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A few seconds later the phone starts ringing, but I set it to vibrate and then ignore it. I feel guilty for standing her up after making a promise to be more honest, but explaining where I am going—no less why—seems impossible.
Lila looks over at me, half her face lit by a streetlight, blond lashes and the arch of her brow turned to gold. She’s so beautiful that my teeth hurt. In psychology class freshman year our teacher talked about the theory that we all have a “death instinct”—a part of us that urges us toward oblivion, toward the underworld, toward Thanatos. It feels exhilarating, like taking a step off the edge of a skyscraper. That’s how I feel now.
“Where’s your dad?” I ask her.
“With your mom,” Lila says.
“She’s alive?” I am so surprised that I don’t have time to be relieved. My mother is with Zacharov? I don’t know what to think.
Lila’s gaze finds mine but her smile gives me no comfort. “For now.”
The engine starts, and we pull out of the parking lot. I see my own face reflected back in the curve of the tinted window. I might be going to my own execution, but I don’t look all that torn up about it.
4
WE DRIVE INTO THE basement garage, and Lila parks in a numbered spot next to a Lincoln Town Car and two BMWs. It’s a car thief’s dream lot, except for the fact that anyone who steals from Zacharov will probably get dropped off a pier with cement boots on.
As Lila kills the engine, I realize that this will be the first time I’ve ever seen the apartment where she lives when she’s with her father. She was quiet on the drive, leaving me with plenty of time to wonder if she knows that I followed her yesterday, if she knows that I’m being recruited for the Licensed Minority Division, if she knows that I saw her order a hit or that I have Gage’s gun.
To wonder if I’m about to die.
“Lila,” I say, turning in my seat and putting my gloved hand on the dashboard. “What happened with us—”
“Don’t.” She looks directly into my eyes. After a month of being forced to avoid her, I feel stripped bare by her gaze. “You can be as much of a charming bastard as you want, but you’re never going to bullshit your way into my heart again.”
“I don’t want that,” I say. “I never wanted that.”
She gets out of the car. “Come on. We have to get back to Wallingford before curfew.”
I follow her into the elevator, trying to behave myself, trying to puzzle through her words. She pushes the P3 button. I guess the P stands for “penthouse,” because soon we are whirring up the floors so fast that my ears pop. She lets her messenger bag drop off her shoulder and hunches forward in her long black coat. For a moment she looks frail and tired, like a bird huddling against a storm.
“How did my mother wind up here?” I ask.
Lila sighs. “She did a bad thing.”
I don’t know if that means working Patton or something else. I think about the reddish stone my mother was wearing on her finger the last time I saw her. I think too of a picture I found in the old house, of a much younger Mom decked out in lingerie and looking like Bettie Page—a picture obviously taken by a man who wasn’t my father and who might have been Zacharov. I have a lot of reasons to worry.
The elevator doors open into a massive room with white walls, a black and white marble floor, and what looks like a Moroccan style wood ceiling at least eighteen feet above us. There’s no carpet, so the tap of our shoes echoes as we walk toward the lit fireplace on the opposite wall, flanked with sofas, and with two people mostly hidden by shadows. Three huge windows show Central Park at night, a patch of near blackness in the shimmering city surrounding it.
My mother sits on one of the couches. She has an amber-colored drink in her hand and is wearing a filmy white dress I’ve never seen on her before. It looks expensive. I expect her to jump up, to be her usual exuberant self, but the smile she gives me is subdued, almost fearful.
Despite that I nearly collapse with relief. “You’re okay.”
“Welcome, Cassel,” Zacharov says. He’s standing by the fire, and when we get close, he crosses to where Lila is and gives her a kiss on the forehead. He looks like the lord of some baronial manor, rather than a seedy crime boss in a big Manhattan apartment.
I incline my head in what I hope is a respectful nod. “Nice place.”
Zacharov smiles like a shark. His white hair looks gold in the firelight. Even his teeth look golden, which reminds me uncomfortably of Gage and the gun taped to the wall of my closet. “Lila, you can go do your homework.”
She touches her throat lightly—gloved fingers tracing the marks she took, the marks that make her an official member of his crime family, not just his daughter—rage in every line of her face. He barely notices. I’m sure he doesn’t realize that he just dismissed her like a child.
My mother clears her throat. “I’d like to talk to Cassel alone for a moment, if that’s all right, Ivan?”
Zacharov nods.
She gets up and walks to me. Linking her arm with mine, she marches me down a hallway to a massive kitchen with ebony wood floors and a center island of a bright green stone that looks like it might be malachite. While I sit down on a stool, she puts a clear glass kettle on one of the burners. It’s eerie, the way she seems to know Zacharov’s apartment.
I want to grab her arm to reassure myself that she’s real, but she’s moving restlessly, not seeming to notice me.
