Page 16 of Merciless Daddy

Lev could have had him removed. One flick of those heavy fingers and the door captains would have folded my cousin into the alley with his men and his cologne and his monologue, and no one on the boardwalk would have looked up. I watched the old man consider it. I watched him look from Gianni to me, from the man who had murdered his father to the man whose family wanted him bled for it, both of us at his table, under his roof, disarmed by his rule—and I watched curiosity win. The old lion sat back half an inch and let it happen, the way you let two dogs meet on neutral ground because you’d like to know which one to bet on.

“Cousin!” Gianni came around the table with his arms opening. “Salvatore. Sal. Nobody told me—this is a gift, an absolute gift—”

I stood. I did it slowly, and I did not open my arms, and the embrace died somewhere over the smoked fish and converted itself into Gianni gripping my shoulder instead, warmly, the way he’d probably gripped his father’s shoulder at some point in the last year of the old man’s life.

“Gianni.”

“Look at you. Chicago agrees with you, eh? Listen—” he lowered his voice into the register he used for sincerity, which was the same as his other registers but slower, “—I know things have been said. Things have happened. Family misunderstandings, old business, the whole mess with father. The accident. But we are blood, Sal. Blood. I say we leave it behind us. Tonight. Here, at this table, in front of our Russian friends. Clean slate.”

Accident.

He called the cold-blooded murder of his father an accident.

Behind me Pietro had achieved a quality of stillness I had last observed in him at his own father’s funeral. Don Arturo had believed in this man’s face once. Had loved him, defended him, and died looking at him. Serafina’s voice moved through the back of my skull: nothing that fits our necks.

“A misunderstanding,” I said.

“Exactly. Exactly. Water under the bridge—”

I couldn’t say nothing.

“Murder is an ambitious misunderstanding, cugino.” I kept my voice pleasant, conversational, the voice for discussing weather. “Most men who misunderstand a situation don’t leave a body in it.”

The room went quiet. Gianni’s smile held—just—and for one moment his eyes were the eyes I remembered from Palermo—small, quick, frightened, and cruel because of the fright. Then he laughed. He actually laughed, loud, for the benefit of the Sokolov captains, and clapped my shoulder again, and turned away from me because he had located an easier target.

“There she is,” he said. “My ptichka.”

He crossed to Yelena.

She had risen when the door opened—manners, performance, armor, all of it—and she stood beside her chair with her face arranged into flawless, pleasant nothing as my cousin took her chin, tipped it, and kissed her cheek. Then his hand slid down her arm and closed around her wrist.

I noticed the grip before I noticed anything else. Before his words, before Lev’s expression, before my own name in whatever sentence Gianni was assembling. His fingers wrapped her wrist and squeezed—not a caress, not even really a claim, but a correction, a pre-emptive one, pressure applied to a woman who hadn’t done anything yet, and her hand went white at the knuckles and the rest of her did not move at all. She had been trained not to move. Somebody had spent years teaching her that.

“You’re sitting with the men, ptichka?” Gianni said it fondly, for the room. “Papers, contracts—no, no. My fiancée has no need to concern herself with freight contracts. That’s what she’ll have a husband for.” He looked over at me, delighted with himself. “You see how it is, Sal. Three more weeks and all this paperwork goes away for her. She’ll thank me. They always thank you eventually.”

Yelena’s eyes came up.

Not to him. To me. One flick, fast, unwilling—she had caught me watching his hand, and she knew what I was looking at, and I watched her register it and hate it: not the grip, which was old news to her, but the warning. Her chin lifted a half degree. Her eyes told me, as clearly as if she’d spoken across the table, to mind my own business or lose the parts of me that made it possible.

Way I say it, though, was that everything on the fucking planet was my business.

“Careful, cugino,” I said, and my voice came out even and low, and the room turned toward it. “You handle valuable things as though you expect them to break.”

Gianni looked at me. He looked down at his own hand on her wrist as though noticing it for the first time, and then—because he was Gianni, because his whole life he has answered any doubt about his strength by doubling it—he tightened his grip. I saw it in her knuckles. I saw it in the small muscle at the corner of her jaw, which was the only part of her that admitted anything at all.

“What belongs to me,” Gianni said, smiling, “soon learns what my limits are.”

The cold thing in my chest put its full weight down. Behind me, Pietro exhaled once through his nose. On the tray at the door, our surrendered guns lay under the guard’s folded hands like a prayer nobody was allowed to finish.

“Enough.”

Lev’s voice was not loud. It didn’t need to be. It came off the head of the table like a door closing on a vault, and both of us—the murderer and the man measuring him—felt it in our spines.

“Family, or no, you are at my table, Gianni Scordato. Uninvited. You will sit, you will eat, and you will not disgrace my roof by squeezing what you have not yet paid for.” The pale eyes moved to me, flat and total. “And you, Sicilian, will remember that my daughter’s wrists are Sokolov business.”

Gianni released her. Yelena sat, smoothed her skirt, and reached for the bread with a steady hand, and only I was close enough to see the white ring his fingers had left on her skin, fading slowly, like a mark on wet sand.

I remembered it. I remember everything.