Chapter 24
SEVASTIAN
For eleven hours I run the recovery the way I’ve run every operation that mattered in my life, like the outcome is a thing I can force if I refuse hard enough to accept any other one.
I work every channel I own. I lean on the men who owe me, the men who fear me, the men who broker the quiet exchanges that happen when one organization holds something another organization wants back.
I put a number on the table that no sane man refuses, then I put a bigger one beside it, because Crystal is not a soldier or a marker or a piece of leverage to me.
She’s the laughing girl who made the woman in my house smile in a place I couldn’t reach, which makes her mine to recover, and I do not lose the things that are mine. I tell myself that for eleven hours. I almost make myself believe it.
The report comes in at the twelfth hour, from a man I keep inside the county coroner’s office. It comes before the news does, which is the only mercy in the whole black day, that I hear it from my own man first instead of from a television.
Remains. Found off a service road in the Mojave by a couple chasing a lost dog.
A woman. Young. And the rest of it, the condition of her, the way she was left, I make him say all of it in his flat frightened voice, every word, because I need the whole shape of what’s been done before I carry it to the only person it will break worse than it’s breaking me.
She wasn’t hidden. That’s the thing I understand first, before the grief gets its hands on me, in the cold clear place where I read messages for a living. You hide a body when you want it gone. You leave one where a tourist’s dog will find it by morning when you want it seen.
Morozov didn’t bury Crystal in the desert.
He arranged her there. Dismembered, scattered along a road that runs past nothing, close enough to the highway to be found fast, far enough to make the finding a horror.
He turned a twenty-four-year-old girl into a billboard.
The message on it is for me, and it reads the way all his messages read.
I can reach anything you love. I can take it apart.
I will not even do you the courtesy of pretending it was difficult.
Under the message, the second thing, the worse thing, the one that sickens me in a way the count and the condition didn’t.
The speed.
He killed her almost at once. He never meant to ransom her, never meant to trade, never spent a single hour considering the offers I was breaking myself to make.
By the time Cindy was sitting in my war room praying that leverage gets kept alive, that there was still time, that I could get one frightened girl home, Crystal was already gone.
Every hour I spent on the phone buying her back, I was bidding on a dead girl. Morozov knew it. He let me bid, because my wasted hope was part of the cruelty he was building.
I sit alone in the war room for ninety seconds with this. It’s all I let myself have. There’s a thing that has to be done that no one else in this house can do, and putting it off only makes it worse for her.
I have to go upstairs and take the hope out of Cindy’s hands.
I find her in the guest room she’s made a little bit hers, sitting on the end of the bed with her phone in both hands, staring at it, willing it to ring with good news.
She looks up when I come in, and I watch her read my face, the skill that first snagged me running at full speed, a room read faster than the people in it want to be read.
She reads me in under a second. Her own face starts coming apart before I’ve said a word.
“No,” she says. Quiet. “No. Don’t. Don’t you say it.”
“Cynthia.”
“Don’t.” She’s on her feet now, backing away from me like distance can outrun the sentence I’m carrying. “She’s leverage. You said. A hostage is worth something, you keep it alive, there’s still time, you said there was still time.”
“There wasn’t.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “I’m sorry. There wasn’t ever, after the first hours. He didn’t take her to trade. They found her this morning. It’s her. I’m certain. I made certain before I came up here.”
I don’t give her the rest. Not the condition, not the road, not the dog, none of the specifics that are going to be on every news broadcast in the state by tonight, the ones she’ll have to brace herself against for the rest of her life.
I just give her the one unbearable fact, let it be enough, watch it do its work.
It goes into her. It hollows her out. The last of the hope she’d been holding with both hands drains out of her face, and what’s left is nothing I ever want pointed at me again.
She makes a sound I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life. Then she folds, just folds, straight down toward the floor. I cross the room and catch her before she hits it. She lets me hold her for exactly as long as it takes her to remember whose fault this is.
It isn’t long.
She goes rigid in my arms. Then she shoves at my chest, hard, both hands. I let her go. She staggers back from me with her face wet and wild, her grief already turning into the only thing strong enough to stand on top of grief, which is rage. She points it exactly where it belongs.
“Your war.” Her voice shakes so hard the words barely hold together.
“Your enemies. Your world. She was nothing to anybody. A dancer who liked diamonds, who tipped the busboys, who never hurt a soul in her whole life, dead in the desert because she knew me. Because I let you pull me into this. They couldn’t get to me behind your precious walls, so they got to her, because she was soft, because she was mine.
You knew. You knew this could happen, you said it yourself, then you let me bring her through that gate. ”
Every word is true. She doesn’t understand that part, that there’s nothing in it I can argue.
I sat in this same war complex weeks ago and named her soft edges as the place they’d cut me.
I put quiet watchers on her people. I still wasn’t fast enough, careful enough, ruthless enough to put one on a bubbly girl who came through my own gate with snacks.
I knew the exact shape of the danger. It killed her anyway.
“You’re right,” I say.
It stops her. She wanted a fight. A man defending himself is a thing she could push against, and I won’t give it to her. She’s standing in the truest accusation anyone has ever leveled at me, and it happens to be the story of my entire life.
“Everything I touch,” I tell her, and my voice is very quiet now, very level, the voice I use when I’ve gone somewhere cold to keep from going somewhere worse.
“Everything I put my hands on dies, Cynthia. Everyone I’ve ever let close.
I have known that about myself for a long time.
I let myself forget it for a few weeks. Crystal paid for my forgetting.
So yes. Your fault is mine. All of it. I won’t insult her by pretending otherwise. ”
I mean it as the only honest thing I have to offer her, the one gift in my possession, the truth. It doesn’t comfort her. Of course it doesn’t. It just confirms for both of us that the man she let into her life is exactly as dangerous to the people in it as she’s now screaming he is.
My phone rings.
I almost don’t look at it. There is nothing on this earth I want less in this moment than my phone.
But the number that comes up is one I know, one only a handful of men alive would dare to call me from, and the cold professional part of me that never fully goes offline understands before I answer that this is not a coincidence of timing.
He waited for this. He timed it to the hour.
He wants to be in the room for it, by wire, listening.
I step away from her. I answer it.
“Sevastian Andreevich.” Gleb Morozov’s voice is an old man’s voice, unhurried, almost warm, the voice of someone calling to discuss a shared business interest over good cognac.
He has called me by my patronymic since I was young enough for him to pretend he knew my father well enough to use it.
“I won’t keep you. I know it’s a hard day in your house.
I only wanted to extend a courtesy, one pakhan to another. It seems congratulations are in order.”
Everything in me goes still.
“You’ve nothing to say. That’s all right.
I understand the surprise. A man should hear this kind of news in a happier way, from the woman herself, in his own home.
” A pause, and I can hear the smile in it, the patience, the relish of a man who has waited a very long time to say exactly this.
“But she didn’t tell you, did she? Your little dancer.
She told her friend. And her friend, in the end, told us.
So allow an old man the pleasure. Congratulations on the child, Sevastian.
I do hope you take very good care of it. ”
The line goes dead.
I stand in the middle of the room with the phone in my hand, the whole floor gone out from under me, and I understand several things at once, each worse than the one before it.
She’s pregnant. There is a child. My child.
She knew, and didn’t tell me.
She told Crystal instead. Crystal, who is dead in the desert in pieces, was the one person alive she trusted with the largest truth of both our lives, and I was not.
And the man who tortured it out of a murdered girl knew that I was going to be a father before I did.
My rival in Los Angeles held the central fact of my life in his hands and called me to hand it back to me as a weapon, gift-wrapped, because he understood before I did what it would do to me to learn it this way.