Page 9 of Merciless Daddy

Silence. My father took the folder back. He read. His face did nothing, which is what his face does instead of everything.

“You’re certain?”

“Mama made me read every document she ever signed. You know that. You approved of it.” I smoothed the silk over my caged ribs and delivered the killing stroke with my sweetest voice. “I’d hate for my husband’s lawyers to look careless. In front of you, of all people.”

A long pause. Somewhere in the house, the nine o’clock guards settled into their new positions, and the new camera watched my empty corridor, and the keypad kept its six digits to itself.

“It will be corrected,” my father said. “You’ll sign tomorrow.”

“Of course, Papa,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

One more day. You’d be astonished what I can do with a day.

It took two maids and eleven minutes to get me out of the dress.

Then I went up the back stairs—pausing on the landing to check the new camera’s angle, which covered the corridor but not the last three feet before the stairwell door, sloppy, thank you, whoever installed that—and along the hall to the room at the northeast corner of the house that my father had not entered in eleven years. The nursery. Officially it was storage now. Unofficially it was the last unoccupied territory of the Sokolov empire, and its sitting government was a nineteen-year-old with a chemistry textbook he was holding like a shield.

“I’m studying,” Kiryl announced, before I’d closed the door.

“You’re on the same page you were on Tuesday.”

“It’s a very rich page.”

He was folded into the armchair by the cold radiator, all elbows and dark honey hair—our mother’s hair; mine too—with our father’s pale eyes gone soft in his face. On the windowsill beside him sat a mug. Steam came off it. Floating on top was a raft of miniature marshmallows so dense a small animal could have crossed to the other rim without getting wet.

I stopped. I looked at the mug. I looked at him. He offered me the mug.

“No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Kiryusha. I am twenty-six years old.”

“You are twenty-six years old and you had a dress fitting with Papa in the room,” he said, “which is like saying you got mauled by something at the zoo. Sit down and drink your medicine.”

“I could have you killed. I know people.”

“You are people,” he agreed cheerfully, and held it out.

I took the mug. Of course I took the mug. I folded myself into the window seat, pulled my knees up under my chin like a girl instead of a bride, and wrapped both hands around the warm ceramic, and something in my chest that had been laced as tight as the bodice let go a quarter inch. He’d made it the disgraceful way. Half milk, half sugar, cocoa apparently applied with a snow shovel. The way I used to demand it when I was eight and Mama was alive.

“It’s revolting,” I said, drinking it.

“You’re welcome.”

For a minute neither of us said anything. The nursery did the talking—the water stain on the ceiling shaped like Italy, which we’d decided years ago was an omen and then argued about of what; the wallpaper firebirds faded to ghosts; the shelf where his baby books still leaned against my old ones, because after Mama died nobody had the authority to separate them and I certainly wasn’t going to grant it. I was fifteen when I started signing his permission slips. Sixteen when I learned to forge our father’s signature for parent-teacher conferences, because Lev Sokolov did not attend conferences and the teachers were beginning to ask questions in that tone. Kiryl thinks he was raised by me. The truth is worse and better: we raised each other, in this room, on contraband sugar and lies to the ground floor.

“So,” he said, too casually, which is the only way he can say anything. “The contract.”

“You’ve been listening at doors again.”

“No! Just standing near them. It’s not my fault they’re so thin. What do you want me to do? Turn my ears off?” He put the textbook down, which meant we were serious now. “Lena. The wedding is in three weeks.”

“I’m aware. I’m being upholstered for it.”

“Then go.” He leaned forward, and his voice dropped, and there it was—the thing he’d been rehearsing, probably into the mirror, probably for days. “Now. Before it. You have friends in the city, you have Mama’s accounts, you speak four languages, you could be anywhere by Sunday. Go and don’t tell me where, so I can’t—” his throat worked “—so nobody can get it out of me.”

He’d thought about that part. That was the unbearable bit. My gentle brother, who apologized to furniture when he bumped it, had sat in this room and thought through his own interrogation and decided he’d fail it.