Page 65 of Merciless Daddy

“I won’t be bait.”

“No. You won’t. No one’s thinking along those lines,” Pietro said.

His voice was quiet. It made the room lean toward him.

He laid the photograph on the table. An unmarked white van stood in an alley beneath a security light. The rear doors were open. Inside were stacked crates, folded tables, and racks for linen bags.

“The wedding company,” he said. “They were meant to collect tomorrow afternoon. But the house ordered everything gone tonight. All the items that should have been used in the wedding—removed early.”

“Why?”

“Lev does not like reminders,” Sal said.

That sounded like my father sure enough.

Pietro uncapped the mailing tube and slid out a floor plan. He spread it over the dining table.

“The collection crew arrives at two,” he said. “The company uses temporary workers. We put Tonio in a jacket and add him to the crew. He enters through the service gate. I wait outside with this van.”

Tonio lifted one of the jackets. “I look excellent in white.” Then, with a shrug, “I look excellent in everything.”

“You look like a refrigerator repairman,” I said automatically.

His grin appeared. “She likes it.”

I ignored him.

My attention had fixed on the plan.

It was an old document. Fifteen years, perhaps twenty. Almost certainly out of date. The kitchen had been renovated since. The east corridor had changed after my mother died. My father had walled off the old breakfast room and turned half of it into storage.

Pietro tapped the eastern side of the house. “We need you for two things. First, the fastest route from the service entrance to the blue room.”

“And second?”

“Kiryl.”

My hand tightened on the back of a chair.

“Obivously, he will not open a guarded door for a strange man,” Pietro continued. “Especially one carrying a gun and claiming you sent him.”

“No,” I said. “He won’t.”

Tonio leaned over the plan. He smelled faintly of cold air, coffee, and whatever he had cooked hours earlier.

“We get to the room,” he said. “You speak to him through the earpiece. I put him in the other jacket. We walk out with the collection crew.”

“You think it will be that simple?”

“No,” Sal said. “Something will fuck up. But so long as we’re expecting it, we can adapt.”

The bluntness made me look at him.

He stood at the end of the table with both hands resting on the chair in front of him. He was not trying to soften the danger for me. I respected that.

“It is the cleanest opportunity,” he said. “That does not make it safe—not exactly. If you refuse, we attempt another method.”

“Which method?”