Chapter 17
SEVASTIAN
Ifind her at dawn on the back terrace, wrapped in a blanket she stole off a couch, watching the sun come up over the lakebed like it owes her money.
I’ve been awake for hours. I don’t sleep much, never have, lately even less, because the war runs under everything like a current I can’t switch off.
Because there’s a woman three doors down whose presence I feel through the walls of my own house like a second pulse.
So I’m up, the smell of wax still on my hands.
I’m dressed. I come out onto the terrace with coffee I don’t intend to drink, and I find her there, coiled too tight, shoulders up around her ears, coiled around herself the way she gets when the fear has its teeth in her.
She’d hate to know how plainly I see it. I see everything about her. That’s the problem.
I should leave her alone. I should go run my empire. Instead I look at the line of her tense shoulders against the pink desert sky, and a thought arrives in my head, fully formed, completely insane. I’m going to act on it before I’ve finished deciding to.
“Get dressed,” I tell her. “Real shoes. We’re going out.”
She squints up at me, suspicious. “Out where? It’s barely morning.”
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t love when you say that. The last time you said something like that, I ended up somebody’s expensive girlfriend in front of forty people.”
“Twenty minutes.” I walk off before she can argue, because if I stand there and let her look at me with those eyes I’ll talk myself out of it.
Behind me I hear her mutter that she was promised coffee in this life.
By the time I have the car out she’s at the garage door in jeans and sneakers with her hair in a knot, fast for a woman, suspiciously fast, like some part of her was already dressed for an exit.
Of course it was. Some part of her is always dressed for an exit. I intend to outdrive it. And I’ve decided, against every instinct I own, that I don’t want to talk myself out of it.
The garage under the ranch holds a dozen cars. Most of them are mine the way a bulletproof vest is mine, functional, dark, built to keep me breathing. But at the end of the row, under the gray cover she asked about, there’s one that isn’t about staying alive at all. I strip the cover off.
It stopped being tonight an hour ago. Matte black, low and obscene, a machine I bought for a single reason.
The first time I drove it, I forgot, for ninety entire seconds, every last thing that’s wrong with my life.
It cost what a building costs and does nothing practical at all, which is the point.
Everything else I own works for me. This one only plays.
I wax it myself. I don’t let the men touch it.
In all the years I’ve owned it, I’ve never once put another person in the passenger seat.
I notice that I’m doing it now only after I’ve already opened the door and held it for her, which is becoming a theme with this woman, my hands deciding things a beat ahead of my judgment.
“Okay, this is a different energy,” she says, sliding in, running her hand over the dash.
She knows exactly what she’s touching, too.
Her grin when the engine turns over and the whole machine snarls awake is the most honest thing I’ve seen on her face since the desert. “Oh. This is a bad-decision car.”
“It’s the best-decision car. People confuse the two.”
“How fast does it go?”
“I’ve never found out. The road always ends first.”
She pulls the seatbelt across like she’s arming herself, eyes already bright. “Find out today.”
We clear the gate, the guard, the long private drive. Then there’s nothing in front of us but the dead-straight ranch road and forty miles of empty Mojave, so I open it up.
The desert detonates past the windows. The acceleration shoves us both back into the seats, the engine climbing into a scream, the dunes, the creosote, the bleached morning sky all smearing into pure motion.
The engine’s scream comes up through the seats, through the spine, a noise you stop hearing with your ears.
The road ahead pulls thin as a blade. Beside me Cynthia makes a sound that starts as a gasp, then turns halfway through into a laugh.
A real one, nothing like the bright professional thing she runs on a room.
A whoop, an actual whoop, her head going back, her hands coming up off the dash to grab at nothing, pure helpless delight pouring out of a woman who has spent every minute I’ve known her braced for the next blow.
Something happens to me that hasn’t happened in longer than I can say.
I feel free.
It moves through me the way the speed does, fast, total, dangerous.
For the length of one straightaway, the needle climbing into triple digits and a woman laughing like that beside me, I’m not the pakhan.
Not the man who buries people in this sand.
Not the throne, the war, the grave I built my whole life on top of.
I’m just a man in a fast car with a beautiful woman, alive in a way I forgot was on offer to me.
I catch myself grinning into the windshield like the boy I was before everything, and I cannot remember the last time my own face did that without me ordering it to.
Kostya used to make this face at me from passenger seats, egging me on past sense.
More, faster, come on, Seva. For once the memory arrives without teeth.
It just sits in the seat behind us and grins.
This is the man I might have been. The thought comes unwanted, a sharp edge under all the joy.
If my life had gone another way. If there were no grave.
That loose, laughing, ordinary man got buried out here too, years ago, and I haven’t seen his face in the mirror since.
The only thing that’s called him up is the woman in my passenger seat.
That frightens me worse than Morozov ever has.
I drive faster anyway. Both things are true in the car at once, the fear, the foot on the floor. The foot is winning. I let it.
Because I know what I do to things I want this much.
I know the shape of that story. I’ve lived the worst of it.
And yet here I am, flooring a car across a desert to chase a feeling I have no right to, one I fully intend to chase again.
Which is exactly how a careful man stops being careful. It’s how a kept thing gets buried.
I don’t slow down. I should. I don’t.
“Faster,” she says, breathless, reading the hesitation in me.
God help me, I give it to her. The needle climbs past every number a sane man respects.
Her hand finds the dash. Mine go light on the wheel, the old calm coming up from wherever I buried it.
The car stops being a machine and turns into one long black thought we’re having together.
