Page 178 of Dark King Daddy

They came in twos and threes. Orlov captains first: men who had served Mikhail for decades, their faces grim and hard. They kissed Anton’s cheek. They gripped his hand. They said things in Russian that amounted to the same thing: we are here, we are yours, the building is yours. Sokolov captains followed. Mine. They nodded at me with the formal respect accorded a Pakhan and studied Anton precise attention.

By noon the room held twenty men. The harbor light came through the tall windows behind the desk and fell across the floor in long gray rectangles. Anton stood with his hands on the desk, the broad oak surface pocked with cigarette burns, and he spoke. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He told them what had happened: the takeover, the assault on Roman, the message from Kostya. He told them the building was recovered. He told them the alliance held.

Men who had been wavering that morning began to speak with certainty. Grisha, the warehouse foreman, his arm in a sling, declared that the dock crews would return to their shifts by evening. Roman stood in the back of the room with his swollen lip and his crossed arms and said nothing, and his silence said more than any speech could have. A captain named Dima—one of the men I had suspected of wavering—asked Anton what he needed. Anton told him. Dima nodded.

I watched my brother-in-law become a Pakhan. It was happening in front of me, in real time, and I was proud of him. I thought: this is what the alliance was supposed to do. This is what our fathers built it for.

The door opened.

Nikita came through it and every detail of his arrival was wrong. He did not pause to scan the room. He did not acknowledge the captains. His face held the smooth, pleasant expression he used for managing people, but beneath it—in the set of his jaw, in the particular speed of his movement—I saw something I had not seen on my brother’s face in years.

He crossed the room. He came directly to me. He leaned close.

“Outside,” he said. “I need you outside.”

“Say it here.”

Nikita’s eyes moved to Anton. To the captains. To the room full of men who were watching us with the sudden, sharpened attention of people who understood that whatever my brother had just said, it was not good news.

“Daniil.”

“I said here.”

Nikita straightened. He stood in front of me, in front of twenty captains, in front of Anton, and he said it.

“The convoy was attacked, Pakhan. Near Teterboro. Ilya called for help from the vehicle. One guard is down—the second man, the one from Boris’s car. Boris is wounded. Ilya is alive but cut.” He paused. One beat. “Ksenia’s location is unknown.”

The room went silent.

I heard the harbor through the open loading bay doors. The water. A distant horn. These sounds were very clear. They were clearer than they should have been, as though my hearing had sharpened to compensate for something my mind could not yet process.

I took out my phone and I called her.

The line rang. Four times. Five. Six. The voicemail greeting—her voice, recorded, saying leave a message in the particular warm, slightly amused tone she used for mundane tasks—played through the speaker and I ended the call before the beep.

Anton was looking at me.

“The meeting is over,” I said.

There was no tremble in my voice—somehow I kept the terror and shame to myself.

“Send medical to the convoy location. Two men down—Ilya and the second guard. Boris is wounded. Get them to a hospital.”

Anton opened his mouth.

“Anton. The meeting is over.”

He closed it. He looked at the captains. They were already moving—chairs scraping, coats being gathered. Dima stopped at the door.

“What do we tell Voronin at two?” he asked.

He was asking about the deadline. The forty-eight hours. Viktor’s terms. The political question that had governed every decision I had made for the last two days.

“We tell him what he wants to hear.”

The words came out without thought. Without calculation. Without the strategic weighting that governed every word I spoke as Pakhan. I said them because they were true. If Viktor wanted the freight operation, he could have it. If he wanted the routes, the dispatch system, the yards, the trucks—he could have all of it. If he wanted me to step down, to leave New York, to kneel—whatever he wanted. Whatever the word was for the thing that would bring Ksenia back.

I did not wait for Dima’s response. I crossed the room. Nikita fell in beside me. Arkady was already at the door—he had heard everything, his face set in the hard, blank configuration that meant his brother was in danger and someone was going to answer for it.