Page 23 of Merciless Daddy

“What’s that?” Kiryl asked.

“A gift from the Sicilian.” I unfolded it on the floor between us and smoothed the crease flat. “He left it under my folder at dinner. Made it look like carelessness. It wasn’t carelessness—that man has never dropped anything in his life.” I tapped the header. “Northbridge Freight. A reservation against our cold chain. Forty refrigerated slots a month, Newark and Elizabeth, standing allocation, effective the first.”

Kiryl leaned over the page. People forgot, because he was gentle, that he was also clever. I never forgot. I was counting on it.

“But the shares don’t transfer until the wedding,” he said slowly. “Nobody outside the family can book against the network until—” He looked up. “Someone’s selling capacity they don’t own yet.”

“Gianni is selling capacity he doesn’t own yet. Through a dead man’s company. That’s what the accountant flew across the country to prove, and Papa sat there and let him prove it, because Papa already knew.” I pulled the lipstick tube out of the pajama pocket where it had lived since dinner, uncapped it, and held out my hand. “Laptop.”

He fetched his school laptop from the dressing room route, and we sat shoulder to shoulder on the nursery floor and I plugged the drive in and opened the fleet schedule.

“Read me the Northbridge dates,” I said. “First column.”

He read. I scrolled. I laid the reservation schedule against my own dispatch grid week by week, looking for the collision, and instead I found the door.

I stopped scrolling.

“What?“ Kiryl said. “What is it?”

“Tuesday.” I turned the screen toward him. “Refrigerated unit out of Newark, oh-six-hundred, long haul to Chicago. Regular run—produce for the supermarket account, it goes every week.” My finger moved down the line to the driver assignment, and something in my chest did a thing I hadn’t let it do in two years. “Look at the driver.”

He read the name. “Vasily Chernenko.” He looked at me blankly. He’d been eight. He wouldn’t remember.

“He drove for Mama,” I said. “Before the fleet was a fleet — when it was six trucks and a rented lot, he was the first driver she ever hired. He taught me the dispatch system when I was seventeen because Mama told him to and because he thought it was funny, the boss’s daughter learning load orders.” I could see him if I closed my eyes—the tea he drank from a jar, the photographs of his granddaughters taped to the visor. “When Mama died, Papa wanted to cut the old drivers’ routes. I stopped it. Quietly, through the paperwork. Vasily knows exactly who signs his checks and exactly who kept him on them.” I looked at my brother. “He is the one man in that entire operation who would drive off the map for me and never once ask why.”

Kiryl was very still. The laptop’s glow made him look younger, which I would not have thought possible.

“Tuesday,” he said carefully. “You want us in that truck.”

“I want us in that cab.” My hands were steady now. This was the version of me that didn’t shake—give me a crisis and a plan and I am a rational woman doing useful work. “And it’s better than that. The Section C compressor repair completes Tuesday. It’s already scheduled—I authorized it myself, tonight, before dinner. It’s in the system with my name on it. So on Monday I inform my father that I’m inspecting the completed repair Tuesday morning, because a four-hundred-thousand-dollar contract sits in that section and I have inspected every major repair for six years. It isn’t a request that needs granting. It’s what I do. It’s why he lets me exist.” I pulled up the facility’s visitor protocols. “And I list you as accompanying. Trainee. Observer. Gianni himself handed me the excuse at dinner—a Sokolov should learn how the world actually works. Fine. You’re learning cold storage. Papa will approve it because it makes you useful and me occupied, his two favorite conditions.”

“And then?”

“And then the inspection runs long, and Vasily’s truck loads at the dock, and two extra bodies ride out the gate in a cab nobody searches, because nobody searches outbound produce leaving its own facility.” I traced the route on the screen. “He drops us at a private bus depot in Pennsylvania—there’s one off the interstate, cash tickets, no cameras worth the name, the drivers there have been paid not to be curious since before we were born. The truck continues to Chicago on schedule. Vasily’s log shows nothing. By the time the house sits down to dinner Tuesday and notices the quiet, we are four hundred miles into a country with a great many buses in it.” I had money in three places my father had never found because my mother had built the places before she built me. “It works, Kiryusha. It’s risky, but it works.”

He stared at the screen for a long time. Then he said, in his too-casual voice, the one he’d inherited from me and deployed almost as badly:

“What about the Sicilian?”

“What about him.”

“Once we’re out. He’s against Gianni—his whole family is, the drivers said the cousin runs Chicago now and they hate him. You have his manifest. He gave it to you, Lena, he wanted you to have it. If we contacted him after, from somewhere safe—they have money, protection, they’re already fighting the man we’re running from—”

“No.”

“They’re the enemy of our enemy—”

“They’re the family of our enemy,” I said. “Gianni is their blood. And even if they’d take us in—we arrive with nothing. We’d be witnesses, assets, leverage against Gianni, wrapped in one convenient package and delivered to a man who catalogs everything he sees. What exactly would we be to him, after a week? After a month?” I closed the laptop. “I’ll use his information. Information doesn’t want anything back. I’m not trading Papa’s cage for a nicer one with better manners.” I capped the lipstick tube. “ No. I want freedom. For both of us. Whatever happens after, it starts with us walking out on our own legs.”

He didn’t argue. There was something in his eyes. Hope.

The following morning, Gianni was at breakfast. That was the first wrong thing.

He did not stay nights at the house—my father’s rule, part of the untouched-bride theater—and yet there he sat at eight in the morning at my mother’s table, buttering bread with his left hand because his right was wrapped in white gauze, and smiling at me like a man who had already read the last page.

I sat. I unfolded my napkin. I poured tea I did not want, and I catalogued the room. My father at the head, already finished eating, papers beside his plate. Kiryl across from me, pale, not eating at all. Gianni’s two men in the hall, visible through the doorway, standing where his men had never stood before. Something had been decided in this house while I slept, and I had not been in the room for it, and my whole life has taught me that the meetings I’m not in are the ones about me.

“Good news. The lawyers worked through the night,” my father said. He didn’t look up from his papers. “The proxy is corrected. The notary block, the venue, everything. You’ll sign this morning.”