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I need to call my father.
Sunday is the only day we’re allowed to call home. We have to use the banks of phones on the ground floor of the Keep, which offers little privacy.
I wait until lunch hour, when I know there will be fewer students around.
He picks up at once, as if he was waiting.
“There you are,” he says. “Having too much fun to remember your dad?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Something like that.”
“So . . . how has it been?”
I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but I think I hear an edge of nerves in his question. He’s wary of what I might say but doesn’t want me to know it, in case I’m still blissfully ignorant.
“It’s been eye-opening,” I say flatly.
A long pause on the other end of the line.
“What does that mean?” my father says.
“What do you think it means, Dad?”
Another silence.
“I have no idea,” he says.
That pisses me off.
“You had no idea that half the people here seem to hate you, and me by extension?”
My father scoffs. “Come on,” he says. “You think Kingmakers is a congeniality contest?”
“That’s the real reason you didn’t want me to come here, isn’t it? You didn’t want me to know that we’re pariahs.”
“Bullshit,” he snorts. “You’re no pampered mafia princess, thinking her daddy owns a chain of hotels. You know how the sausage is made, my girl.”
Do I?
I’m not so certain anymore.
“If anyone there has shit to say about me, it’s because I don’t rub the right elbows or kiss the right rings,” he continues. “The Malina are independent—my men are loyal to me, and me alone. I don’t bend to some Don like the Italians, or share my money like some BratvaPakhan. The Malina are the lone wolves of the mafia world. And that’s how I like it.”
I sigh.
Being a lone wolf is . . . lonely.
“They say things about you,” I tell him. “Things that upset me.”
“What things?” he growls.
My stomach clenches. I don’t want to tell him.
My father is a strange mix of brashness and oversensitivity. He’s as blunt as I am in telling other people how it is, but when it comes to himself, he’s quick to take offense, and he’ll hold a grudge till the end of time.
But I’ve never been able to hide what I feel.
“They say you’re duplicitous,” I tell him. “Even the other Ukrainians say it. The Odessa Mafia?—”
