Chapter 22
CINDY
After the desert, after he said my name soft enough to break me, Sevastian disappears.
Not literally. The war won’t let him leave, so he’s still here, behind the same walls I am, the walls that went from feeling like a cage to feeling like the only safe place on earth and now feel like a cage again. But the man who held me against the hood of a car under a billion stars is gone.
In his place is the pakhan, formal, cold, a hundred miles away even when he’s across a room.
He nods at me at dinner. He answers me in three words.
The night I fed his entire household, I got two and the nod.
He throws himself into the war like the war is a place he can hide from me, and maybe it is.
Meals come and go. The house tiptoes. Tasha overcompensates with gossip, Yelena watches the two of us over her tea like a critic at a bad play, and Petya at the gate has stopped meeting my eyes, which is how I know the whole compound has an opinion.
I know what this is. I watched him do it three times before he ever took me to the desert, the warmth draining out the second anything got real. I just didn’t think he’d do it after he meant it. We went deeper than we’d ever gone, and he answered by going further away than he’s ever been.
I spent nineteen years and one shattered knee learning the lesson. Never chase. Keep your face still. Never let him see what the leaving costs you.
So I don’t chase him. I eat dinner with my chin up. I let Yelena correct my Russian. I let Tasha gossip. I win eleven dollars off Kir at cards and make him pay it in quarters, for morale. Mine. I act like the coldest shoulder in Nevada is the last thing on my mind, and I almost pull it off.
I almost pull it off, right up until the morning I throw up in the guest bathroom for the third day running, and the thing I’ve been refusing to look at finally makes me look.
I’m tired in a way sleep doesn’t touch. My body’s been wrong for a couple of weeks now, off in a way I kept blaming on the stress, the lockdown, the man giving me the silent treatment.
Smells have switched sides too. Coffee, which I’ve loved my whole adult life, made me leave a room this week like it pulled a knife.
I blamed the war. You can blame a war for nearly anything.
And there’s a date in the back of my head I keep not doing the obvious thing with, because doing the obvious thing with it would change everything.
So I have a guard bring me something from a drugstore.
I don’t tell him what it’s for. He’s one of the younger ones.
He brings the little bag back without a word, without meeting my eyes.
I take it into the bathroom and lock the door, like locking a door means anything in a house full of men with guns.
The bathroom is marble, heated floor, towels softer than anything I owned before March.
I sit on the edge of a tub carved from one piece of stone, in all that money, holding a nine-dollar piece of plastic that outranks every object in the building.
The instructions say three minutes. I don’t watch the stick. I watch the door instead, because the stick will do what it’s going to do with or without my supervision.
Two lines.
I sit down on the cold tile floor, my back against the tub, and look at two pink lines until they stop looking like a test, until they start looking like the rest of my life.
It’s been about six weeks since the night it all started, the man in the suit, the apartment, the door I should have shut.
There’s been exactly one man. I don’t have to guess.
I press my hand flat to my stomach, which is still flat, which gives nothing away.
Underneath it somewhere is a thing that’s half me and half a man who buries people in the desert, grows roses for his dead brother, can’t say my name without it scaring him.
I’m pregnant.
The first thing I feel, God help me, is not fear.
The fear comes a second later, a whole flood of it, but the first thing, before I can stop it, is a fierce stupid rush of joy.
I hate myself for it, because joy is the most dangerous thing I own.
I learned that at nineteen. You don’t get to want things.
And here I am on a bathroom floor wanting this one so hard it knocks the wind out of me.
A baby I have no business having, in a war I have no business being in, with a man who can’t love me out loud.
I let myself cry for about four minutes.
Then I wipe my face, because crying on the floor is not a plan, and I’m going to need a plan.
I wash my face in the marble sink. The woman in the mirror has wet eyelashes, blotchy cheeks, and a spine arriving from somewhere by express.
Okay, I tell her. New management. Effective immediately.
The one thing I know, sitting there, the only thing I’m sure of, is that I’m not telling him.
Not yet. Maybe not ever. Because I know exactly what a baby means in Sevastian’s world.
A chain. A Bratva heir would lock me into this life with bars I could never bend, make leaving impossible, turn the quiet escape I’ve been saving for since before I met him into a fairy tale I’d tell myself while I rotted behind these walls.
And it wouldn’t just trap me. It would trap him.
He’d do the thing his code demands. Claim us.
Cage us. We’d both spend the rest of our lives in a marriage that started as a transaction and curdled into a sentence.
He told me himself he breaks what he reaches for.
I’m not handing him one more thing to break.
So the baby is mine. My secret, my choice, my call, until I know what I actually want, which right now I don’t, beyond the one fierce thing my body decided on a bathroom floor without asking me first.
I tell one person.
I have Crystal cleared through the gate.
It takes a phone call and a flexing of whatever power I’ve got in this place, but the guards have learned that the one face the pakhan’s woman gets is the bubbly blonde who turns up with snacks, so they wave her through.
She comes bouncing up the drive an hour later, all big eyes and bigger hug, thrilled to her bones to finally see where I’ve been hiding, gawking at the glass house, the desert, the rose garden like she’s been let into a movie.
She makes the gate guard show her how the intercom works.
She waves at a security camera, both arms. By the time she reaches the front door she knows Petya has a girlfriend in Henderson, that the camera man is Misha or maybe Mickey, she’s already lost it.
I watch my best friend befriend a fortress in under four minutes, headfirst, glowing.
“Okay, this is insane,” she says the second we’re alone in my room, dropping onto my bed.
