Page 32 of Merciless Daddy

“Of course I’m fucking bleeding.”

“Good,” she said.

We came into the Astor Street building through the garage at four in the morning.

The elevator went up. I put my card against the reader for the top floor because there was no other way to make it go, and she noticed it.

The penthouse was Marco’s, technically—leased through the shell, furnished by somebody’s decorator, four bedrooms, a wall of glass, the whole cold lake laid out black behind it. Beautiful. Immaculate. Nobody’s home.

She stopped four feet inside and stood there in my coat with the ruined silk under it, looking at a room she had never seen before.

Behind us the elevator doors closed. And then the lock cycled—that soft mechanical thunk the fire panel makes when the car goes back down and the floor seals, a noise I have heard ten thousand times and have never once thought about.

She heard it.

“There’s a bolt,” she said.

“It’s a fire lock. It—”

“It locks.”

“Yes.”

“Right.” Her voice came out bright and terribly pleasant. “So. Let’s be accurate about tonight, because I want it on the record before I’m too tired to say it properly. You didn’t take me out of a cage, Scordato. You moved me to a fresh one. I told my brother this would happen— told him three days ago, sitting on a floor, that if I ran to your family I’d be trading my father’s cage for one with better manners, and he wanted so badly to believe there was a good one, and I said no, Kiryusha, there is never a good one, there is only ever a nicer—” She stopped.

She had run out of air.

I watched it happen. The sentence went, and then the breath went with it, and she pulled and got almost nothing, and pulled again, faster, and her hand came up to the base of her throat where somebody else’s diamonds had been eight hours earlier.

“Yelena.”

“I’m—” Another pull. Nothing. “I’m fine.”

She was not fine. Her lips had gone the color of the tablecloths in her father’s restaurant.

I turned my head. “Out.”

The man who’d carried the bags up went. The one on the stair went. I heard the service door, and then the floor was empty except for the two of us and the lake behind the glass.

And Olimpo.

He was here with us. I thought she might find some comfort in him.

He got up. He came into the room at his usual pace, which is the pace of a small bear who has not yet decided whether you are worth the trouble—

—and then he saw her, and he slowed.

Olimpo does not slow for anyone. He came the last six feet at a crawl with his big rough head low and his eyebrows working, and he stopped a yard short of her and stood there, patient, saying nothing, the way he stands next to men who have just been given bad news.

She looked at him, smiled.

Then, in a moment of madness or inspiration—maybe both, I got down on the floor.

Not near her. Eight or nine feet, my back against the front of the sofa, one knee up, hands where she could see them.

“I’m going to give you some choices,” I said. “Small ones. You don’t have to talk. Nod or shake your head, that’s all.”

She stared at me. Her chest was going like something trapped.