Chapter Fourteen
Viktor
I drove us out of the city myself.
She sat with her knees angled toward the door.
Not away from me—the angle was subtle, and I did not think it was deliberate—but not toward me either.
The ring, my ring, was on her finger. I had checked in the estate’s guest room corridor when she had come out with her bag and her borrowed clothes and that composed expression.
The desert opened up around us as the Las Vegas lights fell behind.
That was the thing about driving east in the early morning hours—the city’s reach was longer than you thought, its light pollution persisting for miles, the sky remaining a particular washed orange well past the point where you could no longer see the Strip.
Then it let go. Abruptly, in the way only deserts could, with the sky going dark and enormous, the stars appearing in number, the road ahead lit only by headlights and whatever the night offered.
Sofia looked out the window.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“A property I own. Forty minutes.”
“Whose name is it in?”
I glanced at her. The question was practical rather than conversational—she was still doing the threat assessment, working through the implications of their location and its security, and that particular functionality in her, the clear-eyed practicality, remained intact even now.
“A holding company,” I said. “Clean. Cruz’s people would need two weeks to trace it, and they don’t have two weeks. ”
She nodded, then looked back at the window.
I drove.
The property appeared as a gate set back from the road, no signage, the approach a gravel track that ran a quarter mile through desert scrub before opening onto the structure itself: low, wide, built into the landscape rather than imposed on it, the architecture of something designed to be invisible from the road and inhabitable in conditions that required privacy.
I had purchased it three years ago for exactly this purpose and had used it twice.
It was maintained by a service that came monthly and asked nothing.
I stopped the car, got out, and opened Sofia’s door before she had finished reaching for the handle.
She looked at me and said nothing as she got out.
Carrying my bag and hers, I led the way through the front door.
“Well, it’s…”
“Not like me this time, I hope,” I remarked, interrupting her as an attempt to lighten the air.
“It’s cozy,” she answered, chuckling as she looked around.
“You should relax. I’ll show you around when you’re rested.”
She didn’t argue.
She slept for four hours. I did not sleep. I sat in the main room with the lights low and the security system’s soft confirmatory lights blinking from the corners. I ran through everything I knew and everything I needed to know methodically.
The leak.
Someone had extracted footage from the Golovin system with the sophistication and access of a person who knew the system well.
My people were running it. The candidate list was short; the confirmation would take time I currently lacked.
What I knew for sure was that Cruz had the footage, Cruz had deployed it, and the deployment had been a distraction for an armed breach that had a specific target.
Sofia.
They had planned it with detail that required advance knowledge—the timing of the screens, the breach points coordinated with the second the security system lost its visual feed, the three teams inside and outside working in a sequence that had been rehearsed.
This was not improvised from a piece of footage that had appeared on screens.
This had been built before the footage played.
The footage was the signal. The operation had been ready before it.
Which meant Cruz had been further along than I had assessed.
Which meant the information he had about our operations was deeper than the courier network disruption had suggested.
Which meant someone had been feeding him with more consistency and specificity than a single extracted video file could explain.
I watched the desert lighten at its eastern edge.
When Sofia appeared in the doorway at 9 am, still in the black T-shirt and jeans that weren’t hers, her hair loose and her face without makeup for the first time since I had known her, I was on my second cup of coffee and had organized what I knew into the shape it was going to take.
“There’s food,” I said. “Whatever you need.”
She found it without asking for directions. I watched her move through the kitchen from the main room, registering the layout, identifying what was available, and assembling something efficient from the contents. She brought two plates out without asking if I wanted one.
She sat across from me.
We ate without conversation. The desert outside was existing enormously, the scale of it visible now through the windows, the land running flat to distant formations under a sky that was not Las Vegas blue, not the managed atmosphere of the casino district, but actual sky, the kind that had not been interfered with.
Sofia looked at it.
“I’ve never been this far from the Strip,” she said.
“Where were you before Las Vegas?”
A pause. “Phoenix, mostly. A few places in California.” She turned her coffee cup in her hands. “We moved around. My father followed work, and work followed gambling, and gambling moved, so we moved.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died.” Simple. Finished. The particular simplicity of a person who has compressed grief into the smallest shape it can take through years of practice. “Four years ago. Liver. He was fifty-three.”
I looked at her profile. “I’m sorry.”
She turned from the window and looked at me, and the look was direct and slightly surprised.
“Thank you,” she said. Also plain. Also real.
*****
In the afternoon, we walked.
This was my suggestion, which surprised her. She had expected, I thought, that the property would be what the penthouse was: functional, controlled, a space for management rather than habitation. The suggestion of a walk was apparently outside the expected range.
She came.
The property’s land extended east of the structure, running toward a low rise that was not quite a hill, the scrub vegetation sparse and the ground pale.
I had walked this once before, in the dark, during the first visit three years ago, conducting the kind of perimeter check I preferred to do personally when I first acquired a property.
Sofia walked with her hands in her jacket pockets—another borrowed clothing—and her face angled slightly toward the sun like someone who did not usually have access to this quality of light and was using it carefully.
Her footsteps were quiet on the ground. The desert made sounds I had not noticed before: the wind in the scrub, a bird somewhere in the distance, the quality of silence that was not absence but presence—the enormous, unhurried presence of a landscape that had been here before the city and would be here after it.
“You grew up in all of this,” Sofia said. Not Las Vegas. Not the desert. She gestured vaguely at the life. The structure. The Bratva and its apparatus, and the particular world that had produced Viktor Golovin.