“You live in a Bond villain’s house. There’s a man with a rifle by the gate.
Are you okay? Like actually okay? Because the texts have been weird, I’ve been worried sick.
Also.” She digs into her enormous bag, beaming, and produces a bottle.
“I brought champagne. Well. It’s eleven dollars, technically it’s called sparkling wine, but the bubbles don’t know the difference, and we are celebrating.
My best friend bagged a billionaire, she lives in a palace, and I refuse to be sad about it for one more second.
Get glasses. We’re toasting your weird rich life. ”
The tote bag she came with is the size of a toddler. Out of it, in order, come gummy worms, panda-shaped skincare, two tabloids, and a framed photo of the two of us at her birthday three years ago, which she stands on my nightstand with great ceremony, because, quote, this room needed it.
She pops the cork with a shriek of delight, foam going everywhere, and fills two of the water glasses from my bathroom with cheap fizzing wine. She holds one out to me, glowing, the happiest person in the state.
I look at the glass. I can’t take it.
I put my hand over my stomach instead. I don’t decide to. It just goes there, flat and protective, the gesture I’ll make ten thousand times before this is over. I don’t reach for the glass.
Crystal goes still.
I watch her face change, watch the bubbly drop out of it and something quieter, much older, come up underneath.
Crystal is naive about a lot of things. She isn’t stupid about this one.
She’s watched enough girls at the club make exactly this face over exactly this kind of glass.
Her eyes go to my hand on my stomach. Then back to my face.
Her own face crumples and lights up at the very same time.
“Cindy,” she breathes. “Cindy, are you?”
“Yeah,” I say, and my voice cracks on the one word. “Yeah. I am.”
She sets both glasses down on the nightstand so fast one of them tips.
Then she’s across the bed with her arms around me, and I break completely, all the floor-crying I rationed out earlier coming back tenfold.
She holds me. She rocks me. She tells me it’s okay, it’s okay, she’s got me.
She’s the only person on this earth who’s ever held me like that.
We talk for a long time. I tell her everything.
The test, the date, the one night it could have been, the fact that the father is the scariest man in Nevada who can’t say he loves me, the fact that I haven’t told him, that I don’t know if I will.
She listens the way she listens, with her whole self, no judgment, just love, and when I’m done she takes my face in both her hands.
“Whatever you decide,” she says, fierce, “I’m there. You hear me? Whatever it is, you’re not doing one second of this alone. I’m in it with you. I’ve got you.”
I believe her. That’s the thing I’ll hold onto later, harder than anything else. In the worst, most frightening hour of my life, the one person who knew, who held me, who promised she’d be there for all of it, meant every single word.
For one hour, in a guest room in a fortress in the desert, I’m not alone with it.
Crystal makes me laugh through the snot and the tears.
She tells me my baby’s going to be terrifyingly gorgeous with that gene pool.
She makes me promise to name it something she can pronounce.
She drinks both glasses of her own warm champagne, since I can’t.
“More for me,” she says, solemn, toasting my stomach.
“To Peanut. May it get your brains, his face, and somebody else’s entire life situation.
” And for that one hour the war, the cold man down the hall, the whole impossible mess of my life shrinks down to two girls on a bed who love each other, the way they have since two broke dancers decided to be each other’s family.
Crystal leaves at dusk. She hugs me at the door long enough that the guard clears his throat, makes me swear to text her every day.
“Every day,” she repeats, backing toward her car, pointing at me with both hands.
“Pictures of the rose garden. Updates on Peanut and the hot Russians, in that order.” I watch her little car kick up dust down the long drive until the gate swallows it, and I go back inside lighter than I’ve been in weeks, the secret shared, the weight halved, almost happy.
Then the guard at the gate calls up to the house, and the lightness ends.
Something’s been left at the gate. No car, no person, just a box, set down on the road outside the fence sometime in the last hour and found by the man on watch.
They bring it up the drive and set it on the kitchen island.
Tasha frowns at it. Roma’s face goes flat and careful.
I stand there with my hand drifting toward my stomach again as someone slits it open.
An hour ago this counter held contraband champagne and the best secret of my life.
Now everyone in the room is standing one step further from the island than they need to.
It’s a gift. Wrapped, even, in nice paper, the kind of thing you’d send to congratulate someone.
Inside is nothing dangerous, no bomb, no threat spelled out in words.
Just an object, placed there for me to find, plus a small mark on the lid that makes Roma go very still.
He says one word into the phone, a name I last heard in the desert on the worst night of my old life, the night before the worst night of my new one.
Timur.
The man who put a gun to my head in the sand.
The one who ran off wounded into the dark and never stopped being out there somewhere.
He left me a present at the gate of the fortress where I’m supposed to be safe, wrapped pretty, signed with his mark, and the message under the paper is so clear it doesn’t need a single word.
I know exactly where you are. I know they’ve put you behind walls. And I’m enjoying how long this is taking.
The lockdown was supposed to feel like protection.
Standing there with that wrapped box on the counter and Roma already on the phone in fast low Russian, I understand for the first time what it actually is.
A box. A fortified, guarded, gorgeous box.
Now I know my name is on the outside of it, and the man who wants me dead knows exactly which box to come find.
I put my face in order before anyone can read it, because that’s the other thing that changed in a bathroom this morning.
It isn’t only my own skin I’m keeping secrets behind anymore.
I put both hands over my stomach this time. Over the secret nobody can take from me, the one good thing I’ve got, the thing that could save my life or end it. I haven’t decided which.
Mine to keep. For now.