"Hello to you too."
He takes his coat off and lays it over the chair. He doesn’t sit. He stands there with his arms folded.
"Give me details."
I tell him. The stairwell. The loading dock. The white van and the camera gap and the eleven minutes and the fact that they timed it perfectly, that they used my own purge as cover, that they walked into my building and took my pregnant omega while I was standing floors away firing the people they'd already written off.
My father listens. He doesn't move.
“This is a problem,” he says.
And that’s it. That’s the line that makes me lose it. I’m done being polite to him.
“No shit, Sherlock.” I say.
“Watch your mouth.”
“Why? All you do is come in here and tell me I have problems I already know about and criticize me for them. Do you do anything to actually help? No. I’m done with it.”
My father looks like he wants to punch me in the face. “So, what are you going to do? Since you’re so clever.”
I shrug into my coat. “I’m going to Luca's house and he and I are going to have a conversation. Maybe you’re right about something. Sometimes the old ways worked best."
"No. You're not."
"He has Theo. He has my child. Yourgrandchild."
The room goes quiet. My father's hands tighten. I can see the shift in his knuckles, the tendons standing out against the age-spotted skin.
"How far along?"
"Early. A month, maybe five weeks."
He's quiet for a long time. He looks at the sofa again.
"A grandchild," he says.
"Yes."
He sits down. It's the first time in this conversation that he's taken a seat and the movement is slow, deliberate. He lowers himself onto the sofa, onto the exact spot where Theo sleeps, and rests his hands on his knees.
"Your mother was pregnant when I decided to keep her," he says. "I didn't know it at the time. She told me three weeks after the fact."
I've never heard this.
"I was going to let her go. She was a complication. I had enemies who would have used her against me and I was younger than you are now and not as careful. But she was pregnant and that changed the calculation."
"Because of the baby."
"Because of the family. An empire without heirs is a business. A business can be sold, broken apart, absorbed. A family endures. I kept your mother because she was carrying you. And then I kept her because she was carrying you and I loved her. Those are different reasons but they arrived at the same conclusion."
He looks up at me from the sofa. His eyes are pale and steady and for once I can read what's in them.
“I’d want to kill Luca too,” he says. “"Which is precisely why you're going to sit in this office and think instead of driving across the city to do something that gets all three of you killed." My father's voice hasn't changed. It's the same level, measured tone he uses for everything. "The Castellanos took your omega because they want something. They haven't called yet, which means they're letting you feel it. When they call, and they will, you need to be in a position to negotiate. You can't negotiate from a jail cell or a body bag."
"I'm not going to negotiate."
"Yes, you are. You're going to agree to whatever Luca asks, you're going to get Theo back, and then you're going to destroy him. That's the order. Not the other way around."
