Chapter 13
CINDY
They move me to the ranch the way you’d move a witness or a hostage, which, when I think about it too hard, I technically am.
It sits forty minutes north of the city on a dry lakebed, nothing but Mojave in every direction. The drive in is forty minutes of nothing, then a wall, then a gate that opens like it’s been told about me, then a quarter mile of gravel announcing the car to the house.
Whoever built this place wanted to watch trouble arrive for a long time before it mattered. The first time I see it I almost laugh. The scariest man in Nevada apparently lives in a fortress of glass and pale concrete in the middle of the same desert where I watched him kill a man.
The joke writes itself. Sevastian doesn’t see the joke. He decided my apartment was too easy to watch, too easy to reach, so now I live behind a wall, a gate, a guard with a rifle who pretends not to look at me.
By day two I know the gate guard’s name is Petya and that he loses at cards to literally everyone, because Tasha tells me things whether I ask or not. I’m told it’s for my safety, in the same tone you’d use to tell a dog it’s going to the vet for its own good.
I decide to hate it here. I last about a day and a half.
Day one, I find out there are horses. Actual horses, three of them, out past the garage, plus a man whose whole job is their hair. I feed one a carrot under his supervision. The giant thing lips it off my palm gentle as a secret, and I have to walk away before anybody sees my face.
The trouble is the people. I came in braced for a prison, cold men in colder rooms. Instead I get Yelena.
She’s seventy, roughly the size of a bird, and she terrifies grown killers.
She takes one look at me on the first morning, head to foot, the way you’d price a horse, and says, “So. You’re the witness my grandson claimed in a strip club instead of doing the sensible thing.
” Then, before I can decide whether to be insulted, “Good. The sensible thing is boring. He is too sensible. Sit. You’re too thin, which is a strange way to be in a country this rich. Eat.”
I sit. I eat. It’s a stew with dill in it, rich enough that my eyes close on the first spoonful, and Yelena watches me eat it the way generals watch ground being gained.
I’ve spent my whole life slow to trust anyone, walls up, waiting for the catch.
This woman gets under all of it in about four minutes flat, and I let her, which is not a thing I do.
She sees through the whole act, is the thing.
That first afternoon she watches me flinch when Sevastian’s name comes up, watches the careful way I hold myself near him at dinner, and she sets down her tea.
“You may stop performing the great romance for me,” she says, dry as the lakebed.
“I knew it was a transaction the night he announced it. A man does not fall in love at a card table.” A pause.
Those eyes that see straight through you go sharp.
“Though he’s working very hard to look like a man who hasn’t.
The most interesting thing he’s done in years. ”
“I’m supposed to keep pretending, though,” I say, testing.
“Pretend to them.” She waves at the window, the guards, the world.
“Never to me. I’m old, my knees are bad, and lying to me wastes time I’m no longer rich in.
” Then she refills my tea like we’ve just settled the seating chart at a wedding.
Then she goes back to her tea and leaves me with my whole cover peeled off in under a minute.
Then there’s Tasha, who runs the house and talks twice as fast as anyone I’ve met since Crystal.
She decides we’re friends before I’ve finished agreeing to it.
She’s twenty-seven, warm, quick, a little nosy in the exact way I like, and inside a week she’s bringing me coffee the way I take it without being told, gossiping about everyone in the compound, treating me like a person instead of an asset.
After weeks of being handled, that small kindness nearly undoes me.
She also talks. God, she talks, a warm road of gossip with no exits, who’s feuding in the kitchen, which guard cries at movies, why nobody mentions the east paddock to Yelena.
I don’t have to say one word for an hour, and it’s the most restful thing that’s happened to me since the desert.
And there’s the driver. The big silent one who’s been hauling me around since the desert without a word, the man I’d half decided was furniture that happens to drive.
Except at the ranch he turns out to have a name.
The name is Roma, and he isn’t furniture at all.
