Page 27 of Merciless Daddy

“Eighteen-forty hours, collect principal from Zhar-Ptitsa, Brighton Beach Avenue. Principal will be dressed and prepared on site. Nineteen-hundred hours, depart. Route as attached, no stops. Nineteen-forty hours, arrive residence, Mill Basin. Twenty-hundred hours, ceremony. Twenty-twenty hours, execution of instruments.”

Principal. She had a wedding dress with her name sewn inside it and to my cousin’s dispatcher she was a principal, a payload, a dot with a green pulse.

“There’s a second attachment,” Angela said.

“Read it.”

She scrolled. And then she stopped reading, and her hand came off the trackpad, and Pietro put his hand on her shoulder without a word because he knew that particular stillness better than anybody alive.

“Angela.”

“Standing medical authorization,” she said. “It’s countersigned. A physician travels in vehicle two.” She swallowed. “In the event the principal becomes distressed or uncooperative prior to execution of instruments, the attending physician is authorized at his discretion to administer intramuscular sedation sufficient to ensure the principal’s cooperation through the ceremony and signing. Dosage at physician’s judgment. Notarial capacity is not affected.”

Nobody moved.

Something went through me that I have no honest word for. Not heat. The opposite of heat. It came up out of the floor and through the soles of my shoes and settled behind my sternum, cold and very still, and it had the shape of a woman in a service corridor telling me she’d been managing men like Gianni since before I learned to knot my tie.

Notarial capacity is not affected.

They had asked a lawyer whether a drugged woman’s signature would still hold. And the lawyer had said yes.

“Read it again,” I said.

“Sal—”

“Read it again.”

She read it again. My hands were flat on the desk and they did not shake, and I noted that, filed it, and understood that it was not calm.

I took out my phone and called Serafina.

She picked up on the second ring, in a room with an echo. “Twenty more minutes.”

“Angela’s inside Northbridge’s fleet account. I’m going to read you something and I need you to hear all of it.”

I read it to her. Every word, in my flattest voice, the manifest voice, the voice for demurrage and weather. Distressed or uncooperative. Discretion. Sufficient to ensure cooperation. Notarial capacity is not affected.

The line was silent for a long time.

“Madonna,” Serafina said, and her voice had gone thin. “Madonna.”

“Yes.”

“That’s—Sal, that’s a sworn instrument. That’s a woman signing away three hundred jobs with a needle in her arm and a priest in the room.”

“Yes.”

“And Gianni, my brother—” She stopped. I heard her breathe. Then I heard the exact moment the grief turned back into command, because I have known my cousin her whole life. “No.”

“Sera.”

“No. You are not touching a Sokolov convoy. Listen to me. If we hit that motorcade, Lev doesn’t hear we saved your daughter. He hears Italians ambushed my blood on my own road. He will not investigate it, he will not thank us, he will pick up a phone and he will put eleven hundred men behind Gianni Scordato openly, and then this stops being a case and becomes a body count, and it will be Sicilian boys in it.”

“And if we do nothing,” I said, “he has the fleet, the warehouses, the paper, and the bratva anyway, by Thursday, without spending a bullet. You’re not choosing between war and peace, cugina. You’re choosing whether we’re in the war or just losing it politely.”

“That is not your decision.”

“No,” I said. “It’s yours.”