Chapter 7
CINDY
Afew days go by and nothing happens, which is somehow worse than if it had.
I keep waiting for the second car to come back, the forgettable one from the casino drive, the watchers who aren’t Sevastian’s.
I watch for it on the way to work, on the way home, in the gas-station lot, in the reflection of every shop window.
It doesn’t show. That should be a relief.
Instead it just leaves me with the knowledge that they know how to not be seen when they want to, which is so much worse than a man with a newspaper.
I sleep badly. I go to work. I let the girls believe the sugar-daddy story a little more every shift. I’m getting good at being a woman with a secret, which isn’t a skill I ever wanted on my resume.
Then, on day four of this new life I didn’t ask for, an envelope comes, and the strangeness goes from quiet to loud.
The card comes with instructions, which is very on brand for Sevastian, because God forbid the man hand me anything without a set of orders attached.
It’s another black card, this one in my name.
Cynthia Boon, embossed in the corner like I’m a person who exists somewhere with a credit history.
With it comes a text. No greeting, no signature, just an address on the most expensive stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard, then a line that reads, There’s a private salon opening at the casino.
You’ll come on my arm. Buy whatever you need to look the part.
Bring your friends, buy them what they want too.
A beat later, like he could feel me bristling from across the city, It isn’t a suggestion.
So now I own a credit card with no limit, plus a man who thinks “buy a dress” is a military operation.
I should hate all of it. I do hate most of it.
What I don’t expect is the small, ugly thrill that goes through me when I look at that card, because here’s a thing about being broke for seven years that nobody tells you.
When somebody finally hands you a key to the candy store, the part of you that’s been hungry the whole time doesn’t care whose money it is. It just wants in.
I bring Crystal, obviously. If I’m doing something this insane I’m not doing it alone, plus Crystal has wanted to walk into a store like the ones on this block her whole life and be treated like she belongs.
The car comes for us. That’s the part I’m still not used to, that a car just appears now, summoned out of nowhere, the big blacked-out one with the driver who never speaks.
It pulls up outside my building like a yacht docking at a bus stop.
Crystal, who I told to be ready at noon with no further details, because watching her reaction is worth more than the warning, comes down the steps, sees it, stops dead.
“Whose is that?”
“Ours, today. Get in.”
She gets in like the seat is made of clouds.
She runs her hand over the leather. She finds the little cooled compartment, the bottles of water nobody’s going to drink, the privacy screen.
She presses every button at least once, narrating the whole time in a voice that climbs higher with each discovery, until the driver’s eyes flick to me in the mirror with something that would be amusement on a man who had any.
I shrug at him. Let her have this. She’s wanted nice things her whole life, gotten the short end of every single one, and if a rich man’s guilt money buys her ten minutes of feeling like a queen in the back of his ridiculous car, then good.
“Cindy,” she breathes, sprawled across the seat. “I could live in here. I would never leave. They’d have to pry me out.”
“You’d get bored. There’s no snacks.”
“I’d bring snacks.” She’s dead serious. “This is the nicest thing that has ever happened to me and we haven’t even gotten there yet.”
We get there. The car lets us out at the curb. The doorman of the first place actually opens the door for us, and Crystal grabs my hand.
“Cindy.” She stops dead on the sidewalk in front of the first boutique, a glass box with three dresses in the whole window, no prices on anything, which is how you know. “Cindy, this is the kind of place that calls security on people like us.”
“Not today it isn’t.” I hold up the card. “Today we’re people like them.”
Her face when the doors open for us, when a woman in a sharp suit greets us by name, offers us champagne we don’t take, walks us back to a private room with its own couch.
I’d pay real money to see that face again.
Crystal sits down like the couch might eject her.
Then a sales associate brings out the first armful of things with no price tags, the kind of place where asking is the same as not affording it, and something in my best friend just lets go.
“Can I?” she whispers, touching a dress like it’s behind museum glass.
“You can have it. You can have ten of it.” I drop onto the couch beside her, reckless, bright, a little drunk on nothing at all. “Sevastian said to buy you whatever you want. His words. So. Want things.”