He’s just quiet. The first time he says more than three words to me is when Tasha drops a tray and he catches it without looking up from his coffee.
She snaps something at him. He says something back, perfectly deadpan, that turns her pink and sends her stomping out of the room.
“What did you say to her?” I ask, because somebody has to.
Roma considers his coffee. “The truth.”
“Which was?”
“That she throws like her opinions. Wide of the mark.” From the hallway comes a shriek of pure outrage, which means she heard, which means she was listening, which tells me everything neither of them knows yet.
Two things hit me at once. The silent driver is funny.
And those two are going to be a slow-motion disaster that I intend to watch every second of.
It’s the kind of thing only I seem to see, which figures, because it’s my whole skill set.
Tasha calls Roma a humorless slab of a man at least once a day.
Roma calls Tasha nothing at all, just lets her run out of steam, then hands her the exact thing she was reaching for before she has to ask, which makes her madder than any insult could.
I catch the way her eyes track him out of a room when she thinks no one’s watching.
I catch the half-second his mouth does something almost like a smile at the back of her head.
Neither of them has the faintest idea, which is the best part.
I’ve spent my life unable to want a single thing out loud, and there’s an odd comfort in watching two other people be just as bad at it as I am.
“They’ve been doing that dance for three years,” Yelena tells me, materializing at my elbow with the silence of a much smaller, much more dangerous animal.
“Place bets if you like. I’ve given up. Some men need a war to make them brave.
” She gives me a look so pointed I feel it go right through me, then drifts off before I can decide whether she meant the driver at all.
So that’s the trap of the place. I came here to be a prisoner.
Instead, somewhere in the first week, I look up from a kitchen table with Tasha laughing at one elbow, Yelena correcting my terrible Russian at the other, Roma deadpanning into his coffee across the room, and I feel something I haven’t felt since I was a kid in a town too small for a dot on the map.
I feel like I belong to something. A family, the kind you don’t get to choose, full of dangerous people who’d all, I’m fairly sure, kill for one another without blinking. Somehow I’m inside the circle instead of out in the cold looking in.
It scares me worse than the gun did. Wanting things is how you get punished. I learned that at nineteen with a shattered knee and a future that evaporated overnight. I know better than to let a place like this start to feel like home.
I let it anyway. A little. I’m only human, and I’ve been cold a long time.
The watchful part of me never switches off. While everyone here treats me like a problem with a perimeter drawn around it, I do what I’m actually good at. I watch the people. People tell you everything, if you let them, without ever opening their mouths.
I watch who won’t meet my eye. I watch whose warmth runs a half-second late, like it has to be remembered before it gets offered.
I watch a guard linger near a hallway he has no real reason to walk.
I watch the whole household orbit Sevastian, fear and love all braided together so tight you can’t pull one strand loose from the other.
One face keeps snagging me. At first I can’t even say why.
His name is Vadim, and everyone here loves him.
The old soldier, the one who’s bled for this family his whole life, weathered down to scar and gristle, carrying a grief you could set a watch by.
They told me, in the soft way people hand you sad things, that he loved Sevastian’s dead brother like his own blood.
I believe it. That’s the part I keep underlining for myself, because I keep checking it. His sorrow is real. I’ve sat across from enough genuinely broken people to know the real article when it’s in front of me, and the grief on that man goes all the way to the floor.
It’s the other thing I can’t account for.
It’s small. So small I keep telling myself I’m inventing it, that I’ve been scared so long I’ve started seeing knives in the silverware.
But every so often Vadim looks at Sevastian, and for the length of a blink the grief on his face steps aside.
Something else stands in its place, colder, flatter, something underneath the sorrow that doesn’t sit right on a man who’d take a bullet for the one he’s looking at.
Everyone else in this house reads that hardness as a grieving soldier’s stoicism, a man gone stiff from losing too much. I read faces for a living, and the thing I keep catching at the edges of his doesn’t look like grief turned inward.