She laughs again, and for one more straightaway I let myself be the man who gets to make her laugh like that.
“You’re enjoying this,” she accuses, grinning, shouting it over the engine, her hair whipping across her face.
“I’m evaluating an asset.”
“You named the car, didn’t you? Don’t lie.”
“I did not name the car.”
“He named the car,” she tells the windshield, delighted.
“I don’t enjoy things.”
“Liar. You’re grinning. I can see it. The terror of Nevada is having a great time in his little rocket.”
“It’s a hypercar.”
“It’s a rocket with cupholders.”
“It has no cupholders.”
“What do you mean it has no cupholders?”
“Cupholders add weight.”
“You paid for a car with no cupholders.” She says it the way a juror says guilty.
“You people deserve everything that’s coming to you.
” She braces a hand on the dash as I take a long sweeping curve flat out, the whole world tilting, and instead of fear there’s just that whoop again, and I realize I would do almost anything to keep hearing it.
That’s the part that should scare me. It does.
I do it anyway. I take the next curve faster.
For a few miles there’s no war. No throne. No grave. There’s a fast car, a straight road, a woman who has decided, for one morning, to stop being afraid, and a man who forgot he was allowed to feel like this. I let it run. I let it run too long.
Then we crest the rise, and the morning curdles.
There’s an SUV parked off the road just over the top of the hill.
Dark. Nose out. Sun off the windshield, engine dead, dust settled on it thick enough to say hours, not minutes.
Set with a clear sightline back down the ranch road, the road that runs to my gate, my walls, my grandmother, the woman in my passenger seat.
It’s a watcher’s position. I’ve set up a hundred of them. I know one on sight, the angle, the patience of it, the way it sits where it can see without being seen. There’s exactly one reason a vehicle parks there at dawn watching the only road to my home.
Timur. Or Timur’s men. Morozov has put eyes on my house. On my grandmother’s roses. On the woman in my passenger seat with wax still on her hands.
The joy goes out of me between one heartbeat and the next, the warm loose man evaporating, the cold one snapping back into place so hard it’s nearly a relief.
We’re closing on the SUV fast, fast enough to make us a problem the watcher will radio in, two faces in a car they were never meant to get this clear a look at.
I weigh it in the half second I’m given.
I can’t stop. Stopping is a conversation I don’t want at gunpoint with my woman in the car.
I can’t roll past slow enough to be photographed.
So I leave the road.
I haul the wheel and we drop off the asphalt onto hardpack, the car bucking, Cynthia’s laugh cutting off into a sharp inhale as the desert turns from a blur into an obstacle course.
I take us down off the shoulder, around a stand of creosote, into the low dunes where a big slab of an SUV built for watching can’t easily chase a car built for exactly this.
I drive the way I learned in a harder life.
Fast. Brutal. I thread the washes, the rises, the back end sliding loose then catching, loose then catching, putting terrain, dust, distance between us and the eyes on the hill.
Soon the SUV is gone behind us. The only thing chasing us now is our own dust.
When I finally bring us to a stop in the lee of a long dune, the engine ticking, the dust drifting past the windows in a slow gold curtain, we’re both breathing hard.
I look over at her.
She’s flushed, her hair wild, her chest rising and falling fast. The car ticks around us like something cooling after a hunt.
Dust drifts gold through the light between our faces.
Close up she smells like sleep, soap, the wax that’s still on both our hands.
Her eyes are huge, bright with adrenaline, with something else under it.
She’s looking back at me with her lips parted, alive, so alive, a hand’s-width away across the console.
The fear’s burned clean off her. What’s left is the heat, the same current that ran through the count room.
Except there’s no party to perform for out here.
No rules left between us. Nothing but dust, silence, the small space between her mouth and mine, which is closing, because I’m leaning in. Every cell I own is leaning in.
She’s right there. She’d let me, the way her breath’s gone shallow, the way she hasn’t pulled back an inch.
Her gaze drops to my mouth, comes back up, and that small thing nearly finishes me, because it isn’t the count-room heat, the dare, the both-of-us-pretending-it’s-just-bodies.
This is quieter. This is worse. This is the want that comes with a name attached, the kind I swore off the day I learned what it costs.
That’s exactly why I put the car in gear instead.
I already gave her one night I couldn’t afford, in a dead bar with the doors bolted. Out here, alone, with her looking at me like that, I don’t trust myself to stop at a kiss. What’s between us in this car is the other thing. The thing that gets people killed.
So I drop my eyes from her mouth. I put both hands back on the wheel. I pull us out of the lee of the dune toward home, and the silence in the car changes shape into something loaded with everything I didn’t do.
“Sevastian,” she says, quiet.
“Don’t.” It comes out rougher than I mean it. “Not out here.”
She doesn’t push. She turns to look out her window at the desert sliding by, and I drive us back to the ranch the long way, watching my mirrors now, the cold all the way back in me where it lives.
The threat is at my gates. Morozov’s eyes are on my house, my grandmother, her. That’s what a pakhan thinks about, and I do think about it, the whole way home. I think about how I’ll sweep the perimeter, double the road detail, find out how long they’ve been sitting on that hill.
But under all of it, the entire drive, what I’m actually turning over is how close I came, not to the watcher, to her.
To the cliff I keep walking up to and stepping back from.
How much smaller that step back gets every single time.
How one of these mornings my foot is going to come down on nothing but air.
I get us back behind the walls. I don’t look at her when she climbs out. I tell myself it’s strategy.
It hasn’t been, not since the desert. I just don’t have another word yet for what it is, and I’m not ready to learn the one that fits.