“In Russia first,” I said. “Came here at twelve.”
“That doesn’t sound like a childhood.”
“It was an effective one.”
She stopped walking. I stopped, too, and looked at her, and she was looking at me with those dark eyes and the expression that meant she was reading the sentence behind the sentence, which she did with a regularity that I had stopped trying to manage around.
“Did you love anyone?” she said. “Before—” she didn’t finish the sentence. “When you were young.”
The question landed in a way I had not been prepared for, which was rare enough to register as significant. I looked at the distant rise and thought about it with the honest portion of my attention.
“I learned early that love was contingent. That it was offered when useful and withdrawn when not. The Golovin household is more consistent than most. That consistency felt, at twelve, like something I wanted to protect.”
“So you built a life around protecting it.”
“Yes.”
“And the control—” she said it carefully, not as an accusation— “the needing everything to be managed and ordered and contained. That’s where that comes from.”
I looked at her. She was not analyzing me with the detachment of someone conducting an assessment. She was looking at me with a kind of… care.
“Chaos was dangerous when I was young,” I said. “Unpredictability was the condition under which bad things happened. Control was the tool that prevented it. I was very good at the tool and so I used it for everything, and eventually it became—not a choice but a default.”
“And then I walked into a hallway,” she said.
Something moved in my chest. “And then you walked into a hallway.”
She turned and started walking again. I walked beside her.
We went quietly for a few minutes, the low rise ahead of us getting no closer. The sun was lower than it had been, the light shifting toward the particular gold of desert afternoon.
“My mother left when I was sixteen,” she said.
“She didn’t leave badly. She told me she was leaving, she made sure I understood it wasn’t me, she came back twice to check, and then stopped because the coming back made the leaving harder for everyone.
” A pause. “Foster care was—” she stopped.
“It wasn’t the horror story version. It was more like it was nobody’s business, particularly, that I was a temporary presence in a series of spaces, and everyone was managing that fact, including me, and I got very good at being self-sufficient because self-sufficient was the version of me that caused the least friction. ”
I listened.
I understood this with the understanding of a person who had built the same architecture from different materials.
Portable. Self-sufficient. The life organized around its own continuability without requiring anything from the outside to hold its shape.
I had called mine control. She had called hers independence.
They were the same structure with different finishes.
“You don’t have to be self-sufficient anymore,” I said.
“No.” The word came out quietly. “I haven’t been for a while. I’m just now admitting it.”
*****
We went outside again after dinner.
The evening had brought the temperature down by thirty degrees, which was the desert’s particular version of contrast—days that burned and nights that remembered they were high altitude and adjusted accordingly.
I had found a thicker jacket in the property’s storage and given it to her before she could say she didn’t need it, and she had put it on without argument.
She had not said she didn’t need it.
The stars in the desert were different from the stars as seen from Las Vegas, where they weren’t seen at all—the light pollution absorbing them, the city so certain of its own brightness that it had made the rest of the sky invisible.
Out here, the stars were the primary feature of the available darkness, spread in the density that people who live in cities forget is possible, the Milky Way faint but present.
Sofia stood beside me and looked up.
She didn’t speak for a long time. I didn’t either.
The wind had dropped, and the desert had gone still, and we stood in that stillness—two people with a complicated history and a ring between them and a war back in the lit city forty minutes away—and looked at something that had been there before all of it and would remain after.
“I’ll end it,” I said.
That was when she looked at me.
“The war. Cruz and the rival faction and whatever else has positioned itself against this family in the past month.” I said it plainly, probably because I had thought it plainly.
“I will end it before it reaches us again. Whatever it requires. Whatever it costs.” I paused.
“I will burn the Strip before I let them use you.”
She looked at me for a long moment. The starlight was not enough to read her face with precision—I got the outline of it, the shape, the angle of her looking.
“That’s quite disproportionate,” she said, blinking.
“That doesn’t matter. It’s the truth.”
“Viktor.”
“It’s what I’ll do.”
She turned back to the sky. I felt, rather than saw, the slight shift in her weight—the adjustment of a person settling into a decision about proximity.
Then her shoulder was against my arm, and then her head was inclined slightly toward me, and I put my arm around her the way I had put my arm around her in the car, in the dark, with her face against my jacket.
She let out a breath.
I held her in the dark under the desert stars, and she let me, and the space between who we had been and who we were becoming was present in the gap between one breath and the next, unmapped and real and moving in the direction of something I did not have a finished name for.
“Let’s go inside,” she said.
Not uttering another word, we went back into the house and somehow, without tripping while kissing each other senseless, we landed on the bed.
Foreplay was a luxury neither of us could afford in that moment. The way her eyes shone, and her hands roamed my back, told me she was as impatient as I felt. Our clothes were a pile on the floor in a second.
“I want to see you,” I told her, pulling her towards me as I sat up against the headboard.
Guiding her by her hips, I led her to ride me, taking me in inch by inch. She threw her head back as she took all of my length in. Then she started moving, her hips moving in slow circles, which soon became faster movements.
I kissed her neck as she held on to my shoulders. Her breasts bounced as she moved, driving me even crazier.
Our hands didn’t leave each other’s bodies. Our intimacy was more emotional than it was physical. I could admit to feeling that much.
My mouth covered her left nipple as she reached her climax, arching her back. I followed in seconds, a groan escaping my lips.
Minutes later, as I held her beneath the covers, it was with the conviction that whatever darkness was coming, we’d face it together.