It looks aimed.
It’s an instinct, not a fact. I couldn’t say a word of it out loud without sounding like a paranoid woman who’s been through too much. So I tuck it away where I keep the things I’m probably wrong about, and I keep watching.
The rose garden is what finally cracks my careful distance open.
Because there’s a rose garden. In the middle of the Mojave, behind the cold glass house, somebody has coaxed an improbable acre of roses out of the meanest dirt in Nevada.
It’s Yelena’s, naturally, a deliberate softness made in a hard place.
Sevastian finds me out there one evening at the gold end of the day, walking the rows, because it’s the one corner of the compound where I can almost forget what I am.
He doesn’t speak for a while. He just walks beside me, big and quiet, the threat of him gone oddly gentle in the slanting light.
The roses are ridiculous out here. That’s what gets me first, hundreds of them in graded rows, deep red down to a pink so pale it’s nearly an apology, all of it sweet on the dry evening air with the desert breathing in over the wall.
Somebody fights the Mojave every single day for this, and wins, on purpose, for no money.
We don’t perform out here. There’s no audience to play to.
It’s only the two of us and a thousand roses his grandmother grows in spite of the whole desert.
Somewhere down the second row, without either of us deciding to, the conversation strips down to the skin.
“She planted these for my brother,” he says, out of nowhere, low. “Kostya. He loved stupid impossible things. Roses in a lakebed. She keeps it for him.”
I go very still, the way you go still when a wild thing wanders close and you don’t want to spook it back into the dark. Because I know who Kostya is now. The brother. The dead one. The name this whole house tiptoes around. And I have never once heard Sevastian say it out loud.
“What was he like?” I ask, careful.
For one long moment in the failing light, the most guarded man I’ve ever met isn’t guarded at all.
Something moves over his face I’ve never seen there, a crack, a glimpse of a younger man under the pakhan, and he starts to tell me.
His brother. Funny, he says. Easy. Loved by everyone, the kind of person a room got warmer around.
Then his voice snags on something beneath the words, some enormous dark weight I can feel the edge of without seeing its shape, and whatever he was about to say next, the real thing, the thing he hauls around behind that flat face, he stops.
He just stops. The crack seals over. The pakhan comes back across his features like a tide coming in. He looks away at the roses, and the moment is gone.
But I saw it. Not the secret, whatever it is, I didn’t see that.
What I saw was the wound itself. The sheer size of it.
The way a whole man has built himself around a grief he won’t put a name to, and it does something to me I didn’t sign up for.
I came out here certain this man was a monster, and monsters don’t grow roses for their dead.
They don’t almost break open in the gold light.
They don’t stop themselves a half-second before they hand you the worst thing they own.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say.
“I know.” He looks at me then, and there’s something in it close to gratitude, which on this man is its own kind of devastating. “That’s why I almost did.”
We walk the rest of the rows in a quiet that isn’t uncomfortable at all, which frightens me more than the gate, the guard, the rifle.
When he leaves me at my door he doesn’t touch me.
He looks at my mouth, then at the door, then says good night in a voice with gravel in it, the kind of good night that’s mostly a different sentence wearing a coat.
I lie awake half the night anyway, and that’s its own answer.
Here’s the wreckage of my careful evening.
I’m half in love with a criminal who grows roses for his dead brother, which is a catastrophically stupid thing to be.
I’m part of a found family I have no business loving, locked in a fortress I’m not allowed to leave.
And somewhere inside these walls, eating at the same table, smiling the same smiles, there is a liar.
I don’t have proof. I don’t have a name I could defend to anyone.
But I’ve trusted this gut my whole life, and tonight, lying in the dark in a rich man’s guest room with roses on the air through the window, I’m as certain as I’ve been of anything that I already know which smile in this house is the false one.
I just hope, for all our sakes, that this is the one time in a hundred my gut has it wrong.