Page 24 of Merciless Daddy

“Of course, Papa.”

“And the wedding is moved.” He turned a page. “Three days from now. Here, at the house. Private—the immediate families, a priest, witnesses. The public celebration can follow in the spring, when it suits everyone’s calendars.”

The tea went down my throat like a stone. Three days. I set the cup in its saucer without a sound, which cost me more than anyone at that table would ever be given the satisfaction of knowing.

My escape route, gone.

“Three days,” I said. Pleasantly. “The caterers alone—”

“There are no caterers for a private ceremony,” Gianni said, and there it was, the voice of a man unwrapping his own gift. He leaned back, gauze-wrapped hand resting on the cloth between us like a signed confession neither of us would read aloud. “Your father and I discussed it last night, ptichka. After I left you.” A pause exactly long enough. “The situation has changed. My cousin flies to Brooklyn, asks questions at your father’s table, leaves papers lying around. Three weeks is a long time. Three weeks is a gift to people who want this alliance to fail.” He spread his good hand, reasonable, magnanimous, a statesman. “Why give them the gift? We marry now. The paperwork completes now. Whatever the Scordatos in Chicago are planning, they can plan it about a finished thing.”

I looked at my father. My father looked back at me with the pale flat eyes he’d given me at birth like a debt, and I understood that this was not a proposal being floated. This was a ledger already closed. Gianni had lost a skirmish in my bedroom and gone downstairs and won the war in my father’s study, because he had finally, after months of courtship, said the one thing Lev Sokolov could not argue with: speed protects the asset.

“How prudent,” I said.

“I thought so,” said Gianni.

“And Kiryl.” My father did not even turn his head toward my brother; he addressed the space above his plate. “You’ll move to the blue room this morning. Ground floor, east wing. Until the marriage is complete.”

Kiryl’s fork stopped. “The blue room is next to the guard station.”

“Yes,” said my father, and picked up his coffee, and that was the entire explanation anyone would ever receive. Kiryl looked at me across the table—one look, fast, our mother’s carefulness with our father’s fear in it—and I gave him the smallest fraction of a nod.

This morning, the hope in his eyes had gone.

Chapter 5

Salvatore

Four-forty in the morning.

Below us Mezza Notte was dark, chairs upended on tables, the walk-in humming through the floorboards. Tonio’s kitchen. Tonio’s building. My war room.

I’d spent those three days doing my job. Working through manifests. Shell companies. And I’d spent every hour I wasn’t doing my job watching a fixed camera in a Brooklyn dining room, thirty-eight seconds at a time, running it back, watching a woman with pale eyes sweep a wine glass off a table on purpose to put herself between a frightened girl and my cousin’s temper.

“Sal.”

Angela arrived. We’d been waiting for her, my brothers, Serafina and I. She’d sent a message to say she had news that had to be delivered in person. So here we all were, in person.

She sat at the long table with her hair pushed back off her face, and she had the particular stillness she got when she’d found something she didn’t want to say out loud. She opened a laptop. Pietro stood behind her chair with one hand on the backrest, not touching her, close enough that she could lean into him if she wanted to. Tonio was at the counter making a fresh pot because Tonio’s response to catastrophe was always carbohydrates and caffeine, in that order.

Serafina sat at the head of the table with her hands folded.

“So, Angela? What’s up?” I said.

“The proxy’s fixed. In the wedding contract.” Angela turned the laptop toward me. “The notary block, the venue recital, the acknowledgment—all of it. Filed corrections logged at three-fourteen in the morning, Eastern, eleven hours after the mistake was pointed out to them.”

“Eleven hours,” Serafina said.

“Firms don’t move in eleven hours. Firms don’t move in eleven days. Somebody put a gun to that partner’s desk.” Angela scrolled. “And yesterday the registry pulled a marriage license application forward. Brooklyn. Amended once, expedited, priest of record attached, four witnesses named.”

“They moved the wedding,” I said.

“They moved the wedding.”

Serafina didn’t move. “To when?”

Angela looked up at her, and then at me, and I watched her decide to say it flat because there was no other way to say it.