Page 18 of Merciless Daddy

“So.” He set his palms flat on the cloth and the table came to order like a courtroom. “The Sicilian wants cold storage. This is real business and I do not turn away real business over table manners.” A glance at Gianni that could have skinned a seal. “You will have the warehouse records. Utilization, rates, the standing contracts—my people will send what a buyer is entitled to see, and nothing that he is not.”

“And the fleet systems,” I said. “Dispatch, routing. If my trucks are interlining with yours, my office needs visibility.”

“No.” Flat. Final. “The trucking runs how it runs. You will get confirmations like every other customer.” The heavy head turned a degree, and the next sentence came out of him with the deliberate weight of a man laying a foundation stone in public. “In three weeks the fleet passes under my son-in-law’s authority in any case. Whatever visibility you want after that, you will negotiate with him. Family arrangement. Signed and blessed.”

Gianni sat up under the words like a plant under a lamp. Son-in-law. Authority. He actually smoothed his lapel. Across the table Yelena sat perfectly still with her hands folded on her leather folder, being discussed in the future tense, wearing the flawless pleasant nothing I was starting to be able to see through—and what was under it tonight was so cold and so controlled that it made my chest hurt in a way I declined to examine at the table.

“Then we’re concluded,” I said, and stood, and buttoned my jacket. “Lev Borisovich. The hospitality was instructive.”

“The company was expensive,” he said, which from him may have been a joke. It was impossible to tell and unwise to laugh.

We made our goodbyes in the order the room required. And in the shuffle of chairs and coats and Gianni’s loud plans for the wedding, I did one small thing with my hands that thirty years of manifests have taught them to do invisibly: I left the Northbridge document behind. Slid it half under the edge of her leather folder, corner protruding, unmistakable to anyone who kept papers for a living and invisible to everyone who didn’t. Pietro saw it and said nothing, and we walked out into the gold noise of the dining room.

She caught me at the coat check.

The service corridor between the private room and the front of the house was narrow and warm, lined with hanging furs, smelling of cold ash and other people’s perfume, and I had contrived to be the last one down it, sending Pietro ahead for the car, and I would like to say I was surprised when I heard her heels behind me. I was not surprised. I had baited the hook and she had taken it in under four minutes, and my pulse was up before I even turned around, which was its own piece of intelligence, filed under problems.

“You forgot this.” She held out the manifest, folded once, her voice pitched under the music. Up close, in the narrow light, she was a full head shorter than me and gave up not one millimeter of it. “Careless.”

“Keep it.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Read page two when you’re alone. The reservation schedule. It’s your network being pre-sold, Yelena Lvovna. I’d think the majority shareholder would want a copy for her files.” I watched that land—the flicker, fast and fierce, at majority shareholder, at the confirmation that I knew exactly whose companies were on that table tonight. “I have others.”

Her eyes narrowed. The paper disappeared—not into her hand, somewhere into the dark silk, a magician’s economy—and she stepped closer, and the corridor got smaller.

“Then let’s not waste the privacy,” she said. “Did your family send you to inspect this alliance, or to sabotage it?”

“That depends entirely on what the alliance is hiding.”

“How diplomatic. And the question at dinner—the compressor, the contractor. Addressed to me, past my father, in front of his men.” Her chin came up. “Was that reconnaissance, or were you simply enjoying the trouble it made?”

“Both. I’m efficient.”

“I noticed.” She said it like an accusation. Then her voice dropped further, and the temperature dropped with it. “Now hear me, Sicilian, because I’ll say this once. Whatever you were doing at that table—whatever you think you saw—” and her right hand moved, involuntary, a half-inch toward her other wrist before she caught it and stilled it—“do not mistake my fiancé’s hand for an invitation. What Gianni does is Sokolov business, and Scordato business, and no business of yours. I’ve managed men like him since before you learned to knot that tie. I don’t need an audience, and I certainly don’t need a foreign cousin deciding my wrists are his cause.”

I looked at the wrist anyway.

“I don’t require invitations to dislike a coward,” I said. “I’ve disliked him for free since we were boys. And how do you feel about marrying a patricide?”

She met my stern gaze with her own.

“The facts are disputed.”

“I watched him kill his own father, in cold blood.”

“A stray bullet.”

“Vengeance will come for him.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said it.

“You’re threatening my fiancé?”

“I would never.”

Something moved through her face—not softening, nothing so cheap, but a recalibration, the look of a woman revising a figure. Then it was gone, and the barbed wire came back up, and she stepped in another half foot.

“Good.”