Page 29 of Merciless Daddy

I stepped out into the middle of the road with my hands up and empty and walked toward the sedan.

“Salvatore Scordato,” I said. Loudly. In English, then in the Russian I learned on docks. “Scordato. Do you hear me? Nobody in this convoy has to be hurt tonight. Put your hands on your windows and stay in your seats. My people have you from three sides and every one of them is a better shot than you are.”

Doors opened anyway. Of course they did.

Two out of the lead car, one out of the sedan’s front passenger door—young, big, coat flapping, and his hand went inside it as he turned.

He turned wrong.

He came around fast and the muzzle came up and swung, and it swung back, toward the sedan, toward the rear glass, because he had a bad angle on me and a clear one through his own car, and I understood in the half second I had that he was about to put rounds through a window with her behind it.

I shot him through the shoulder.

One round, left shoulder, high, the joint. He went down on the asphalt and the pistol went skidding under the trailer and he screamed.

“Down,” I said to the other two. “Down. On the ground, now, or I stop being careful.”

They went down. Pietro was behind them by then with a shotgun and a very quiet manner, and Tonio was out of the cab and moving along the far side, and it was over in nine seconds.

Except the rear door of the sedan was still shut, and the glass was dark, and I couldn’t see her.

That was the worst ten seconds of my life. Ten seconds of a black window and no way to know what was happening on the other side of it, and my own hand shaking on the door handle for the first time in thirteen years.

Then the car rocked.

It rocked hard, on its springs, and something hit the inside of the glass, and I heard a man make a sound that was not a word.

She’d got her heel into the top of his foot. I found that out afterward, from the state of his shoe. Four inches of Italian dress heel driven straight down through the bones on top of a man’s foot, and while he was folding forward around it she’d put the back of her head through his mouth and taken out three teeth.

I got the handle. The door was locked. I put my elbow through the quarter light, reached in, and unlocked it, and hauled the door open, and hauled him out—a big man, half a head taller than me, bleeding down his chin and still with his fist in a handful of white silk—and I put him face-down on the road and knelt on him until he let go.

“Don’t get up,” I said.

Then I turned back to the car and she came out of it at me like something let off a chain.

She was in the dress. White silk, half the bodice torn away from the shoulder where the man had had hold of her, one sleeve gone, her hair down out of its pins on one side and her mouth bleeding at the corner. And her eyes were enormous and pale and completely, absolutely gone—nothing in them but a woman who had been dragged out of one car by strangers and was now being reached for by another one.

“Yelena—”

She hit me in the throat with the flat of her hand. It was a good strike; somebody had taught her that much at least. Then she went for my face with her right hand closed around something, and I got my arm up half a second too slow, and the pin of the firebird brooch went through my cheek from the jaw to just under the eye.

I felt it open. I felt the blood go down inside my collar, warm, immediate.

I did not hit her. No chance.

My hands came up and I caught both her wrists and I brought them in and held them crossed against my own chest, and I put my weight into my heels and let her fight it. She was strong. She fought like somebody who had been waiting years to be allowed to.

“Yelena Lvovna. Look at me.”

“Get your hands—”

“Look at my face.”

She looked.

She stopped moving. Not calm. Coiled. Breathing in short hard pulls with her wrists still in my hands and my blood on her fingers.

“The wedding is over,” I said. “It’s not happening.”