I read it at the ranch with my coffee, schooling my face for the benefit of nobody. I text back one line and put the phone away.
the bar earned it.
16
CINDY
Sleep and I have stopped speaking.
It’s not the bed. The bed is the nicest thing I’ve ever been unconscious on. It’s my head, which will not close for business. I lie there in the dark doing laps. Vadim’s face, the flat cold note under all that grief. The rose garden, the crack in Sevastian’s voice when his brother’s name came out of him. The Wet Sunset gone dark behind us for good. Then back to Vadim, around again, until the sheets feel like a straitjacket I’m renting.
Around two I give up, put on socks, go hunting for a glass of water like that’s a real errand instead of my legs needing a job.
The ranch at night runs quiet. There’s a man posted at the end of the family wing who pretends not to see me as long as I stay inside the walls, which is the deal nobody ever said out loud. The kitchen keeps one light burning over the stove like a vigil. I drink my water at the sink, looking out at forty miles of nothing through glass that’s probably rated for rifles, and that’s when I see it. A thin yellow line under the door at the end of thebreezeway. The garage. Where there should be nobody at two in the morning.
My first thought is guards. My second thought is Vadim, and that one walks me down the breezeway on quiet feet before my common sense gets a vote. I ease the door open an inch, ready to have seen nothing, ready to be a woman who got lost looking for water.
It’s not Vadim.
Sevastian stands in a pool of work light beside the long black hood of a Rolls, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a soft cloth in one hand, moving it over the paint in slow circles like the car asked him for this.
I stop breathing for a second, for a brand-new reason this time.
I’ve seen this man in bespoke wool with a casino kneeling around him. I’ve seen him in headlights with a gun out. I have never seen him like this. The jacket hangs on a hook by the workbench. His forearms are bare under the lights, corded, old ink running up the left one, the kind of forearms that make a woman lose an argument with herself, and he’s working with the slow total attention I’ve only ever seen him spend on threats. On threats, and once or twice on me.
The watch is what gets me, though. The six-figure thing he wears like it’s nothing sits on a shelf next to a dented tin of wax, face down, like a confiscated toy.
I should back out. I came down here hunting a traitor and found a private thing instead, the kind of thing you’re not supposed to see. I get one foot into reverse.
“You walk loud for a dancer,” he says, without turning around.
“I walk normal. Your house repeats everything.”
“It’s concrete and glass. It keeps no secrets.” The cloth keeps moving. “You should be asleep.”
“So should you. It’s two in the morning and you’re polishing a car that has a staff.”
“The staff doesn’t touch the cars.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’d do it wrong. Then I’d have to notice, then we’d all have a bad week.”
I come in instead of leaving, because that’s the kind of decision I make now. There’s a stool by the workbench, so I take it, knees up, sock feet hooked on the rung, and he lets me. That’s the part I’ll keep turning over later. He just lets me, no security theater, no flat voice, no wall. The garage smells like wax, clean, faintly sweet, motor oil somewhere underneath. It’s warmer in here than it has any right to be, or maybe that’s the company.
“You took the watch off,” I say, because I can’t not.
He glances at the shelf like he forgot it existed. “The watch is for them.” He goes back to the hood. “This is for me.”
I sit with that one for a while. The whole world gets the watch, the suit, the stillness. A piece of painted metal at two in the morning gets the actual man. Being in the room with the actual man pulls at me, low and specific, even though all he’s doing is buffing.
“Does anybody know you do this?”
“The men know not to come in here at night.”
“So if I told Tasha that the scariest man in the state does his own detailing. In his socks.”
He looks down. He is, in fact, in his socks, the shoes lined up by the door like a schoolboy’s. “Then you’d be choosing chaos,” he says, going back to the hood. “Tasha can’t hold a thing that good. It would reach the Strip by lunch.”
