Page 12 of Merciless Daddy

The firebird, for his little bird. The mythical creature whose feathers burn the hands of every man who grabs at it—pinned dead in diamonds to my chest by a man who had never read past the title of anything. I could have laughed.

“It’s exquisite,” I said. “You have wonderful taste, Gianni.”

“You’re so right.” He turned to my father, gesturing at me like a man presenting a solved problem. “You see how she is? Some women, you give them diamonds, still they sulk about the wedding, the arrangements, this and that. Not her. You know why, Lev?” He didn’t wait. “Because little birds are happiest when someone else decides where the cage should stand. It takes the worry out of their heads.”

My father said nothing, which Gianni took for agreement.

“You’re too clever for me,” I said, with the small, defeated smile I keep for exactly this purpose, and watched him inflate. It worked every time. The trick with Gianni was that flattery didn’t even need to be plausible. Only audible.

We sat. The long table, the white cloth, the silver my mother had chosen—including the coffee service on the sideboard behind Gianni’s chair, a tall polished pot with a belly like a funhouse mirror.

Gianni’s phone buzzed against the tablecloth before the soup. He checked it at the table, because of course he did, holding it low against the cloth in the manner of a man being discreet. In the belly of my mother’s coffee pot, his screen floated, small and warped and reversed—and his thumb moved across the keypad in six unhurried taps. I watched the reflection the way I’d watched it three dinners running, confirming. Right column, top. Left column, middle. The pattern mirrored, flipped it in my head, matched it to the grid. Six digits. His own birthday, day and month and year, because Gianni Scordato was the only date in Gianni Scordato’s calendar.

Genuinely, it was almost disappointing. You want your captors to make you work a little.

“So.” He put the phone away and pointed his spoon at me. “The proxy. Your father tells me there’s some delay. Some—what. Some clause you didn’t like?” His voice went up at the end, and his men by the wall got very interested in the wallpaper, because Gianni getting louder was a barometric event everyone in his orbit had learned to read.

“Not a clause,” I said. “A defect.”

“A defect.” He smiled around the table, inviting everyone to enjoy this with him. “She’s a lawyer now. My bride the avvocato.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare.” I lowered my eyes to exactly the depth that reads as modesty. “It’s only—the notarization block was drafted for the wrong state, and I thought—well. If I signed it as written, and the proxy were ever challenged, a court could void it. Your control of the shares could be undone by any clerk with a grudge.” I lifted my eyes and delivered it straight to his vanity, which was the largest target in the room and possibly the state. “And I could not sit there and watch your lawyers make you look careless. In front of my father. In front of everyone. Not you, Gianni. I won’t allow anyone to make you look small—especially not your own counsel.”

I watched the sentence go into him and find nothing in its path. His face traveled from irritation, through confusion, and arrived at pleasure, and he sat back and pointed his spoon at my father this time.

“You see? She protects me already.” He shook his head at the miracle of his own good fortune. “I’ll have those idiots redraft it tonight. Careless—she’s right, it’s careless. You pay a firm like that and they can’t get the state right.” He was reconducting the whole thing now, arranging history so the objection had been his. I passed him the bread and let him keep it.

The soup came. Gianni, warmed by wine and his own narration, leaned toward my father and lowered his voice to the volume he believed was confidential, which carried to the kitchen.

“Once it’s signed—Lev, I tell you, everything changes. The fleet under my authority, the warehouses, the licenses. Real American companies. Clean since before we were born.” He tapped the tablecloth. “No more squeezing everything through Northbridge and those rotting Valenti shells with half of Washington sniffing at them. We move it through the daughter’s trucks, and nobody looks twice, because there’s nothing to look at. Thirty years of nothing to look at.”

The daughter’s trucks. I sat six feet away, wearing his diamonds, being discussed in the third person, while he confessed a federal indictment over the soup course. My father made a low sound and offered one of his proverbs—measure seven times, cut once—which Gianni took as applause. I memorized every word with my eyes on my spoon. My whole life, men have said things in front of me that they would kill each other for writing down.

Then the door opened, and Kiryl came in—summoned for dinner, hair combed flat with water, wearing the careful blankness he wore downstairs—and Gianni’s face lit with a new idea, and everything in me went to glass.

“Ah! The scholar.” Gianni spread his arms. “Kiryl. Sit, sit. I’ve been thinking about you.” He waited until my brother had sat, until the boy’s hands were folded in his lap, until the whole table was watching. “After the wedding, you’ll come to Sicily. A few months. Maybe longer.” He smiled with all his teeth. “A young man needs proper instruction, and your father agrees—the books are fine, but a Sokolov should learn how the world actually works. I’ll teach you myself. The family business. My personal guest. We’ll take very good care of you.”

He held my eyes while he said the last part. Not Kiryl’s. Mine.

There it was, laid on the table with the bread: sign, obey, smile, or your brother comes to Sicily as my personal guest, and you will spend every day of your marriage wondering how he is. My father ate his soup. Kiryl said, “Thank you, that’s—very generous,” in a voice I’d taught him myself, and did not look at me, because I’d taught him that too.

“How wonderful,” I said. My voice came out warm and bright and perfect.

Under the table, I pressed my thumbnail into my palm until it bit, until I felt the little crescent open in the skin—a private, stinging arithmetic, one small pain I chose myself, to hold down all the ones I hadn’t.

Little birds, ptichka. Ask any man who’s grabbed a firebird what happened to his hands.

The house went to sleep in a particular order, like a body shutting down—kitchen first, then the halls, then the men, and last of all my father’s office light, which went out at ten past midnight the way it had gone out at ten past midnight my entire life. I gave it twenty minutes more. Then I went up the back stairs in socked feet, past the blind three feet the new camera couldn’t see, and let myself into the nursery, and turned the little brass key in the lock behind me.

A locked door in this house meant nothing, of course. Every lock in this house answered to my father. But the click of it was a ritual, and rituals are what you have when you don’t have doors.

The loose floorboard lived under the window seat, third plank from the wall, and it had been loose since before I was born—some carpenter’s small failure that had become, over eleven years, the most valuable square foot of real estate in the Sokolov empire. I lifted it out. Underneath, wrapped in one of Mama’s silk scarves, lay a coloring book and a tin of pencils.

The book was called The Tale of the Firebird, printed in Leningrad before there stopped being a Leningrad, its cover soft as cloth from handling. My mother bought it the year I turned seven. On the bad nights—and in a pakhan’s house there is a generous supply of bad nights—she would take it out and we would lie on our stomachs on this floor and color the firebird’s feathers, one each, taking turns, and she would say the same thing every time: Slowly, Lenochka. The bird doesn’t fly if you rush her. When she died, I was fifteen, and I took the book before my father could seal it into the shrine with everything else of hers, and it has lived under this floorboard ever since. It is the only thing I have ever successfully stolen from Lev Sokolov. So far.

I did what I always did. I pulled the old blanket off the shelf—the scratchy one, the ugly one—wrapped it around my shoulders, and folded myself cross-legged onto the floor with the book open in the lamplight. Kiryl’s mug still sat on the windowsill where I’d left it. The chocolate at the bottom had gone cold and dense as pudding, the pink marshmallows dissolved to pale ghosts, and I drank it anyway, because my brother had made it for me, and because cold disgusting chocolate made by someone who loves you beats anything served at that dinner table tonight.

And then I colored.