Page 19 of Merciless Daddy

“Just know that a man who killed his father would have no qualms about hurting his wife.”

Her pale eyes were level and merciless and inches from mine. “Noticing a cage does not make you a rescuer, Salvatore Scordato. It makes you one more man standing outside it with opinions. I’ve had a lifetime of those.”

I stepped closer.

I didn’t decide to. She did not retreat and we stood there among the hanging furs with the music muffled behind us, not touching, and the air between us went thick and electric and undeniable. I could see the fine grain of her skin. I could see the exact place where the dark honey of her hair escaped its pins at her temple. I could hear her breathing, which had changed, and mine, which had too, and I said, quietly, into that narrow charged space:

“I didn’t mistake you for a woman waiting to be rescued.”

Her lips parted. Closed. When she spoke it came out low and even and cost her something—I could see what it cost, I was close enough to itemize it.

“Good,” she said.

But her pulse jumped.

There, at the wrist she’d tried to angle away from me, under the fading shadows of my cousin’s fingers—the beat kicked, visible, once, twice, fast, betraying her the way bodies betray everyone, and she knew I’d seen it, and I watched fury and something that was not fury fight for the same square inch of her face. I was still watching the bruised skin and the small wild drum beneath it when she stepped back, unhurried, immaculate, restoring the corridor to its proper distances.

“Enjoy Chicago,” she said. “Give my regards to whoever sent you.”

For one instant I thought the corner of that wide, unsmiling mouth moved. Then she turned and walked back toward the gold light and the noise and the men who owned her on paper, spine straight, chin up, the manifest hidden somewhere against her body like contraband, and she did not look back, and I stood among strangers’ furs with my heart going like a winch under load.

Outside, the cold came off the ocean hard and clean. Pietro had the car at the curb, engine running, and he looked at my face for a long moment as I got in, the way he looks at a wall of evidence.

“Well?” he said.

“Lev knows and won’t look. Gianni confirmed the routing in front of six witnesses. We’ll have partial records within the week.” I looked out at the boardwalk, at the neon firebird burning above the door, wings spread, forever out of reach of the painted hands. “Serafina gets her rope.”

Pietro pulled into traffic. He drove two blocks before he said, in the mild tone he saves for detonations, “And the daughter.”

I watched Brighton Beach slide past the glass—the fur shops, the signs in two alphabets, the old men smoking under awnings.

“The daughter is really something. Really, really something.”

Facts, my cousin had said. Not chivalry.

I had the facts. It was everything else I was flying home with that broke the mandate—a fascination lodged under my ribs like a splinter of hot metal, and thirteen years of ice already, quietly, starting to run.

Chapter 4

Yelena

The armored town car smelled of Gianni’s cologne and my father’s disappointment, and I couldn’t have told you which was harder to breathe through.

My father sat opposite, hands folded on his knee, watching Gianni and me. My fiancé had wedged himself against my side even though the seat could have held his whole family, his thigh pressed along mine, his arm draped across the back of the seat behind my shoulders. Not around me. Behind me. A barrier, not an embrace.

Sal’s manifest lay folded against my ribs, inside the silk, warm from my skin. Every time the car took a corner I felt the paper’s edge and thought of a Sicilian’s hands sliding it under my folder in plain sight of everyone, and no one seeing it but me.

“Yelena Lvovna.”

The full formal name. I turned my face to my father and arranged it into the expression he preferred, the attentive blankness of a woman receiving instruction.

“Yes, Papa.”

“You corrected your fiancé at the table tonight. In front of the Sicilian. In front of my men.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never raised his voice; the volume never changed, only the weight. “And you allowed the Scordato to address you directly. Twice. You answered him.”

“He asked me a question.”

“Dogs bark. You do not have to bark back.” He looked out the window at the frozen dark going past, the fur shops and the shuttered awnings, and delivered the rest to the glass. “This alliance stands on one leg, dochka. That leg is the appearance of a family with no seams. When you contradict your husband, you show the Sicilians a seam. When you let one of them speak into your face, you show them where to put the knife.” His pale eyes came back to me. My eyes, thirty years older and with the warmth bred out of them. “An enemy’s attention is not a compliment. It is a survey. Do not give him ground to survey.”