your chair is open.”
“Then they’ll learn it isn’t.” I don’t raise my voice.
I never have to. “Gleb Morozov knew my father, so he thinks that makes him my better. It makes him old. I’m not going to win this by arguing my pedigree at a table in California.
I’m going to win it the way the chair is always won, by being the last man able to sit in it. ”
I look around the felt, one face at a time, long enough for every man at it to remember he chose me.
“Yuri had a wife. She’ll be cared for, generously, for the rest of her life, and this whole city will know why.
We don’t move on Morozov yet. We make him reach again.
The next time he reaches, we take the arm off at the shoulder. ”
Vadim volunteers to sit with Yuri’s widow, the way he takes all the grief work. The men love him for it.
So do I.
It’s enough. It always is, because I’ve spent fifteen years making sure of it. The room breathes out, turns to logistics, and I sit at the head of my own table running an empire with the front of my mind, while the back of it sits in a cramped apartment across town wondering if she’s awake yet.
This is the problem. I notice it like a stone in my shoe. All through the routes, the markers, the question of who we put on Morozov’s emissary when he finally surfaces, some disobedient channel in me keeps drifting back. Honey hair on a flat pillow.
A mouth that gave my filth right back to me word for word.
The exact way she looked at me when I told her this was a mistake, like I’d slapped her and was deciding whether to slap back.
At one point Kir says the word leverage and my brain, a respected instrument, supplies her bare leg hooked over my hip. I run an empire.
This is the equipment I’m running it with. I have killed men over a smaller pull on my attention than she’s putting on me at this table. The fact that I can’t make it stop is information. I don’t much like what it’s telling me.
When the meeting breaks, Vadim stays.
He always stays. After every council, the two of us, the last of the old guard, while the young ones file out to do what young men do.
He pours himself a finger of vodka though it’s barely seven.
He doesn’t offer me one, because he knows I don’t drink while I’m working.
We’ve done this ten thousand times. The vodka is the cheap kind, the brand from home that tastes like a knife fight, drunk in a building full of bottles older than both of us.
He’s never once switched. Some loyalties are to the throat.
“The business in the desert,” he says, easy, turning the glass. “The envoy. It went clean?”
“It went clean.”
“No witnesses?”
There it is. He doesn’t look up from the glass when he says it, his voice mild as milk, an old soldier tidying up after his pakhan the way he’s tidied up a hundred times before.
There’s a girl. He doesn’t know that yet, or he shouldn’t, and the smart move, the one every instinct I’ve sharpened over a lifetime is shoving at me, is exactly what I swore to her I’d never do.
Tie it off. Make her a clean line in a clean report.
One loose end, gone, and the desert stays sealed forever.
“None that matter,” I say.
He looks up then. Just a flick of those tired eyes.
“There was someone,” I go on, because a half-truth lives where a clean lie gets caught. “A woman. Out there by accident. She’s not a problem.”
“A witness is always a problem, Sevastian.” Gentle. Almost fond. The voice of the man who taught me half of what I know about staying breathing. “You of all people know that.”
“She’s mine now.” I let it sit flat on the table between us, the way I let everything sit.
“I’ve claimed her. Publicly, at her club, in front of forty people.
As far as this city is concerned, she’s the pakhan’s woman, which means she isn’t a witness to anything.
She’s family. She’s protected. That’s the end of it. ”
For a long moment Vadim says nothing. He turns the glass. His face gives me back nothing but that same worn sadness, the grief he’s carried so long it’s just the shape of him now, and I read it the way I’ve read it for fifteen years. As loyalty. As a tired old soldier watching my back.
“If you say she’s handled,” he says at last, “she’s handled.”
“I say it.”
He nods. He drinks. The matter is settled, because I’ve said it is, and nothing in my world stays open once I’ve called it done.
Vadim bled for my brother. There’s no version of this world where I look at that face and see anything but a man who loves what I loved.
I’ve staked my life on that for fifteen years.
I stake it again now without thinking twice, the way I do every morning.
On my way out I catch Roma in the corridor.
“Put a detail on the woman,” I tell him. “Quiet. She doesn’t see them, she doesn’t know they exist. Two men, rotating, eyes only.”
Roma’s expression doesn’t move. “The stripper.”
“The woman from the desert.” I don’t have her name. I find that I want it, which is a problem I’ll deal with later. “Timur saw her face. Until I know what Morozov’s people do with that, she’s exposed. I want to know the second anyone but me comes near her.”
“Insurance,” Roma says.
“Insurance.”
“The men will notice,” he says. “They’ll say the pakhan caught feelings.”
“The men can say it to my face.”
“Nobody will say it to your face.”
“Then we have a system.”
It’s a good word. It’s the word I’m using, and I half believe it, the same way I half believe the coffee was why I came in early, the war the reason I left her bed before dawn.
A man protects an asset. A pakhan keeps his claimed woman breathing, because a dead claimed woman makes him look weak in front of the families he’s trying to hold.
There are six clean reasons to park two men outside her building. Not one of them is the real one. I take the six clean reasons down the hall with me. I leave the real one where I left the rest of it, on a nightstand, in the dark, under a band of hundreds.
I take the back stairs down to the floor, because I don’t feel like the elevator, because some mornings a man needs forty concrete steps to put himself back into one piece. That’s where I find Vadim a second time.
He’s on the half-landing, his back to me, phone to his ear, voice low. I move quiet on stairs, a habit out of a life where it’s the whole difference, so he doesn’t hear me until I’m nearly on him. He ends the call when he turns and sees me, pockets the phone, gives me a tired smile.
“Pakhan. My sister. Her husband’s a fool with money again.”
“They usually are,” I say.
He laughs the old laugh, the one from courtyards twenty years gone, and for one second we’re just two men in a stairwell who buried the same boy.
He goes up past me toward the salon. I go down. A man’s allowed a phone call about his idiot brother-in-law without his pakhan reading anything into it, and I don’t. Vadim’s earned thirty years of not being read into.
I walk out onto my floor, into the black, the gold, the quiet, and I make myself think about a woman across town instead.
She’s the easier thing to think about by a mile, which ought to worry me, if I were the kind of man who listened to that.
I’m not. I’ve got a dead soldier, a stripper in my head, a war on my doorstep.
I pick the stripper, because some mornings you take the soft problem over the hard one and call it strategy.