Page 30 of Merciless Daddy

Her mouth opened and nothing came out of it.

“Eight o’clock. Mill Basin. The priest and the witnesses and the proxy. It’s over, you’re free, you are not going into that house tonight.” My voice came out lower than I meant it to and I let it. “You are not signing anything tonight.”

She stared at me. Blood at the corner of her mouth, my blood on her knuckles, a hundred and thirty pounds of ruined couture and pure fury, and God forgive me—with a hole in my face and three men bleeding on a road in Brooklyn—I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted her in that second.

I let go of her wrists.

She didn’t run. There was nowhere to run to; that was the point of the road. She stood there with her arms down at her sides and her chest going, and she said, “You’ve made a very expensive mistake.”

“Almost certainly,” I said.

Tonio put a trauma kit down on the asphalt beside the boy I’d shot—tourniquet, pressure dressing, saline, the one we carry for ourselves—and cut the zip ties on the least injured of the lead-car men so he could work.

“Shoulder joint, through and through, he keeps the arm if you’re quick,” I told him. “Ambulance is eleven minutes on Flatbush. Nobody follows us.”

And I took out my phone and sent one message to a number Serafina had bought in Odessa three years ago and never used.

Lev Borisovich. Your daughter is alive, unhurt, and with me. Your son-in-law’s dispatch order authorized a physician to sedate her into her own wedding. I have the document. She will not be drugged into a marriage in my family’s name. Ask him about it before you decide who to bury. — S.S.

Then I put her in the car myself, with my coat around her shoulders, and we drove north with my cheek bleeding into my collar the whole way.

The cabin light was on low and we had thirty-eight thousand feet of nothing under us, and she sat across the aisle from me in the wreckage of her wedding dress with her chin up and her hands in her lap.

Pietro had put four butterfly closures into my cheek at Teterboro with a penlight in his teeth, and then he’d gone forward and pulled the curtain, because Pietro has never once in his life needed to be told to leave a room.

So it was the two of us and the engine noise. Her, and my blood dried brown across the knuckles of her right hand.

She’d refused a blanket. She’d refused water. She’d taken my coat off her shoulders and folded it, precisely, and set it on the seat beside her like something she was returning to a shop, and she’d been sitting like that for twenty minutes without saying a word.

I let her have the twenty minutes. I have spent my whole professional life understanding that silence is not empty; it’s somebody working.

“Turn the plane around.”

I laughed. “No, signora. No.”

“You don’t understand.” Her voice was perfectly level. “My brother is in that house. He is nineteen years old and soft. My father knows I care for him. Gianni knows I care for him.” Now her hands came out of her lap. “So whatever you thought you were rescuing tonight—whatever this is, vengeance or leverage or whatever accountants do for excitement—you have just left the only person I have in the world alone in a house with Gianni Scordato and no reason for anyone in it to keep him breathing. Turn the plane around.”

I reached into my inside pocket, took out a folded sheet of paper, and held it across the aisle.

“Read this first.”

“I don’t want your—”

“Read it, Yelena Lvovna. Then tell me to turn the plane around and I’ll consider it.”

She took it the way you take something out of a dog’s mouth. Unfolded it. Held it under the reading light.

I watched her read the dispatch order. I watched her get to the top: collect principal from Zhar-Ptitsa. Principal will be dressed and prepared on site. I watched a muscle move at the corner of her jaw at the word principal, and then her eyes went down the page to the second attachment, and stopped.

Her face did nothing at all. That was the terrible part. I sat four feet away and watched a woman read a sworn instrument authorizing a stranger to put a needle in her arm and turn her into a signature, and her face did absolutely nothing, and the only thing in that cabin that moved was the paper.

It shook. Very slightly. Just the corner of it.

“Notarial capacity is not affected,” she read out loud.

“They asked a lawyer,” I said. “The lawyer said the signature would hold.”

“Yes.” Her voice had gone somewhere far away. “That’s—of course they did. Of course.” She read it again, all of it. “Six thirty-two this morning. He drafted this at six thirty-two this morning, and then he came to breakfast and buttered bread.”