“He named the car,” she tells the windshield, delighted.
“I don’t enjoy things.”
“Liar. You’re grinning. I can see it. The terror of Nevada is having a great time in his little rocket.”
“It’s a hypercar.”
“It’s a rocket with cupholders.”
“It has no cupholders.”
“What do you mean it has no cupholders?”
“Cupholders add weight.”
“You paid for a car with no cupholders.” She says it the way a juror says guilty. “You people deserve everything that’s coming to you.” She braces a hand on the dash as I take a long sweeping curve flat out, the whole world tilting, and instead of fear there’s just that whoop again, and I realize I would do almost anything to keep hearing it. That’s the part that should scare me. It does. I do it anyway. I take the next curve faster.
For a few miles there’s no war. No throne. No grave. There’s a fast car, a straight road, a woman who has decided, for one morning, to stop being afraid, and a man who forgot he was allowed to feel like this. I let it run. I let it run too long.
Then we crest the rise, and the morning curdles.
There’s an SUV parked off the road just over the top of the hill. Dark. Nose out. Sun off the windshield, engine dead, dust settled on it thick enough to say hours, not minutes. Set with a clear sightline back down the ranch road, the road that runs to my gate, my walls, my grandmother, the woman in my passenger seat.
It’s a watcher’s position. I’ve set up a hundred of them. I know one on sight, the angle, the patience of it, the way it sits where it can see without being seen. There’s exactly one reason a vehicle parks there at dawn watching the only road to my home.
Timur. Or Timur’s men. Morozov has put eyes on my house. On my grandmother’s roses. On the woman in my passenger seat with wax still on her hands.
The joy goes out of me between one heartbeat and the next, the warm loose man evaporating, the cold one snapping back into place so hard it’s nearly a relief. We’re closing on the SUV fast, fast enough to make us a problem the watcher will radio in, two faces in a car they were never meant to get this clear a look at. I weigh it in the half second I’m given. I can’t stop. Stopping is a conversation I don’t want at gunpoint with my woman in the car. I can’t roll past slow enough to be photographed.
So I leave the road.
I haul the wheel and we drop off the asphalt onto hardpack, the car bucking, Cynthia’s laugh cutting off into a sharp inhale as the desert turns from a blur into an obstacle course. I take us down off the shoulder, around a stand of creosote, into the low dunes where a big slab of an SUV built for watching can’t easily chase a car built for exactly this. I drive the way I learned in a harder life. Fast. Brutal. I thread the washes, the rises, the back end sliding loose then catching, loose then catching, putting terrain, dust, distance between us and the eyes on the hill. Soon the SUV is gone behind us. The only thing chasing us now is our own dust.
When I finally bring us to a stop in the lee of a long dune, the engine ticking, the dust drifting past the windows in a slow gold curtain, we’re both breathing hard.
I look over at her.
She’s flushed, her hair wild, her chest rising and falling fast. The car ticks around us like something cooling after a hunt. Dust drifts gold through the light between our faces. Close up shesmells like sleep, soap, the wax that’s still on both our hands. Her eyes are huge, bright with adrenaline, with something else under it.
She’s looking back at me with her lips parted, alive, so alive, a hand’s-width away across the console. The fear’s burned clean off her. What’s left is the heat, the same current that ran through the count room. Except there’s no party to perform for out here. No rules left between us. Nothing but dust, silence, the small space between her mouth and mine, which is closing, because I’m leaning in. Every cell I own is leaning in.
She’s right there. She’d let me, the way her breath’s gone shallow, the way she hasn’t pulled back an inch.
Her gaze drops to my mouth, comes back up, and that small thing nearly finishes me, because it isn’t the count-room heat, the dare, the both-of-us-pretending-it’s-just-bodies. This is quieter. This is worse. This is the want that comes with a name attached, the kind I swore off the day I learned what it costs.
That’s exactly why I put the car in gear instead.
I already gave her one night I couldn’t afford, in a dead bar with the doors bolted. Out here, alone, with her looking at me like that, I don’t trust myself to stop at a kiss. What’s between us in this car is the other thing. The thing that gets people killed.
So I drop my eyes from her mouth. I put both hands back on the wheel. I pull us out of the lee of the dune toward home, and the silence in the car changes shape into something loaded with everything I didn’t do.
“Sevastian,” she says, quiet.
“Don’t.” It comes out rougher than I mean it. “Not out here.”
She doesn’t push. She turns to look out her window at the desert sliding by, and I drive us back to the ranch the long way, watching my mirrors now, the cold all the way back in me where it lives.
The threat is at my gates. Morozov’s eyes are on my house, my grandmother, her. That’s what a pakhan thinks about, and I do think about it, the whole way home. I think about how I’ll sweep the perimeter, double the road detail, find out how long they’ve been sitting on that hill.
