Chapter 8
SEVASTIAN
The dress is going to be a problem for me all night.
I knew it the second she came down the stairs of her sad little building.
I know it now, walking her through my own front doors with my hand at the small of her back, because the dress is barely a dress, dark red, cut to the spine in back, held up by what looks like pure optimism.
Under the lights of the salon she is, to put it in the language of a man with all my education and refinement, a filthy catastrophe of a problem.
I didn’t pick it. That’s the part eating at me.
I gave her a bottomless card and a single instruction, look the part.
I expected her to come back wrapped in something safe, the way most women hedge when they don’t know the room.
Instead she walked down those stairs in this, a dress she chose herself, off a rack she picked, with her own two hands.
The only conclusion a reasonable man can draw is that some part of Cynthia Boon stood in a fitting room, looked at this scrap of red, pictured exactly what it would do to me, then bought it on purpose.
I cannot decide whether that’s a problem or the single best thing that’s happened to me this year. Probably both. I’ve negotiated with cartels. I’ve been shot. The dress is worse.
Because she did not play it safe. The neckline is a rumor. Her tits are, to put it plainly, very nearly out, held in place by faith and good tailoring. Every time she turns to charm someone I get a fresh reminder of how little is between that fabric and her skin.
So now I get to spend the most important night of the season escorting a walking advertisement for the thoughts I am trying very hard not to have in public. I am thirty-six years old. I run an empire. I have buried men in the desert and slept fine afterward.
Yet here I stand in my own casino, half-hard like a much younger man, because the woman on my arm has a dimple at the base of her spine I keep wanting to put my mouth on, and she knew, she had to know, when she picked this.
I keep catching the line of her, the weight of her, the way the slit moves when she walks, and my mind keeps wandering off to extremely specific places.
What she’d look like with the dress shoved up to her waist. What sound she’d make.
Whether I could get her quiet enough to do it in the office off the floor without the whole party hearing.
These are not pakhan thoughts. These are the thoughts of a man who has lost the thread entirely.
She did it to me on purpose, with a dress.
I have never wanted to reward and punish a person so badly at the same time.
This is not the frame of mind in which one fights a war. I’m aware. I can’t seem to care.
The salon is the prettiest room I’ve built.
Black marble, gold leaf, a chandelier that cost more than the annual budget of a small unlucky nation.
Tonight it’s full of the only people on earth who can afford to lose what they’re about to lose at my tables.
The room sounds like money being moved politely, low laughter, ice, the rifle-click of chips in a hundred restless hands.
Under the perfume, the faint cigar smell of men who think their wives can’t tell.
Oil men. A prince who isn’t really a prince anymore.
Two brothers from Macau who launder more in a weekend than I move in a month.
Every one of them arrives with a woman dressed the way Cynthia is dressed, expensive, on display, meant to be seen, which is the part I did not account for.
Because half of them can’t stop looking at her.
I watch it happen across the room, the snag of attention, the way conversations tip toward her without their owners deciding to.
The not-really-a-prince looks at her twice.
One of the Macau brothers looks at her considerably longer than twice.
I make a note to adjust his credit line in a direction he will feel.
Every single time it happens, something cold and simple wakes up in me and starts itemizing exactly how I’d remove the offending eyes from the offending skull.
I have to keep reminding myself that one cannot start a war at a gambling event over men looking at a woman one is only pretending to own.
The trouble is I’m not pretending. That’s what I keep tripping over tonight.
The hand at her back is supposed to be theater.
By now it’s anything but, and I am putting my hand on her because I need every man in this room to understand, in the wordless animal way men understand these things, that she belongs to me, and the cost of forgetting it is steep.
“You’re growling,” she says under her breath, smiling at the room like a professional.
“I don’t growl.”
“You’re doing a growl-adjacent thing. It’s very alpha. The oil guy’s terrified.”
“Good.”
“You can’t murder a guest.”
“There’s a room for it.”
