Page 16 of Dark King Daddy

I stopped at the door.

“Be careful,” she said. “Not with the Voronins. With him.”

“There’s nothing to be careful about. He doesn’t see me.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

I didn’t answer. I left Harbor House, walked to the corner where my car was parked, and drove toward Red Hook’s waterfront. The morning’s competence settled back over me like a coat I knew how to wear. The pipe, the ceiling, the inspector, the funding deadline — all of it had been manageable. Solvable. Problems with clear actions and measurable outcomes.

Daniil Sokolov was not a problem with a clear action.

I drove toward Beard Street and did not think about him. I thought about Sergei Petrov, and his wife, and what it meant that the Voronins had taken an Orlov man and left him beside a bomb with a Sokolov union card in his pocket.

I thought about that all the way to the warehouse, and it was almost enough to thoughts of frustratingly handsome bratva men out of my mind.

Orlov Marine & Storage sat at the end of Beard Street, its brick facade darkened by a century of waterfront weather. The building had been a working warehouse since before my family owned it, and it still looked like one from the outside — loading bays, roll-up doors, the faded sign painted directly onto brick that read ORLOV MARINE in letters that had been refreshed once in the nineties and not since. The legitimate import operation occupied the ground floor. The upper floors belonged to the family.

I parked in the private lot behind the building and entered through the service entrance. The ground floor was active — forklifts moving pallets, dock workers on break, the smell of salt water and diesel and cardboard. Nobody stopped me. They knew my car.

The private medical room was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and old carpet. I had been in it twice before — once when a dock worker had crushed his hand between two containers, once when Anton had come home with a knife wound he described as a “disagreement.” The room was small, clean, and deliberately anonymous. White walls. A medical bed. Cabinets stocked with supplies that no legitimate warehouse would need.

Sergei Petrov sat on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor and his hands gripping the mattress on either side of his legs. He wore a clean shirt that was too large for him — one of Anton’s, probably — and his face was a landscape of damage. Both eyes swollen, the left nearly shut. The bridge of his nose had been reset and taped. His jaw was bruised in a pattern that suggested methodical, repeated impact. Stitches closed a laceration above his right eyebrow.

My father stood near the window with his arms folded, watching carefully. Anton leaned against the wall beside him. Roman Belov, one of Father’s senior men, stood by the door. The doctor was checking the stitches on Sergei’s eyebrow with the careful attention of a man who understood that his patient’s value to the organization was considerably higher than his rank.

Sergei saw me come in. He tried to stand.

“Stay,” I said. “Please.”

He sat back down. I pulled a chair from the corner and placed it across from him, close enough to talk but not close enough to crowd. I sat.

“Sergei,” I said. “I’m going to ask you some questions. If you need to stop, tell me.”

He nodded. The movement made him wince — his neck was stiff, the muscles along his spine probably seized from hours of being bound in one position.

“Get me up to speed. Tell me what happened from the beginning.” Of course, I held official power in my father’s organization. But I held a fuck ton of unofficial power. That’s what happens when you’re smart and well-loved.

Sergei filled me in. His voice was hoarse, broken-nosed, the words arriving in fragments that he assembled with visible effort. He had been leaving Orlov Marine on Monday evening, walking to his car in the lot, when two men had approached him. They had been calm. They had shown him a photograph of his wife, taken that morning outside the grocery store where she worked.

“They said get in the van,” Sergei said. “I got in the van.”

They drove him to a garage in Newark. He didn’t know the address. He had been blindfolded for part of the drive, but he had counted turns and estimated distance. Fifteen to twenty minutes from wherever they started, which he believed was near the port.

At the garage, they had beaten him. Not quickly, not in anger. With patience. They had asked him questions between the blows, always the same questions.

“They wanted Father’s schedule,” I said.

“Mikhail Mikhailovich’s movements. When he was at the warehouse. When he was home. Which car. Which routes. They asked about the security rotation on the upper floors. They asked about the Tuesday meetings.”

Tuesday meetings. The weekly council sessions where Mikhail and his senior men discussed bratva business. If the Voronins knew about Tuesday meetings, they had someone inside the organization. Not just a dock worker. Someone with access to the schedule.

“What else did they say?” I asked.

Sergei’s swollen eyes shifted. He looked down at his hands, then back at me.

“They said Lev Sokolov authorized the interrogation. The kidnapping. They said it over and over. Three times, four times. ‘Lev Sokolov knows. Lev Sokolov authorized this. We have to do what Lev asked us to.’ They wanted me to believe it. They wanted me to — to say it. To anyone who found me.”

“Did you believe them?”