Page 8 of Merciless Daddy

The dress was built to be admired and impossible to run in, which told you everything you needed to know about my father’s taste in daughters.

I stood barefoot on a platform draped in velvet in the middle of what used to be a drawing room, arms out like a saint or a scarecrow, while Nina Aronova pinned white silk against my ribs with hands that shook with exertion and age. Nina had sewn everything I’d ever worn to everything that ever mattered. My first communion dress. The navy suit for my mother’s funeral. Now this. If you laid her work end to end you’d have a fairly complete map of my captivity, in couture.

“Breathe out, Yelenochka,” she whispered around a mouthful of pins.

“If I breathe out any further I’ll be legally dead.”

She almost smiled. That was our arrangement. I made jokes, she almost smiled, and neither of us looked at the man by the windows.

My father was on his second call of the fitting, pacing the length of the terrace doors with his back to me. Lev Sokolov did not attend his daughter’s bridal fittings out of sentiment. He attended them to inspect his cargo.

“The waist,” I said, when he ended the call. “It could come out half an inch. I’d like to be able to sit.”

He did not look up from his phone. “No.”

“The neckline, then. A finger higher. It’s a wedding, not an auction.”

“The neckline stays.” He scrolled. “Nina. Tighter through the bodice.”

Nina’s eyes flicked to me. I gave her the tiny nod that meant do it, it’s fine, we’ve survived worse fabric, and she gathered another pinch of silk at my spine and pinned it down. The dress closed around my ribs like a polite fist. I have worn my father’s ownership in a lot of materials over the years—sable, diamonds, one memorable summer of Cartier—and I can report that silk is the most honest of them. It doesn’t even pretend to keep you warm.

“You’ll wear the pearls,” he said. “Your mother’s.”

“Mama hated those pearls.”

“Yes. And she wore them beautifully.”

I let it go. You learn, in this house, to spend your defiance where it buys something.

Then Nina’s hand slipped.

It was nothing. A pin, a half-second, a bright little bite of metal under my left arm—I barely felt it. But I heard her breath stop, and I saw my father’s head come up from his phone with the slow, terrible attention he saves for other people’s mistakes, and the room got very quiet in the way rooms do just before he speaks.

“I moved,” I said, before he could. “Sorry. My fault entirely. I was trying to see the back in the mirror.” I turned my head and gave him the smile I’d been performing since I was six, the one with nothing behind it but teeth and good breeding. “Vanity, Papa. You always said it would be the death of me.”

His pale eyes held mine. I look in the mirror every morning and my jailer looks back, wearing lipstick. For a long second I couldn’t tell which way it would go. Then he said, “Stand still, Yelena Lvovna,” in the tone of a man closing a ledger, and went back to his phone.

Nina’s fingers found my wrist behind the fall of the skirt and squeezed once. I didn’t look at her. That’s the arithmetic of this house: her mistake was worth a scene, mine was worth a sentence, so I bought hers and paid the difference. I’ve been doing that math since I was small. I’m very good at it. Ask my brothers.

While I stood there being contrite, I did the other thing I’m very good at, which is inventory.

The terrace doors had grown a keypad. New—the adhesive around the mounting plate hadn’t fully cured; there was a shine to it, a smell of solvent under the roses somebody had jammed into every vase for wedding ambiance. Those doors used to open with a latch and a shoulder. Now they wanted six digits. In the eastern corridor, visible through the double doors when Nina turned me, a camera had sprouted from the crown molding where no camera had been on Tuesday, angled to cover the stretch between the study and the back stairs. My stretch. My stairs. And at nine o’clock exactly—I heard the hall clock, I felt the shift—two guards I didn’t recognize traded places at the front of the house with two others I didn’t recognize, which meant my father had brought in new men, which meant he didn’t fully trust the old ones, which meant something had spooked him.

Some women collect handbags. I collect exits. Mine kept being repossessed, but the habit survived.

Nina finished, stepped back, and looked at me in the mirror with an expression she smothered immediately, because it had grief in it, and grief was not on the approved list. “She’s a vision,” she said instead, to my father.

“She’s adequate,” he said, which from Lev Sokolov was a sonnet. He crossed the room to me at last, and I stood there in his white silk while he looked me over the way he looked over anything before shipment. Then he held out a leather folder. “The revised agreement. You will sign it before dinner. Gianni’s lawyers are waiting.”

“Of course, Papa.”

I took it. I read it standing on the platform, half-pinned, because being underestimated is the only inheritance I actually control and I have learned to spend it wisely. Everyone in that room probably believed I was skimming for the parts about jewelry.

The proxy was on page eleven. Upon solemnization of the marriage, full and irrevocable power of attorney over all shares and voting rights held by the bride. My mother’s companies. The cold storage, the trucks—the two clean things she’d left me, the only property in my name on this whole spinning earth—signed over to Gianni Scordato in perpetuity, with irrevocable sitting in the sentence like a stone in bread.

I felt my heartbeat in the pinpricks. I kept my face pleasant. Then I turned to page fourteen, and God, or my mother, or whichever underworked saint handles Brooklyn, handed me a gift.

“Papa.” I frowned at the page, the small studious frown that men in this family find endearing right up until it costs them money. “The notary block. It’s drafted for New Jersey. ‘State of New Jersey, County of Bergen’—but the signing venue is here, and the instrument recites New York law. If I sign this tonight, the acknowledgment is defective. Any registrar could void the proxy later. Gianni’s own counsel could void it, if it ever suited him to.”