Page 25 of Merciless Daddy

“Tonight.”

Tonight.

“Confirm it,” I said.

“I confirmed it twice.” Angela’s voice was gentle, which was worse. “Eight o’clock ceremony. Private. Mill Basin, at the house. The proxy executes immediately after, in front of the same witnesses, with the license as the trigger.”

I stood up.

“Three options,” I said. “There are only three. Anyone finds a fourth, I’ll buy them a house.

“One. We do nothing. At eight o’clock tonight Gianni Scordato marries into the Sokolov bratva and takes irrevocable proxy over a refrigerated fleet, two cold-storage facilities, and thirty years of clean American paper. Not laundering through corpses anymore. Through a real company with real invoices and a real customer list, and the daughter’s name on the shareholder register so nothing on the face of it is even a crime. Every route we’ve mapped becomes legitimate freight overnight.” I turned. “Our case dies. Not weakens. Dies. Because you cannot prosecute a man for using his wife’s trucks.”

Nobody said anything.

“Two. We kill him. Tonight, at the house, under Lev Sokolov’s roof, in front of a priest and four named witnesses.” I let that sit. “Lev has three sons and eleven hundred men on that stretch of coast and a code that says a guest’s blood on his floor is his debt to collect. We would be at war with the bratva by Thursday, on their ground, with our men strung out across two continents, and Serafina Scordato’s first act as head of this family would be starting a war she can’t finish.” I looked at her. “I don’t recommend it.”

“And three,” Serafina said.

“Three.” My voice came out lower than I intended. “There’s no marriage without a bride. No proxy without a signature. The whole structure hangs on one woman in one room at eight o’clock tonight.” I put two fingers under the photograph and didn’t quite touch it. “We take her out before she gets there.”

The room changed temperature.

Pietro’s hand came off Angela’s chair. He didn’t look at me; he looked at the back of Angela’s head, at a woman he had once followed for a week before he ever spoke to her, and I watched him remember exactly what it feels like to be the man in the car.

“You want to take a woman,” Pietro said.

“I want to take her out of a house where a man who murdered his own father has been given the keys.”

“Sal.” Tonio had stopped making coffee. He was standing there with the pot in his hand, and his whole big warm face was creased with something between horror and hope. “She doesn’t know us. You understand that? To her we’re the ones with the bag over her head.”

“I understand it perfectly.”

“No.” Serafina’s voice cut the room in half.

She hadn’t raised it. She never raised it. She just stopped folding her hands and set them flat on the table, and every man in that room turned toward her the way we’d all turned toward her father for thirty years.

“We do not take women,” she said. “That is not a preference. That is the line, and I drew it the day I sat in this chair. Enzo Valenti took women. Gianni is buying one tonight. If our answer to that is to grab her off a street in Brooklyn, then explain to me—slowly, cugino, use small words—what exactly we’re supposed to be.”

“We’d be the ones who kept her out of that bedroom.”

“You’d be one more set of hands on her.”

I should have stopped there. Three days without sleep and a still frame on my second monitor and I did not stop there.

“He shot Don Arturo in the chest,” I said. “At a meeting. And your answer to what that man does with power is to file better paperwork—”

Serafina stood.

It was very quiet. Angela had gone completely still. Pietro had shut his eyes.

“Say my father’s name again in this room to win an argument,” Serafina said, “and I will send you back to Palermo on the morning flight.”

The words went into me and found bone.

“Sera—“

“He was my father.” Her voice didn’t shake. “You do not get to hold him up like a card. Not you. Not ever.”