Chapter One #2
My heart was pounding so hard I was genuinely afraid I might pass out. Not metaphorically afraid. Actually, physiologically afraid, in a way where the edges of my vision had gone slightly strange, and my hands had developed a tremor that made the glasses on the tray click softly against each other.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t run.
I don’t know if that was pride or stupidity. Later, I would spend a long time turning that question over and never arriving at an answer I liked.
He stopped just short of the door. Close enough that I could see there was no sweat on him, no elevated color, none of the physiological signatures of a man who had just ended a life.
He looked the same as he would have looked checking security logs or walking the casino floor. Controlled. Contained. Exactly himself.
“Leave.”
His voice was low. Not a whisper; it was quieter than a whisper, somehow, having the kind of volume that meant he did not need to shout to be heard.
The word was controlled and almost gentle, and it scared me more than any amount of shouting would have, because it meant he was not threatened by me.
Not alarmed. He had looked at me and made a decision, quickly and quietly, and the decision was to tell me to ‘leave,’ not to kill me.
And the worst part was that I couldn’t tell if that was mercy or something else entirely.
I took one step backward. Then another.
The whiskey sloshed. One glass tipped, and the contents ran down the inside of the tray and over my hand, cold and sharp-smelling, and I thought, absurdly, of Marco’s face when I told him I’d spilled the order.
I turned, and I ran. Well, not a full run.
I couldn’t exactly run in heels in the narrow corridor.
But my walk was so fast it was indistinguishable from running in practice if not in form.
My heels were too loud again, and I was convinced with every step that I would hear another shot, that the decision would be reversed, that I had miscalculated something in the compressed second during which I had looked at Viktor Golovin, and he had looked at me.
I went through the door to the main corridor. Then another. Then the noise of the casino hit me—the music, the voices, the slot machines, the ordinary hum of people spending money they may or may not have—and I almost went to my knees with the relief of it.
I dumped the tray at the nearest station and didn’t look at the girl staffing it when she called after me.
The bathroom was around a corner and down a short corridor, and I made it there in a minute that I would never afterward be able to account for.
The door of the stall hit the side wall.
I locked it and pressed my back against the cold metal and slid down until I was crouching, which was an awkward, undignified position in a pencil skirt and heels, and I stayed there.
The shaking that started in my hands moved up my arms and into my chest until my teeth were clicking together and I couldn’t make it stop, no matter how hard I pressed my palms against my thighs.
The smell of whiskey was still on my hand.
I thought about the body. The way it had fallen.
I hadn’t heard it fall exactly, but I had felt the finality somehow.
I thought about Viktor Golovin’s face and the way his eyes had found mine with such immediate, unhesitating precision, and I understood that I had seen something I was not supposed to see.
That the man in that room with his gun loose in his hand and his sleeves rolled up was not the kind of man who made mistakes twice.
I was a mistake. The question was what kind.
I sat on the floor of that bathroom stall for what was probably four minutes and felt, under the fear, something else begin to form.
Something harder. The particular anger that comes from being made small.
From being made afraid, from having your ordinary life, your tired-feet-and-tight-smile ordinary life, suddenly revealed as something that could end in a service corridor on a Tuesday night.
I was not going to be silent.
The thought was quiet but absolute. I was not going to pretend I had not seen what I had seen.
I was not going to become someone who swallowed fear and called it practicality.
I had done too much of that already, in too many small rooms, for too many reasons that other people had told me were good ones.
Whatever happened next, I would not be quiet about it.
I stood up. Straightened my skirt. Found my reflection in the smudged mirror above the sink—eyeliner slightly smeared, lipstick still intact, which felt like a small, stupid victory—and washed whiskey off my hand.
Then I went to find Marco and told him I was leaving sick.
Outside, Las Vegas was aggressively, unrepentantly alive.
The neon lit the street in colors that belonged to no natural thing.
The air was warm and dry, carrying the smell of exhaust and food truck grease and, beneath it all, the particular ozone smell of too much electricity running through too many signs.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment and breathed it in.
My phone buzzed. Elena. Three messages, the timestamps ranging from eleven to just now, probably checking how the shift was going.
Elena always checked. It was one of the things I loved about her and one of the things that currently made the phone feel like a grenade in my hand, because if I answered it, I would have to decide how much to say, and I didn’t know yet what was safe to say, or to whom, or about what.
I put the phone in my bag without opening the messages.
I had walked three blocks before I realized I was shaking again.
It was less now, though more manageable.
The kind of tremor you can walk through rather than the kind that sits you down.
The heels were agony. I stopped at a crosswalk and pulled them off and walked in stockinged feet on the warm concrete, holding the shoes by their straps, and felt slightly insane and slightly more like myself for it.
I will not be silent.
The words kept coming back to me, quiet and stubborn, like a splinter.
I turned them over as I walked, testing them.
Because the alternative was what? Going home and sleeping and waking up and going back to that floor tomorrow night as if nothing had happened?
Pretending that Viktor Golovin’s eyes hadn’t found mine with absolute certainty through that door, that he hadn’t seen my face as clearly as I’d seen his?
He had let me walk away.
That thought, too, would not leave me alone. He had looked at me, assessed me, made whatever calculation men like him made in seconds that normal people spent hours on, and told me to leave instead of raising the gun.
I didn’t know what that meant. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
The neon signs reflected in a puddle from an earlier street cleaning, trembling slightly on the surface of the water. Las Vegas. Beautiful and completely indifferent, the way only a city that runs on other people’s desperate hopes can be.
I pulled out my phone. Looked at Elena’s messages without reading them. Put it away again.
One foot in front of the other. That was what I knew how to do.
I told myself that by morning, I would have a plan. That I would know what to do with what I had seen. That the fear would settle into something workable, something I could carry without it carrying me.
There must be a way.