Chapter 25
CINDY
Everyone in this house is waiting for me to break. I can feel it, the careful way they move around me, the soft voices, the trays of food left at my door like offerings to something fragile. They think grief on top of a baby makes a woman who shatters. They’ve never met me.
I spent my whole life learning what to do with the kind of pain that wants to take you down with it.
You don’t lie under it. You get up, you find the thing that did it to you, you make that the job.
Crystal is dead because of a leak. Somewhere a mouth opened that shouldn’t have, and my best friend got taken apart in the desert for it.
I am not going to sit behind these pretty walls being fragile while the mouth that did it keeps eating breakfast.
Because here’s what I’ve worked out, lying awake in a locked house.
The walls Sevastian built to keep the danger out have a flaw he won’t look at straight.
They keep the danger in, too. Whoever fed me to the wolves is on this side of the gate.
I’m sure of it before I have a shred of proof, the way I knew the desert was wrong that night before I ever came up over the rise.
The traitor isn’t out there somewhere in Los Angeles. The traitor sleeps under this roof.
So I do the only thing left to a woman who can’t leave her own house. I hunt from inside it.
I’m good at exactly one thing that matters here, and no file ever taught it to me. I read people. A dancer learns it or a dancer starves. Right now I’m locked in a house full of faces, with nothing to do all day but watch them.
I start where my own gut first pinged, weeks ago, before any of this mattered. The watchers. Not Sevastian’s men, the other ones, the second set, the ones I caught photographing me on the shopping day and the ones who tailed me before I was anything worth tailing.
I pulled a watcher’s name off a valet ticket once like a paranoid lunatic, and I was right to.
Roma ran the name for me last week, no questions asked.
It came back a shell, an employee of a parking company that doesn’t exist. Even the fake was professional.
Those were Morozov’s eyes, on me from the outside, from the very beginning.
That part I can explain to myself cleanly.
Morozov had me watched out in the open, in the city, at the club, which is how his people knew exactly where to find a bubbly blonde who’d tell two friendly strangers her whole life story over a free drink.
An outside watcher could learn all of that.
An outside watcher only needs to sit at the bar.
But that’s the shallow wound, and it’s not the one keeping me up.
Because some of what hit this family couldn’t have come from a man on a barstool.
I’ve sat quiet through enough tense dinners now to catch the shape of it.
The stash house that got raided, where Sevastian’s men walked in expecting a quiet night and found people waiting for them.
The convoy that got torn apart on the one empty stretch of road, by men who knew the route, the timing, the exact count of guns.
You don’t learn those things at a bar. You don’t photograph those from a parking garage. Those are things only a handful of people inside this family carry around in their heads, and somebody handed them to Los Angeles.
Two leaks. That’s what I keep coming back to in the dark.
Two separate holes in this family, the outside eyes that found Crystal, the inside mouth that’s been feeding the war.
The inside one is the one that turns me cold, because the inside one means someone at the table I eat at every night, someone who passes me the bread and asks after my health, has been selling all of us to the people who left my friend in pieces.
There’s a second reason I can’t let this go, one I don’t say out loud to anyone. I press my hand to my stomach a hundred times a day now, and every time I do, the same thought comes. This child is going to be born into this house. Into these walls, this family, this war.
I can’t change that, not yet, maybe not ever.
But I will not let my baby be born into a house with a traitor sitting at the table, a rot nobody named, the exact unseen thing that already cost me Crystal.
If I’m bringing a person into this, the least I can do is know which of the smiling faces around the cradle is the one selling us.
A mother should at least know where the knife is.
I didn’t get a say about the war, the walls, the men outside my door.
This part, the watching, is mine. Nobody assigned it. Nobody can take it.
So I watch them.
I make myself into furniture. The grieving pregnant woman, no threat to anyone, drifting pale and quiet through the house.
I let them all believe it, because a woman nobody’s guarding their face around is the most dangerous woman in the room.
I sit in on the edges of things. I bring tea to meetings I have no business near and linger pouring it.
I learn the rhythm of who comes and goes, who gets called into the closed rooms, whose voice drops when I get close.
And I watch what each of them does the moment Crystal’s name comes up, because grief doesn’t lie the way words do.
Tasha becomes my second set of eyes without me ever quite asking her to.
She finds me one night in the kitchen at two in the morning, neither of us sleeping, and she doesn’t ask why I’m sitting in the dark with a cold cup of tea making lists in my head.
She just sits down across from me and says, quiet, “You’re working something.
I’ve watched you do it for three days. What is it?
” I look at this sharp kind woman who was my first real friend in this whole impossible world.
I decide to trust her, because I have to trust somebody, and because my gut, the same gut working this whole problem, says she’s safe.
So I tell her. Two leaks. Inside and out. She goes very still. Then she nods slowly, like I’ve just said a thing she’s been carrying around unsaid.
“Tell me who you watch,” she says. “I’ll tell you what I know that you can’t see.”
After that it goes faster. Tasha knows this house from the inside, the histories, the loyalties, who owes what to whom, the things you only learn living somewhere for years.
I bring her faces, she brings me context, and together we start crossing names off a list neither of us will say aloud.
The young soldiers don’t know enough to be the inside leak.
The cook’s been here twenty years and weeps openly about Crystal, real tears, the easy kind that aren’t hiding anything.
One by one the obvious answers fall away.
