When Sofia appeared in the doorway at 9 am, still in the black T-shirt and jeans that weren’t hers, her hair loose and her face without makeup for the first time since I had known her, I was on my second cup of coffee and had organized what I knew into the shape it was going to take.
“There’s food,” I said. “Whatever you need.”
She found it without asking for directions. I watched her move through the kitchen from the main room, registering the layout, identifying what was available, and assembling something efficient from the contents. She brought two plates out without asking if I wanted one.
She sat across from me.
We ate without conversation. The desert outside was existing enormously, the scale of it visible now through the windows, the land running flat to distant formations under a sky that was not Las Vegas blue, not the managed atmosphereof the casino district, but actual sky, the kind that had not been interfered with.
Sofia looked at it.
“I’ve never been this far from the Strip,” she said.
“Where were you before Las Vegas?”
A pause. “Phoenix, mostly. A few places in California.” She turned her coffee cup in her hands. “We moved around. My father followed work, and work followed gambling, and gambling moved, so we moved.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died.” Simple. Finished. The particular simplicity of a person who has compressed grief into the smallest shape it can take through years of practice. “Four years ago. Liver. He was fifty-three.”
I looked at her profile. “I’m sorry.”
She turned from the window and looked at me, and the look was direct and slightly surprised.
“Thank you,” she said. Also plain. Also real.
*****
In the afternoon, we walked.
This was my suggestion, which surprised her. She had expected, I thought, that the property would be what the penthouse was: functional, controlled, a space for management rather than habitation. The suggestion of a walk was apparently outside the expected range.
She came.
The property’s land extended east of the structure, running toward a low rise that was not quite a hill, the scrub vegetation sparse and the ground pale. I had walked this once before, in the dark, during the first visit three years ago, conducting the kind of perimeter check I preferred to do personally when I first acquired a property.
Sofia walked with her hands in her jacket pockets—another borrowed clothing—and her face angled slightly toward the sun like someone who did not usually have access to this quality of light and was using it carefully. Her footsteps were quiet on the ground. The desert made sounds I had not noticed before: the wind in the scrub, a bird somewhere in the distance, the quality of silence that was not absence but presence—the enormous, unhurried presence of a landscape that had been here before the city and would be here after it.
“You grew up in all of this,” Sofia said. Not Las Vegas. Not the desert. She gestured vaguely at the life. The structure. The Bratva and its apparatus, and the particular world that had produced Viktor Golovin.
“In Russia first,” I said. “Came here at twelve.”
“That doesn’t sound like a childhood.”
“It was an effective one.”
She stopped walking. I stopped, too, and looked at her, and she was looking at me with those dark eyes and the expression that meant she was reading the sentence behind the sentence, which she did with a regularity that I had stopped trying to manage around.
“Did you love anyone?” she said. “Before—” she didn’t finish the sentence. “When you were young.”
The question landed in a way I had not been prepared for, which was rare enough to register as significant. I looked at the distant rise and thought about it with the honest portion of my attention.
“I learned early that love was contingent. That it was offered when useful and withdrawn when not. The Golovin household is more consistent than most. That consistency felt, at twelve, like something I wanted to protect.”
“So you built a life around protecting it.”
“Yes.”
