Page 27

The groceries stay. Let the roommates eat.

* * *

I pick her up.

She’s heavy. Sleep-heavy, soft and loose and warm in my arms, all that thick body dead weight against my chest, her braids hanging over my arm. Her skirt’s still bunched up at her waist and she’s bare underneath. I don’t fix it. I wrap her in her purple comforter, and I carry her out of that room.

She wakes up a little on the stairs.

“Sasha?” Her voice is thick and slurry. Her eyes don’t open. “Where…”

“Sleep.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home.”

She frowns without opening her eyes. “I am home.”

“No, you’re not.”

Her face scrunches like she’s gonna argue. Then she yawns, turns her face into my neck, and goes right back out.

Downstairs, Gleb is holding the gate. The broken one I fixed this morning. I carry her through it and down to the car, and Misha opens the back door, and I get in with her in my lap and don’t let go of her the whole way.

* * *

I bought the house at noon.

She was standing in line at the bursar’s office begging a woman with a Hello Kitty lanyard for an extension, and I was on the phone with Yuri telling him I wanted the biggest fucking house on the highest fucking hill in Bel Air, with a wall and a gate and no neighbors close enough to hear her scream. He sent me three. I bought the first one. I didn’t look at the number. Cash, done, closed by two.

At two-forty in the morning, the gate opens for us.

It’s twelve feet high. Black iron. Cameras on both posts. Two of my men in the booth beside it with rifles they’re not hiding. The drive winds up through palms and old oaks, and then the trees open up, and there it is.

Glass. Stone. Three stories cut into the side of the hill. Every light in the place on. The pool glowing blue, pouring over the edge of the cliff like it goes all the way down to the city. And below it, all of LA. Every light from here to the ocean.

Nine bedrooms. A gym. A theater. A wine cellar. A kitchen bigger than her whole apartment. A closet I had filled this afternoon with every size she wears, in every color but black.

All of it hers.

All of it mine.

All of it a fucking cage, and she’s gonna walk around inside it in her socks and eat my food and sleep in my bed and forget there was ever anything outside it.

I carry her up the stairs, down the hall, into the main bedroom.

The bed’s a California king. White sheets. A wall of glass looking out over the ocean, black and endless. I lay her down in the middle of it, still wrapped in that ugly-ass purple comforter. My girl. In my bed. In my house. Finally.

Fuck, I want to wake her up.

She stirs. Her eyes crack open. She looks at the ceiling, twenty feet up. At the glass. At the ocean. At me.

“Sasha,” she whispers. “Where am I?”

“In bed.”

“This isn’t my bed.”