Page 14 of Dark King Daddy

“You’ll eat now.”

I took a bagel. She watched me take a bite. Then she looked up at the hole in the ceiling, the shattered plaster, the exposed joists and the broken pipe still dripping.

She raised her coffee cup in a mock toast and said nothing.

I ate the bagel, put the wrapping in my pocket, and went to find Luis.

By eleven, the building inspector was in the west wing.

His name was Decker. Fiftyish, methodical, the kind of man who brought his own flashlight and a tape measure he’d probably had since the Reagan administration. He had walked into Harbor House expecting a disaster and found a partially completed restoration with excellent original woodwork, compliant fire exits, and a gallery ceiling that had recently collapsed.

I showed him the good stuff first. The restored windows. The repointed brick. The new electrical runs, properly permitted, properly inspected at rough-in. I let Luis walk him through the fire exit modifications, because Luis had done the work and could explain it better than I could, and because Decker respected contractors who knew their own buildings.

Luis explained how the flood had been contained. He described shutting the main valve, isolating the east wing electrical, and moving salvaged materials. He did not mention that every one of those decisions had been mine, made in the first thirty seconds, because I had told him not to. I had told him in the site office while we waited for Decker to arrive, standing in plaster dust with water still dripping through the floor.

Decker signed off on the west wing. The east wing would require a separate inspection once the ceiling was repaired and the pipe replaced, but the project’s funding deadline — the reason I had fought for today’s visit — survived. The grant required proof of progress by the end of the month. The west wing was progress. The east wing was a setback, but setbacks were expected in a building a hundred and thirty-seven years old.

Decker left at eleven-fifteen. I walked him to the door, shook his hand, and thanked him for his flexibility. He told me the west wing work was some of the best restoration he’d seen in Red Hook. I said Luis would be pleased to hear that, and I meant it.

Zoe was waiting in the site office. She had commandeered the only chair that wasn’t covered in drawings and sat with her legs folded under her, eating the second half of the bagel she’d forced on me earlier. The damaged drawings were spread across the folding table — elevation studies for the east wing gallery, now spotted with water and smeared where the ink had run.

“Sit,” she said.

“I need to call the — “

“Sit.”

I sat. She pushed the other half of her bagel toward me. I ate it without protest, because arguing with Zoe about food was a losing proposition and I had already spent my morning arguing with water.

“Drawings are salvageable,” she said, holding up one of the elevation studies. The ink had bled at the edges but the measurements were legible. “I can retrace these this afternoon. The acoustical panel specs are fine — they were in the tube.”

“Good.”

“The ceiling is not fine.”

“No.”

“The pipe is definitely not fine.”

“Also no.”

My phone rang at eleven-twenty. It was my brother, Anton.

I answered. “I’m at Harbor House, what — “

“Ksenia.” His voice was tight. Controlled, but tight. Anton was precise when he was calm and terse when he was angry, and right now he was both. “Sergei Petrov has been found.”

I sat forward. Sergei Petrov. Warehouse supervisor at Orlov Marine. I knew him — quiet, reliable, built like a man who moved cargo for a living. He had been missing for three days. His wife had called Anton twice a day since Monday. The Orlov organization —my father’s organization, my organization — had searched the waterfront, the warehouses, the bars Sergei sometimes drank at after shifts. Nothing.

“Where?”

“In a garage. Newark. Daniil got him out before it exploded.”

“They?”

A pause. One second. Long enough for me to understand that whatever came next mattered.

“The Sokolovs.”