Between rounds, Lex’s gaze drifted to the crowd while the cutman worked. The first three rows were a blur of faces. All unimportant, until a flash of blond caught his eye in the third row, five seats in from the aisle. His neck snapped around to it, but it wasn’t Barnaby. Just some model he kind of recognised.
She wasn’t as beautiful as Barnaby. Nobody was.
When the tenth round started, Morozov came out swinging.
The first punch was a left hook that Lex picked up late, his eyes still readjusting from the crowd to the ring. Morozov’s hook caught Lex on the temple, clean and heavy. The world tilted and his legs went soft underneath him. Lex saw the right hand coming. He saw the elbow drop, the shoulder rotate, saw the fist accelerate through the short, brutal arc towards his jaw.
He tried to move.
Chapter Thirty-Six
LasVegas was an affront to every aesthetic sensibility Barnaby had ever cultivated.
The heat hit him first, a wall of dry, manufactured warmth that rolled up from the casino floor and settled against his skin like cling film. The MGM Grand smelled of carpet cleaner, cigarette smoke, and something chemical and sweet that he suspected was pumped through the ventilation system to keep people disoriented. The noise was even worse. Slot machines shrieked in overlapping key signatures all around him.
Vidal had chartered a private jet and handled the logistics, arranging for a car from McCarran and booking the honeymoon suite at the Bellagio for him and Lex. Vidal had done all of this without asking for permission, because Vidal operated on the principle that nothing could go badly when he was so obviously right.
He was sitting beside Barnaby now, wearing sunglasses indoors, his legs crossed, his camel coat folded across his lap like a blanket. “This,” Vidal announced, surveying the MGM GrandGarden Arena with proprietary satisfaction, “is the greatest thing I have ever done for you. Including giving you that dildo.”
Barnaby did not dignify this with a response, primarily because it was true.
They’d arrived late, because the jet had been held on the tarmac at Farnborough for ninety minutes. By the time they reached the arena, the fourth round was underway and the doors were closed. Security had been immovable. Two men in black polo shirts had informed them that no entry was permitted during rounds. Barnaby stood in the corridor with his hood up and his mobile in his hand. In desperation, he pulled up Linda Murphy’s number on the screen, his thumb hovering over the call button for long enough that Vidal had made a noise of physical anguish beside him.
The thing was, he didn’t know where the two of them stood. He’d ended things with her son, and the tabloids had made Barnaby the sympathetic party in the breakup, which meant Linda had spent three weeks fielding press coverage that painted Lex as a villain. She might blame Barnaby for the public dimension of it. She might simply not want him here, distracting her boy.
He pressed call and Linda picked up on the first ring.
“Barnaby?” The arena noise rose behind her voice. “Everything all right, love?”
His throat closed. Theloveundid him, the way it was delivered without hesitation, as though nothing that had happened had altered her accounting of him one bit.
“I’m — yes. I’m here. I’m at the arena. We’ve just arrived, my friend and I, and the doors are closed. Security won’t…” He stopped. He was rambling, which he never did, and the fact that he was rambling told him exactly how far outside his own composure he’d travelled. “I’m sorry. I should have called ahead.I don’t know if you’d even want me here, given everything, but I —”
“Which door?”
He blinked. “Sorry?”
“Which door are you at, Barnaby? North or south entrance?”
“I — north, I think.”
“Stay there.”
She appeared three minutes later, small and fierce in her sequinned jacket. Her eyes were dark and quick and absolutely a mirror of Lex’s. She seized Barnaby by the elbow with a grip astonishing for a woman barely five foot three, and marched them past the security bollards. One of Lex’s entourage was displaced from his ringside seat with a look from Linda, and a second seat materialised through a process Barnaby didn’t fully follow.
“Oh, I can’t look,” Linda said, her fingernails digging into his forearm through the cotton. “Tell me when it’s over, love.”
“Mrs Murphy, if you look away every time he’s hit, you’ll miss the entire fight.”
“I know, love. That’s the point. I’ve been doing this for twelve years and I still can’t watch. His nan was the same. She used to turn the telly to face the wall during his amateur bouts. Just sat there listening to the commentary like it was the shipping forecast.” Her grip tightened. “Is he bleeding? Don’t tell me if he’s bleeding.”
“He’s bleeding.”
“Oh, God.”
Barnaby leaned forward. There was a cut above Lex’s left eyebrow, a dark seam that the cutman was working between rounds. Lex sat on his stool with his head tilted back while Malik murmured at him, and even from thirty feet away Barnaby could read the set of his shoulders, wound tight across the trapezius.
He knew that body. He’d mapped it with his hands in the dark at Chatham House, tracing the architecture of muscle and scar tissue while Lex lay still and let him explore. The bell rang. Lex stood, and Barnaby’s hands clenched in his lap.