She wants things. God, she wants things, and watching her want them out loud after years of watching her give away everything she has to people who never pay her back, it does something to me.
Crystal tries on a coat the color of butter, spins in the mirror, laughs that loud helpless delighted laugh of hers, and for a second the whole grey shape of my life goes quiet.
It’s just my friend, happy, in a soft yellow coat.
The numbers, though. The numbers start doing things I’m not built to stay calm about.
A dress here, shoes there, the coat, a bag for Crystal that has a waitlist apparently, except not for us, and somewhere around the time the associate murmurs a total for one armful that’s more than I make in half a year, my nerve cracks.
Seven years of poverty does not switch off because a rich man said so.
My hands actually sweat. I picture the card declining, security after all, the whole thing turning out to be a test I just failed in front of my friend.
I step into the corner. I call him.
He picks up on the second ring. “Cynthia.”
“Hi. Yeah. So, quick question.” I turn my back to the room, drop my voice.
“I think there’s a problem with the card.
Or with the amount. I’m looking at a number that’s, well, a lot.
I don’t want to blow past some limit and have it bounce in front of everyone.
So what’s the actual ceiling here? Because I think I’m close to it. Or past it.”
He laughs.
It stops me dead. I have known this man across three of the worst nights of my life. I’ve watched him kill, threaten, command, go cold, go still. I have never once heard him laugh. The sound of it down the phone is low, warm, genuinely amused, and the sound of it goes through me low and warm.
“There’s no ceiling,” he says, the smile still in his voice. “That’s the point of that card. There’s no number. You won’t find the bottom of it, so stop looking. Spend more.”
“That’s insane.”
“Buy something that scares you. Then buy your friend something that scares her worse.” A pause. The amusement drops into something quieter, something that pulls at me lower than I want it to. “You’ve been telling yourself no for a long time. Stop, for one afternoon. Go crazy.”
He hangs up on me mid-syllable.
I stand there a second with the dead phone in my hand, a brand new dangerous feeling unspooling in me, because spending this man’s money was a chore thirty seconds ago.
Now it’s a dare. Here’s the part I’m not proud of and can’t seem to help.
I still think he’s a criminal. I’m still a thing he’s decided he owns.
But some furious righteous corner of me looks at that bottomless card and thinks, fine.
If I’m going to be the kept woman, let’s make the house pay for the privilege. Let’s make it bleed.
I go back to the couch. I stop being careful.
I buy the dress that scares me. I buy three more.
I let the woman in the suit bring out the lingerie, the real stuff, scraps of silk that cost what I used to make in a month, made of basically nothing, and I buy that too without letting myself think about who it’s for.
I buy shoes I can’t walk in. I buy a coat I’ll never need in a city that’s a hundred degrees most of the year.
Then I find the jewelry case. I see a thing I have no business wanting, fine, cold, glittering, with a price tag steeper than a decent used car.
I look at it a long moment. Then I put it on.
I watch the associate run the card. I watch it clear without a blink, and I laugh out loud the way I haven’t in years.
“Crystal.” I wave her over to the case, grinning now, gone fully feral. “Pick something.”
“Cindy, no, you already, I can’t.”
“Pick. Something.” I point at a set of earrings under the glass, drops of something brilliant under the little lights. “Those. Try those.”
She tries them. She looks at herself in the little mirror with diamonds in her ears, her hand comes up over her mouth, her eyes go shiny, and she makes a sound that’s half shriek, half sob. I tell the woman in the suit we’ll take them. Crystal grabs my arm so hard it stings.
“That’s a hundred thousand dollars,” she hisses, like saying it quietly makes it less unhinged.
“I know.”
“Cindy.”
“Sevastian said go crazy.” I mean it as a joke, mostly.
I mean it as me beating the system, getting one back on the man who buys people.
But watching Crystal cry over a pair of earrings she’ll probably never have a reason to wear, watching her be a girl who gets nice things instead of a girl who gives them away, I’d spend it again.
I’d spend ten times that. There are worse uses for a monster’s money than this.
Underneath the high, though, there’s the other thing, getting louder the more I buy.