Page 77

I fully wake to the sound of the door and the smell of butter and chocolate.

For a second I do not know where I am. But Dmitri is coming through the doorway with a tray that does not rattle and that is all I need to know to jog my memory.

Pain au chocolate.

A glass pitcher of fresh orange juice beaded with cold.

Hardy’s work. I would know that precision even if the man himself is not in the room.

“You are awake,” Dmitri says.

“Just,” I hazily reply.

Dmitri sets the tray across our laps and climbs in beside me. The bandage on my arm pulls when I sit up but I don’t care.

He breaks a pain au chocolate and puts half in my hand. Flakes on the sheet, but it’s no drama.

The city beyond the glass is ordinary daylight now.

No night time raid. No kitchen. No Tito.

“Yum,” I say as we begin to eat.

“The remaining Lucci men are being hunted,” Dmitri says, as if he is telling me the weather. “Systematically. My people. Maxim’s. Nikolai’s. The accords held long enough for that. Tito’s death made the rest of them visible. They will not last the week.”

“That is good news,” I say. And it is. But I’ve got a feeling that right now what Dmitri really needs to hear is going to come from my lips…

I set the pastry down. I wipe my fingers on the napkin Hardy folded into a sharp rectangle.

“I am ready to tell you,” I say. “The thing I would only say when it was over.”

Dmitri goes still. “Talk.”

“I dug,” I say. “Through contacts I should not still have. People who owe me from cities I ran from. I got into archived FBI files. Not the rumors. Not what the families repeated when they thought you could not hear. The actual unredacted records.”

Dmitri’s face does not move. I cannot tell what he is feeling. The boy who list his father in such terrible circumstances is still in there somewhere. But so is the Pakhan who put two rounds into Tito for saying the word rat.

“Your father was not an informant,” I say. “He refused. Repeatedly. They leaned on him and he would not give them a name, a route, a meeting. Two of his own generals did inform. And they let him carry it. They let the families believe the Pakhan sold his blood so they could walk away clean. He died with their lie nailed to him.”

The silence that follows is longer than the gunfight.

I watch his eyes. I watch his hands on the tray.

I wait for rage, or disbelief, or the kind of cold that means I have touched a wound he will not forgive me for opening.

Then he moves.

The tray almost goes.

Dmitri pulls me in and holds me hard. His face is in my hair. I feel him breathe once, twice, like a man coming up from a long time underwater.

“I will forever be in your debt,” Dmitri says. The words are rough. They are not a performance. “Do you understand what you have given me?”

I hold him back with my good arm. “You do not owe me,” I say. “I wanted the truth. I wanted you to have it.”

My Daddy draws back enough to look at me. Something in his face has settled. Not softer. Clearer.

“Starting now,” Dmitri says, “you are my chief intelligence general. Mackensie has carried too much that is not business. He will focus on that. He will help make our financials grow and grow. You will run what is known and what is hidden. Contacts. Files. The things that live in whispers and gardens and archived rooms. You have already been doing the work. Now it has a title and a seat.”