What’s left is a shrinking circle of people who knew the things Los Angeles knew, and the smaller it gets the colder I get, because a tight circle of people who hold the deepest secrets of this family is, by definition, the people closest to Sevastian.
I need to get near rooms I’m not allowed in. For that, I need Roma.
He’s a hard man to ask for anything, the big silent one, Sevastian’s driver and shadow, the one who never wastes a word.
But he watched me lose Crystal. Somewhere in these awful weeks the wall between us came down.
So when I find him in the garage one night and tell him, plainly, that I think there’s a rot in this house, that I mean to find it, he doesn’t tell me I’m a hysterical pregnant woman.
He looks at me for a long moment with those flat careful eyes.
Then he says, “I’ve thought it too. For longer than you have.
” And after that, doors I couldn’t get near start being unlocked when I happen to pass them.
He never says much. He just quietly makes the house more open to me, an inch at a time, and stands close by when I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be, so that if anyone finds me it looks like he sent me.
It’s in those cramped late hours, the three of us moving quietly through a sleeping house, that I see the other thing. The thing between Roma and Tasha.
I don’t think they know I see it. Maybe they don’t fully see it themselves yet.
But I’ve spent my life reading exactly this, and it’s all over them.
The way his hand finds the small of her back to steer her around a corner and stays a half beat too long.
The way she looks up at him when he speaks and goes soft in a way she goes soft for no one else.
A look held across a dark kitchen that has nothing to do with traitors.
Two careful, guarded people letting one small unguarded thing exist between them, in the middle of all this death.
It puts a hard ache in me, watching it. Because that, that easy tenderness, the hand that just rests where it’s wanted, is the very thing Sevastian and I keep reaching for, keep breaking before it can hold.
We had it for one night in the desert. Then he turned it into a cage.
I watch Roma’s hand on Tasha’s back and I want to cry, not for Crystal this time, for the dumb simple thing I can’t seem to have, the thing these two are growing quietly in a corner while I fight a cold war down the hall from the father of my child.
I push it down. I have a job.
And the job keeps bringing me back to one face.
I won’t name him yet, even in my own head, the way you don’t say a thing out loud in case saying it makes it true.
But my gut has been screaming it for weeks, and every quiet test I run only makes it scream louder.
It’s not what you’d think. It isn’t false grief, isn’t some snake who doesn’t care that Crystal died.
The grief I keep watching is real, that’s the thing that makes my skin crawl, the grief is the truest thing about him.
What snags me, every single time, is the other thing, the thing that lives under the grief and doesn’t match it.
It’s how he looks at Sevastian.
Everyone else in this house looks at Sevastian like he’s deep water, a force you respect and don’t cross.
This one looks at him the way you look at a debt.
There’s a coldness that comes up in his face in the half second before he arranges it, a flat hard hating thing, there and gone, whenever Sevastian’s back is turned.
Everyone reads his hardness as a grieving soldier’s stoicism, the old scarred veteran who’s bled for this family and doesn’t emote.
They see loyalty worn rough by loss. I see a man whose face goes carefully empty when it has no reason to be, who holds too still when Sevastian speaks, whose eyes do something aimed when they settle on the back of the pakhan’s neck.
I’ve watched a thousand men want a thing they’re pretending not to want.
I know what wanting looks like when it’s pointed at someone’s throat.
I almost get caught.
It’s late, and I’m in the wrong hallway, tucked in the dark outside a half-open door, watching the very man my gut keeps naming take a phone call he stepped out of the light for. I’m close enough to see his face go to that flat cold place when he thinks no one’s looking.
Then his head starts to turn, toward the dark, toward me, and I go to ice.
My pulse slams so hard I’m sure he’ll hear it.
If he sees me here, like this, watching him, the grieving harmless pregnant girl suddenly tucked in a shadow with sharp eyes, the whole shape of me changes for him in an instant.
I stop being furniture. I become a problem.
And I know exactly what this family does with problems.
Roma’s hand closes around my arm out of the blackness and pulls me back around the corner, silent, three seconds before the man’s eyes reach the spot where I was standing.
We stand pressed against the cold wall in the dark, his hand still on my arm, both of us not breathing, while footsteps pause, consider, finally move away.
Roma looks down at me. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. His face says the same thing my hammering heart is saying. That was too close. You have no idea how close that was.
I go back to my locked room as the sky goes gray. I sit on the edge of the bed with my hand on my stomach, and I finally let myself look at the thing straight on.
I know who it is. Not for certain, not in the way you could prove to anyone, but in the way I’ve trusted my whole life, the way that’s never once been wrong about a room.
My gut has handed me a name. It’s the worst possible name, someone trusted, someone close, someone this family would bleed for, a man Sevastian loves like his own blood, a man he’d never in a thousand years suspect.
And sitting there in the gray light, I understand the trap I’ve walked myself into.
Because knowing this is so much worse than not knowing.
Not knowing, I was just a sad woman behind walls.
Knowing, I’m a woman holding the one piece of information that gets people killed, in a house where the man it’s about can reach me, where I can’t prove it, where telling the wrong person is the same as telling him.
I went looking for the truth to feel less helpless.
Instead I found the single most dangerous thing in this house, and I picked it up with both hands.
I’m in deeper than I can climb out of. The baby moves, or I imagine it does, too early to be real. I press my palm flat and stare at the lightening window.
I wanted to stop being the girl this happens to.
I think I just became the girl it happens to next.