“I’m fine,” I hear myself say, and the voice that comes out is so normal it scares me. Smooth, light, like somebody flipped a switch and turned me into a girl who didn’t just watch a man die. “Just got turned around out there. It’s really dark.”
“I told you to pee close.” Crystal is smug, scooting over to make room.
“Should’ve taken the bear spray,” Stevie says, not looking up from the coals.
“Next time I’ll take the bear spray.”
I mean it so much it scares me. “Get over here, you’re freezing.”
I sit down next to her. I let her pull me into her side, jacket included, and I make myself laugh at whatever Joss is saying. Somebody hands me a cup of warm wine. I take it, but I don’t drink it. I just hold it, because my hands need a job that isn’t shaking. The fire pops. The girls keep going, loud and easy, about Dale, about movies, about Stevie’s almost-text. None of them have any idea that twenty minutes ago I had a gun pressed to my head.
I keep my mouth shut. He told me to, but even if he hadn’t, what would I say? Hey guys, fun update, I watched the most dangerous man in Nevada blow a hole in someone, and then he let me live because he liked my face. Pass the marshmallows.
So I sit there. I laugh in the right places. Apparently I’m a very good liar, which is a thing I’m learning about myself at the worst possible time.
Crystal hands me a marshmallow, raw, since the fire’s done for. It tastes like sugar and nylon. I eat the whole thing slowly, like it’s a job, while my body keeps quietly insisting we’re about to die.
The shaking won’t stop, though. It’s gone underground, this fine tremor running through me that the wine isn’t touching, and every time the fire pops I have to clamp my jaw to keep from jumping. My whole body is still convinced it’s about to die. Nobody tells you that part. You think the fear ends when the gungoes away. It doesn’t. It just moves in, makes itself at home, sets up a chair in the corner of you and stays.
Crystal tucks her cold feet under my leg and tells a story about a customer who proposed to her after three lap dances. The girls howl. I laugh too, and for a few minutes it almost works. I almost believe I’m just a girl at a campfire.
Then I’ll catch myself plotting an escape I have no business plotting. How fast I could grab the keys. Which car is closest. How long to the highway, how much longer to a town with people in it, lights, locks, a door I could put between me and the desert. It always comes back to the same dead end. Too far. He told me as much, and I believe that too. There’s nowhere out here that isn’t his.
Later, when the fire’s down to coals, everyone crammed into the tents in a tangle of sleeping bags, somebody already snoring, I lie on my back next to Crystal and don’t sleep. I watch the dark go a little less dark, hour by hour, gray bleeding into the seams of the tent. I think about a man in a suit who came down to my level in the sand and looked at me like I was something he intended to keep.
I’ll be watching you. And you’ll be seeing me again. Very soon.
I believe him. That’s the thing that gets me. Out of this whole insane night, the part I’m the most sure of, down in my bones, is that he meant every word.
My life stopped being mine somewhere out there in the dark tonight. I just haven’t met the rest of it yet.
3
SEVASTIAN
Three nights. That’s how long I last before I do something I have no good reason to do, which is get in a car and drive to a sticky little club off the Strip to look at a woman I should have already forgotten.
I don’t forget her. That’s the problem. I’ve spent three days running an empire with half my attention. Signing off on shipments. Sitting through a meeting about a dead soldier, nodding along while my men talk, and the whole time some back room of my skull keeps playing the same loop. A girl on her knees in the sand. Furious. Soaked with tears. Refusing to look away from me when every sane instinct should have had her begging.
I’ve had men beg me for their lives in nicer settings than that. None of them stuck. She stuck.
It’s a stupid reason to be here. I know that. A man in my position does not drive himself across town over a stripper, because I have people who would have made her disappear three nightsago and saved me the trip. That was the smart play. Vadim said as much, in his careful way, the way he says things when he thinks I’m about to do something idiotic but values his teeth too much to come out and say it.
A witness is a problem, Pakhan. Make her go away.He’s right. He’s almost always right, which is why I keep him close and ignore him about half the time.
This is one of the half.
So here I am, parked outside a place called the Wet Sunset, which is exactly as classy as the name promises. Roma kills the engine. He says nothing.
“Wait here,” I tell him.
“You sure about this?” He’s known me long enough to ask without expecting an answer he’ll like.
“No,” I say, then I get out.
Inside, the place hits me like a wet towel. Bad music, too loud, bass I can feel in my back teeth. Cheap colored lights washing everything in red, then purple, a smell of spilled liquor losing a war with somebody’s vanilla body spray. A long bar down one wall. A small stage. A scatter of men who all have the same look on them, which is the look of a man spending money he told his wife he didn’t spend. A bouncer takes one look at the suit and decides, correctly, that I am not his problem tonight. Smart kid. He’ll live longer than the ones who guess wrong.
I find the best booth in the house. The corner one, with sightlines to every door, because some habits you keep even on a night you’re pretending is about pleasure. I sit. I look for her.
