“And the number,” he says. “If anything feels wrong, you call it. A car. A face. A sound on the line when you pick up. Anything.”
“What counts as wrong?”
“You’ll know. You’re the most suspicious woman I’ve ever met.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m pacing myself.”
I agree to all of it, standing in a black office over a floor full of other people’s money, signing my life over to a man I’ve known three days, because the alternative is the desert.
The driver walks me out through the casino, through the gold and the noise, past the cocktail girls in their tiny costumes who are doing the exact job I do in a much prettier room. He holds doors like it’s a martial art. I thank him twice, get nothing twice. I decide to make him my project. The night air hits cool after the floor. I stand on the curb a second just breathing, trying to feel like a person again.
That’s when I see it.
Across the wide bright drive, past the line of cabs and the valet stand, there’s a car. Not the dark sedan from my building. A different one, parked where it shouldn’t be, engine off, a shape behind the wheel I can’t make out. It sits angled wrong for a fare, nose pointed at me. At the entrance I just walked out of. At the watchers Sevastian put on me, watching them right back.
The driver opens my door. I get in. I don’t say anything, because I don’t have the words for it yet, just a cold thread sliding downmy spine and a single clear thought I can’t shake the whole ride home.
Sevastian’s people are watching me. Somebody else is watching Sevastian’s people.
And whoever they are, they don’t drive a car that turns heads. They drive something built to disappear.
7
CINDY
Afew days go by and nothing happens, which is somehow worse than if it had.
I keep waiting for the second car to come back, the forgettable one from the casino drive, the watchers who aren’t Sevastian’s. I watch for it on the way to work, on the way home, in the gas-station lot, in the reflection of every shop window. It doesn’t show. That should be a relief. Instead it just leaves me with the knowledge that they know how to not be seen when they want to, which is so much worse than a man with a newspaper.
I sleep badly. I go to work. I let the girls believe the sugar-daddy story a little more every shift. I’m getting good at being a woman with a secret, which isn’t a skill I ever wanted on my resume.
Then, on day four of this new life I didn’t ask for, an envelope comes, and the strangeness goes from quiet to loud.
The card comes with instructions, which is very on brand for Sevastian, because God forbid the man hand me anything without a set of orders attached.
It’s another black card, this one in my name. Cynthia Boon, embossed in the corner like I’m a person who exists somewhere with a credit history. With it comes a text. No greeting, no signature, just an address on the most expensive stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard, then a line that reads,There’s a private salon opening at the casino. You’ll come on my arm. Buy whatever you need to look the part. Bring your friends, buy them what they want too.A beat later, like he could feel me bristling from across the city,It isn’t a suggestion.
So now I own a credit card with no limit, plus a man who thinks “buy a dress” is a military operation.
I should hate all of it. I do hate most of it. What I don’t expect is the small, ugly thrill that goes through me when I look at that card, because here’s a thing about being broke for seven years that nobody tells you. When somebody finally hands you a key to the candy store, the part of you that’s been hungry the whole time doesn’t care whose money it is. It just wants in.
I bring Crystal, obviously. If I’m doing something this insane I’m not doing it alone, plus Crystal has wanted to walk into a store like the ones on this block her whole life and be treated like she belongs.
The car comes for us. That’s the part I’m still not used to, that a car just appears now, summoned out of nowhere, the big blacked-out one with the driver who never speaks. It pulls up outside my building like a yacht docking at a bus stop. Crystal, who I told to be ready at noon with no further details, becausewatching her reaction is worth more than the warning, comes down the steps, sees it, stops dead.
“Whose is that?”
“Ours, today. Get in.”
She gets in like the seat is made of clouds. She runs her hand over the leather. She finds the little cooled compartment, the bottles of water nobody’s going to drink, the privacy screen. She presses every button at least once, narrating the whole time in a voice that climbs higher with each discovery, until the driver’s eyes flick to me in the mirror with something that would be amusement on a man who had any.
I shrug at him. Let her have this. She’s wanted nice things her whole life, gotten the short end of every single one, and if a rich man’s guilt money buys her ten minutes of feeling like a queen in the back of his ridiculous car, then good.
“Cindy,” she breathes, sprawled across the seat. “I could live in here. I would never leave. They’d have to pry me out.”
“You’d get bored. There’s no snacks.”
