He looks at me over her head then, one look, nothing the room could read, and the floor of the fanciest casino in Nevada tilts maybe four degrees under my shoes.
“Don’t keep them out too late,” he tells me, which in front of my friends sounds like a boyfriend, and in the four inches between us sounds like something with teeth in it. Then he’s gone, back through his tables, the noise closing up behind him like water.
Crystal grabs my arm with both hands. “He knows my name.”
“He knows everybody’s name. It’s a professional requirement.”
“He said it like a fact he was glad about,” she says, and hugs my arm hard enough to leave marks. I let her, because she isn’t wrong. I don’t know what to do about it either.
The night’s last act isn’t gambling at all. There’s a lounge off the floor with a band winding down, a real band, brushes on the drums, almost nobody left to hear them, and Lacey decides the empty space in front of the stage is legally a dance floor. She’s wrong, but the band rallies for us, and then it happens, the thing I’ll keep.
My girls dance. Not work dancing. Nobody’s tipping, nobody’s watching that matters, there’s no pole, no stage light, no rent riding on it. Just five dancers who became dancers because once, before the bills, they loved it, doing it for free, badly on purpose, Crystal spinning Stevie until they both nearly go down, Promise doing a slow elegant thing from another decade with her wine still in her hand, Joss heckling the band into one more song.
I dance too. Carefully, because of the knee, which holds. Seven years I’ve danced for strangers’ money in a room that smells like beer, watching nothing but the clock. Nobody has paid me one cent to be doing what I’m doing right now, and I could cry at how different it is, the same body, the same steps, a whole other thing entirely. I spin Crystal instead of crying about it. Her laugh goes up into the gold ceiling like it was painted for exactly that.
We end the night upstairs, all of us in white robes over our good dresses, eating room-service pancakes at two in the morning because rich people’s food is wasted on rich people. Lacey goes down first, mid-sentence, a flute of orange juice still upright in her hand like a torch. Joss and Stevie collapse in a heap on the enormous bed. Promise takes the second bedroom with the dignity of a woman who has earned a door that closes.
That leaves Crystal, who fights sleep the way she fights every ending of every good thing, and finally folds sideways into the couch with her head on my leg.
“This was the best night,” she mumbles. “Top five. Maybe three.”
“What beats it?”
She’s quiet long enough that I think she’s gone. Then, “Ask me again when you marry him,” she says, and is asleep before I can tell her to shut up.
While they sleep I do my quiet work. I’ve been trading my comps into chips all night, then the chips into cash, a little here, a little there, nothing anybody would blink at. Now I ease out from under Crystal’s head and go around the room like a reverse pickpocket, feeding folded bills into purses.
Rent for Joss. The light bill for Stevie. Lacey’s forty dollars back, plus the forty more she’d never ask for. Promise gets hers tucked in her coat pocket, where she won’t find it until laundry day, because she’d march it straight back to me otherwise, which makes this a coward’s move, and I stand by it.
Then I stand at the glass with the Strip burning gold below and my whole loud broke family asleep behind me, in a room none of us could have afforded to look at a year ago.
The story we’re selling this city is that I belong to him. That’s the costume. Tonight, for the first time, I can’t find the seam in it, the place where the costume stops, where I start. I press my forehead to the cold window and look for it until my eyes give out.
The last thing I hear, falling asleep on the world’s most expensive couch, is Crystal talking in her sleep. Making friends with somebody in a dream.
11
SEVASTIAN
Gleb takes one of mine, so I take a building of his.
It’s a stash house on the east side, an unmarked stucco box that holds product, cash, and three of Morozov’s people on a quiet night. The logic is simple. He reached into my city and lifted Yuri off a parking level. I let that sit a respectful week, long enough for him to think I’d swallowed it, then I send men to burn his stash house to the studs.
A message answered with a louder message. This is the grammar we speak out here, and I’m fluent in it. I learned it young, the way you learn any first language, by hearing it spoken over my head while I was small.
I run it from the back of the Cullinan two streets away, Roma at the wheel, the radio turned low. It’s the kind of operation I’ve run a hundred times. In, out, eight minutes. Take what’s portable, torch the rest, leave nothing standing that Gleb can call a victory. I planned it myself, every approach, every exit, because I don’t trust this to anyone now that the war is real.
It goes wrong in the second minute.
The first voice through the radio is too high. The second is flat, and the flat one is worse, because that one has done this before. Behind both of them the night opens up, the snap of rounds going thin across an open street, glass somewhere, a man swearing in two languages at once.
I hear it before Roma does. The radio chatter tightens, my men’s voices go clipped, and then comes the unmistakable sound of a plan meeting resistance it wasn’t built to meet. They were ready. That’s the only word for it. The stash house I sent eight men to surprise is not surprised. There are shooters posted where shooters have no business being, angles covered that only matter if you knew we were coming. What should have been eight clean minutes turns into a gunfight in a residential street. I sit two blocks away with my hands very still on my knee, listening to it go bad in real time.
It is a specific kind of hell, listening to your men die over a radio while you sit in a warm car a safe distance off. I do not recommend it. The seat under me is heated. That’s the detail that stays. Men I chose were bleeding on a sidewalk eight hundred yards away, and the seat under me was warm as a sleeping animal.
We get most of it out. But I lose Pasha, a good soldier with a young wife I’ll now have to go sit across from while she screams or doesn’t, and we nearly lose a van of product on top of him. As Roma drives us away from the smoke, silent, both hands hard on the wheel, a single thought arrives, cold, clean, very unwelcome.
They knew.