“There is not a room for it.” A pause. “Is there a room for it?”
I let her wonder. It’s good for the cover, a woman looking at her man like she can’t decide whether he’s joking, and the not deciding is half of what I like about her.
“You know I’m allowed to be looked at. That’s literally the job tonight. Eye candy. You bought the candy. You can’t be mad people want to eat it.”
She says it sweet, eyes front, lips barely moving, and I have to take a slow breath, because the picture she just handed me is not one I can carry across a crowded room with any dignity intact. “Behave,” I tell her.
“I’m behaving perfectly. You’re the one plotting murder.” She lifts a flute of champagne off a passing tray, holds it, doesn’t drink it, just uses it as a prop the way the smart ones do. “Try to look like a man having a nice time, not a man deciding where to hide the bodies.”
The infuriating part, the part I will not say out loud, is that she’s good at this.
Better than good. She came up out of a dive bar in fishnets three weeks ago, and she’s working this room of monsters like she was raised in it.
Reading every face. Mirroring every register.
Charming a Macau launderer with one breath, freezing a wandering hand off her hip with the next, the smile never once slipping.
I catch pieces as we move. She tells the senator’s wife she could never wear yellow, a lie, and the woman blooms like something watered.
She asks the not-really-a-prince nothing whatsoever about being a prince, which makes him hers for life.
I keep my own face bored, I watch her do it, and a small private alarm I don’t enjoy goes off somewhere in me, because somewhere between the door and this corner of the room, the liability on my arm turned out to be a weapon. I’m only just now noticing it’s loaded.
Then the room adjusts, the way rooms do when a certain kind of man walks into them.
He comes through the crowd with old-country manners and a glass of vodka he carries like a scepter, an expensively dressed old wolf wearing a politician’s smile.
I know what he is before he opens his mouth, because I’ve spent all night waiting for Morozov to send someone.
You don’t open a new salon in this town without your enemies buying a ticket.
“Sevastian Volkonsky.” He says my name like we’re old friends, which we are not. “What a room. What a lavish, expensive room. Gleb sends his regards. He hears wonderful things.”
“Does he?” I don’t offer my hand. He doesn’t offer his. We both understand the choreography.
“He does.” The old wolf’s eyes move, slow, deliberate, to the woman beside me, and they travel her the way the others did, except there’s nothing hungry in it, which is worse.
It’s appraisal. It’s a man putting a number on something he might want to buy or break.
“And he hears, just lately, that you’ve acquired something charming.
A new addition. Los Angeles is very interested in your charming new addition.
” He smiles at her, warm as a snake on a hot rock.
“We like to know what our friends are bringing home.”
There it is. The threat, wrapped in silk and good manners, set down gently on the marble between us. We see her. We know she’s yours. We’re wondering what she costs you. Every word polite. Every word a blade.
I feel Cynthia go still beside me, the smallest hitch, and I brace for her to shrink, because anyone with sense would shrink.
Instead she turns the full beam of that stage smile on the old man.
She steps half an inch closer into my side.
She says, bright as morning, “Oh, you must be one of Sevastian’s California friends.
He mentioned the business out west had gotten a little, what’s the word he used.
” She tips her head, mock-thoughtful. “Provincial. He said provincial. Anyway, it’s so nice to meet someone who drove all this way just to see the room. ”
I do not laugh. It costs me real effort not to laugh.
The emissary’s smile holds, but something behind it stumbles, regrouping, because he came to rattle a kept woman and got handed his own hat with a curtsy.
He thought he was reading a pretty ornament.
He just discovered the ornament reads back, and faster than he does.
I let the silence run half a beat too long, long enough for him to feel it.
Then I answer his pleasantry with one of my own.
“Tell Gleb the room is open to everyone,” I say, easy, mild, final. “Even old men who confuse a long drive with an invitation. He’s welcome to come lose his money in person. I’ll have a chair held for him. Near the door, so it’s a short walk back to California when he’s finished.”