Page 10 of Merciless Daddy

“Kiryusha—”

“I’m the reason you’re still here. Do you think I don’t know that?” He said it fast, like pulling a splinter. “I’ve done the math, Lena. Every time you should have run, there’s me, standing in the doorway of it like an idiot. So take me out of the doorway. Go.”

I set the mug down on the sill, very carefully, because I wanted to throw it.

“All right. Let’s ‘do the math,’ since you brought it up.” I held up one finger. “Your passport. Papa took it in March—‘for safekeeping,’ which is also what he says about my jewelry and my mail. Two.” Another finger. “Your account. Frozen since the engagement was announced. You have what’s in your wallet, which is, what?”

“...Forty dollars and a coupon.”

“Forty dollars and a coupon. Three.” I pointed at the door. “Dmitri, or whichever slab of beef they’ve rotated in this month, stands outside your room from eleven at night until seven in the morning. You think that’s for your protection? It’s a fishhook, Kiryusha. It’s in me, not you. And if I ran tonight, alone, tell me—honestly, you’re the honest one, it’s your whole personality—how long before Papa realizes the fastest way to bring me back is you?”

He didn’t answer. He looked at his hands. Nineteen years old and he still sat like a boy waiting outside an office.

“We go together,” I said, quieter now. “That’s the plan. That has always been the plan. I need you to trust that there is one, even when I can’t show you the pieces, because the pieces only work if you can’t be made to describe them. Understand?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Nothing is fair. But at least I’m being unfair in your favor.”

He laughed—a cracked, unwilling laugh, the kind that’s half surrender—and slumped back into the chair, and for a moment he looked like what he was under all of it: a kind, clever kid born into a family of raptors, still waiting for someone to tell him it had been an administrative error. I would burn the whole coastline before I let Gianni Scordato take him for instruction. But I didn’t say that. Some promises you keep by never saying them out loud where the house can hear.

“Lena.” He was watching me now, with Mama’s carefulness. “Are you frightened?”

“No,” I said. Smoothly. Immediately. A performance, of course.

Kiryl looked at me. Then he looked, pointedly, at the mug on the windowsill.

I followed his gaze. The chocolate was half gone. The marshmallow raft was gone entirely—I’d eaten it without noticing, the way you do—except for a small, damning archipelago of survivors floating in the middle of the cup.

The pink ones. Every single pink one, untouched.

“You only leave the pink ones,” my little brother said gently. “You’ve done it since you were nine. You’re still the same, aren’t you? Haven’t changed.”

I looked at my cup full of evidence for a long moment.

“They taste like soap,” I said.

“They taste identical, Lena. It’s the same marshmallow.”

“Drink your own disgusting chocolate,” I said, and he did, and neither of us said anything else, and I ate exactly one pink marshmallow on principle, and it did taste like soap, and I was terrified.

My mother’s study was a shrine.

My father’s rule, established the week she died and enforced for eleven years since: nothing in the room moves. Her fountain pens still stood in their cup. Her reading glasses still sat folded on the blotter, exactly where she’d set them down before the last drive to the hospital. Lev came in twice a year—her birthday, their anniversary—stood in the doorway for four minutes, and left. He thought grief was a customs seal. Break it and the contents spoil.

I was the only other person allowed in here, and that was only because mother had stipulated it in her will. Even so, I had to make sure everything in the shrine was in the right place.

And what father did not know, because he had never came in here, was that his shrine had a payroll.

I sat down at her desk, moved nothing, and woke the laptop I kept in the bottom drawer under a stack of condolence cards nobody had ever answered. My mother left me fifty-one percent of two companies when she died—the cold storage in Newark, the trucking fleet—and my father, who considered legitimate business the way other men consider needlepoint, had decided years ago that letting me “handle the paperwork” kept me occupied and cost him nothing. He thought I filed things. He told people I filed things. Meanwhile the paperwork employed three hundred people, ran nine figures of clean revenue a year, and answered to me from a dead woman’s desk while a camera down the corridor guarded the wrong door.

The phone in the drawer buzzed before I’d even logged in. The Newark facility manager. At this hour, that meant blood or freon.

“Talk to me.”

“Miss Sokolova—” He was breathing like he’d run up stairs. He was sixty and built like a filing cabinet; he did not run up stairs. “Compressor’s down in Section C. Went down maybe forty minutes ago, temperature’s climbing, we’ve got—the whole citrus contract’s in there, the berries for the supermarket account, I’m looking at three, four hundred thousand if it turns, and the night crew, they logged the fault right away, they did everything right, but if Mr. Sokolov hears—”

“Stop.” I said it the way you say it to a horse. “Breathe. You called me first?”