Page 18 of Dark King Daddy

Sergei’s face changed. The toughness, the lucidity, the careful recitation of facts — all of it gave way. His mouth trembled. He pressed his lips together hard enough to turn them white.

“I tried to — when they showed me the photograph — I couldn’t call her. I couldn’t — “

“I know,” I said. I stood, moved my chair beside the bed.

I took his phone from the table beside the bed and put it in his hand.

“Call her,” I said. “Tell her you’re alive. Tell her you’re safe. You don’t have to tell her anything else.”

He dialed. The phone rang once. Half of a second ring.

“Sasha.” His voice broke on the first syllable. He pressed the phone against his ear and bent forward over his knees and the sound he made was not a word. It was the sound of a man who had been holding himself together for three days finally allowing someone else to hold the weight.

I sat beside him and said nothing. I listened to him tell his wife he was alive, he was safe, he loved her, he was sorry, he was sorry, he was sorry. I listened to the sound of her crying on the other end of the line — loud, uncontrolled, the crying of a woman who had spent three days not knowing.

I stayed until his voice steadied. Until the shaking in his hands slowed enough that he could hold the phone without it slipping. Until he said “I love you” one more time and hung up and sat back and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“Thank you,” he said. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the phone in his hand.

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“Thank you,” he said again.

I stood. I squeezed his shoulder once — briefly, firmly — and left the room. Anton followed, and my father after.

“Ksenia, Anton, my office. Let’s talk.”

My father’s office faced the river.

It occupied the northeast corner of the second floor, and from his desk he could see the East River, the span of the Manhattan Bridge, and the stretch of Brooklyn waterfront that had been Orlov territory for longer than I had been alive. He had chosen that view deliberately. Mikhail Orlov did not decorate by accident. Every object in the room — the nautical chart framed behind his desk, the photograph of his own father standing on the Red Hook docks in 1974, the model of a container ship on the bookshelf — said something about who he was and what he intended to remain.

The desk was mahogany. Old, heavy, scarred at the corners where decades of use had worn through the polish. He settled behind it with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of tea cooling at his elbow. He had been here since before Sergei arrived. I could see it in the lines around his eyes, the particular stillness of a man who had been angry for hours and had converted that anger into the kind of patience that was more dangerous than the anger itself.

Anton stood at the window, looking out at the water.

I sat in the chair across from his desk. The room smelled of tea and tobacco.

“Tomorrow evening,” Mikhail said. “Seven o’clock. Volna. Lev and I will have dinner together, publicly, with both families present. After dinner, Lev and I will meet privately to discuss compromised personnel and the Voronin operation.”

He paused. His fingers rested on the desk, flat, still.

“I need you there. Both of you.”

“The alliance needs to appear intact,” I said.

“The alliance needs to be intact.”

He looked at me. My father had dark eyes — the same eyes Anton and I had inherited, though in Anton they had hardened earlier and in me they had learned to soften on command. In Mikhail they were simply watchful. He missed nothing, and he allowed people to believe he missed less than he did, which was its own form of strategy.

“If I don’t attend,” I said, “it looks like the Orlovs are hiding.”

“If you don’t attend, it looks like the Orlovs are fractured. A father who has just been targeted by an enemy organization, whose employee was abducted and nearly killed, who cannot produce his daughter at a public dinner with his closest ally — that is a family in crisis. That is a family the Voronins can pressure.”

“And if I attend — “

“If you attend, the Orlovs are strong. Composed. The Pakhan’s son and daughter stand beside the Pakhan. The alliance is visible. The Voronins see two families operating as one.”

I understood. I had understood before he said it. The request was not a request. It was a deployment, and I was being deployed, and I would go because that was what I did.