Page 11 of Merciless Daddy

“You always say to.”

“I do always say to. Good. Now listen.” I pulled the facility schematic up on the laptop, the layout I knew the way my father knew prison tattoos. “You’re not going to save Section C, so stop trying. Isolate it—close the air dampers between C and B, keep the cold you still have where it can work. How much space is open in B?”

Keys clattered. “Maybe sixty pallets.”

“Then move the berries first. Berries turn fastest and the supermarket contract has the penalty clause; the citrus can take four hours of bad temperature and shrug. Get every hand you have on B, and pull the forklift crew off the loading dock—nothing ships in the next two hours that matters more than this.”

“There’s two trucks inbound from the produce terminal—”

“Reroute them.” I was already in the fleet system, and there they were, two blinking dots on the Turnpike with my last name painted on their sides. “Send them to the Elizabeth facility, I’m authorizing the transfer fees now. And call the refrigeration contractor—the good one, the one we used in August, not the one Papa’s cousin recommends. Emergency call-out, tonight, my authorization.” I typed my credentials, the shareholder codes my mother had put in my name the summer I turned eighteen. “Tell them the invoice comes to me directly.”

A pause on the line. Then, carefully: “Mr. Sokolov’s going to ask why the repair wasn’t budgeted.”

“Mr. Sokolov declined the maintenance budget in April because the equipment was ‘fine,’” I said. “The equipment was not fine. That is not your fault, it is not the night crew’s fault, and no one—hear me—no one loses wages or shifts over my father’s arithmetic. If there’s blame going around, send it to me. I’ve got a wedding coming; the blame will slip off me like water off a duck’s back.”

He laughed, the shocked little laugh of a frightened man given somewhere to stand, and I heard him already moving, shouting names, dampers closing. “Yes, Miss Sokolova. Thank you, Miss Sokolova.”

“Call me when B is loaded.”

I hung up, and for a moment I sat in my mother’s chair with my heart going and my blood up, feeling—and this is the shameful, private truth of my life—happy. Genuinely happy. Give me a crisis and a phone and I am a rational woman doing useful work in a world that makes sense. It’s the quiet that ruins me. The quiet, and the fittings.

Then I saw the notification sitting in the portal’s approval queue, and the happiness evaporated.

Pending request: administrator access. Requesting party: Gianni’s lawyers, a firm name I’d seen on the contract’s letterhead, the same letterhead that couldn’t draft a notary block. Scope: full administrative control of the trucking dispatch system and the warehousing management platform. Routing schedules, manifests, customer records, everything. Effective date: contingent upon completion of the anticipated share transfer.

The anticipated share transfer. Me. I was the anticipated share transfer.

I read it twice, cold all the way through. My mother’s companies. Three hundred people. My husband-to-be wanted them.

I took the lipstick tube out of my pocket. But of course, it wasn’t really lipsteick. It was a dummy item, built around an encrypted drive the size of a fingernail. I plugged it in and I took everything — the access request, the revised proxy with its irrevocable clause, the current fleet schedule with every route and every plate—and while the progress bar filled I sat very still and listened to the house.

The floors talked. Footsteps in the eastern corridor. Heavy, unhurried, entitled—one of my father’s lieutenants, the broad one with the bald patch, who knocked on doors heavy and insistent.

The drive finished. I pulled it, capped the lipstick, slid it up my sleeve, and had the screen switched by the time the door opened—to a spreadsheet of florist invoices, peonies against ranunculus, which I had prepared weeks ago for exactly this purpose and kept fresh, like a fire extinguisher.

“Working late,” the bald man said, filling the doorway, looking around the shrine with the particular discomfort men like him have in rooms that belonged to women.

“Flowers.” I sighed at the screen, dropped my chin into my hand, the picture of a girl drowning in beauty. “Papa wants white, Gianni’s people want white and gold, and peonies are out of season, but why would anyone ask me? I’m only the bride.”

He looked at the spreadsheet. He looked at me. Something in his face relaxed into the mild contempt that has been my best disguise since I was fourteen. “Good you keep busy,” he said. “Your father wants everyone downstairs at eight. Don’t be late over flowers.”

“I would never,” I said sweetly.

He left. I listened to him all the way down the corridor, past the camera that was guarding my father’s grief and missing everything else, and I sat in my mother’s chair with three hundred jobs and a marriage contract and the anatomy of a laundering operation resting inside a lipstick tube against my wrist.

“Well, Mama,” I said to the reading glasses. “You always said I’d wear your shade eventually.”

Gianni Scordato arrived at seven-forty, unannounced.

I heard him before I saw him. That was always true of Gianni. He came through the front hall trailing cologne and Italian and two of his own men, talking with his hands about traffic on the Belt Parkway as though traffic were something that happened to him personally, an insult arranged by lesser men. My father received him in the dining room with the handshake he reserved for people he was still deciding whether to respect, which Gianni, in his months of courtship, had never once picked up on.

Then he saw me, and his whole face did the thing I’d learned to brace for, the proprietary brightening, a man spotting his coat on the rack.

“There she is.” He crossed the room. He was holding a flat velvet box. “I brought you something. No—don’t thank me yet. Stand still.”

I had not moved, and I had certainly not thanked him, but Gianni conducted both sides of every conversation. He opened the box. Inside, on white satin, sat a firebird in diamonds—wings spread, tail streaming, a brooch the size of my palm, genuinely beautiful, which somehow made it worse. Then he took it out and pinned it to my dress himself, without asking, his knuckles pressing against my collarbone while he worked the clasp, taking twice as long as the clasp required.

“There,” he said, stepping back to admire his handiwork, by which I mean me. “The zhar-ptitsa. For my ptichka.”