Page 6 of Merciless Daddy

“He said it wasn’t hurting anybody.” Luis’s voice cracked in half. “He said it was just—business, between big men, and nobody would ever know, and I swear, Don Salvatore, I swear on my mother—”

“Don’t swear on your mother. She’s had an expensive enough month.” I held out my hand. “Your phone.”

He gave it to me. The messages were there—a number with no name, short instructions, timestamps. Careful language, nothing incriminating on its face, but the payment confirmation from the hospital’s billing portal was in the thread too, screenshotted and sent to him like a receipt. Like a leash, with the length written on it. The sender’s grammar was better than a street collector’s. Northbridge paid for good coats and good grammar.

I photographed everything with my own phone, every message, both directions, and the number twice. Then I handed his phone back.

“Here is what happens now,” I said. “You don’t block that number. You don’t refuse him. When he contacts you again—and he will—you say yes to whatever he asks, and then you come to me before you do it. Every instruction, every word, the same day. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

He stared at me. “You want me to keep—you’re not firing me?”

“Firing you gets your mother’s bill reversed and gets me nothing.” I let that settle. “The family will protect you and your mother. Both of you, fully, for as long as this takes. That is my word. But it has one condition, Luis. If you lie to me—once, about anything, ever—the protection ends that minute, and you go back to being alone with these people. Don’t be alone with these people.”

“I won’t lie.” He said it so fast it fell over itself. “I won’t. I swear—I mean. I won’t.”

“Good. Go home. Sit with your mother. Come to work Saturday like nothing happened.”

He went. At the door he stopped, and turned around, and looked at me like he was going to say something that would embarrass us both, so I nodded at the door and he took the mercy and vanished through it.

Tonio strolled over, hands in his pockets, and stood beside me contemplating the empty doorway like it was art.

“You know what you just did,” he said. “You just recruited an informant inside their collection network, turned their own leash into your leash, and made the kid grateful for it. Without raising your voice. I’ve seen you do it to dockworkers, customs men, one bishop—”

“The bishop approached us.”

“—and now teenagers. It’s unnatural, Sal. Normal people have to shout.”

I turned the tracker over in my hand. A little black box that thought it knew where I was going.

“Frightened people are useful to whoever frightens them,” I said. “But they’re loyal to whoever makes them safe. Everyone in this business learns the first half.” I dropped the tracker into my pocket, where it could listen to my keys for a while until I decided what lies to tell it. “Almost nobody learns the second.”

By midnight the building was mine. Tonio had gone home to Katerina, and Pietro had gone home to Angela—which he still announced casually, every evening, like a man testing whether the miracle would hold if he said it out loud. Downstairs the kitchen was dark. I had the office to myself.

My phone buzzed. Sera. She sent a link to a livestream. I clicked it and it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. The Zhar-Ptitsa. Somehow we’d got a camera in there already.

Nothing exotic: a fixed angle from somewhere high in the dining room, the whole restaurant laid out like a chessboard in warm gold light. Firebird murals on the walls. White tablecloths. Lev Sokolov holding court at the big round table in the back with my cousin Gianni beside him, both of them performing the friendship for an audience of serious men.

I wasn’t watching them.

I was watching her.

Yelena Sokolova. On paper she was decoration. The pakhan’s daughter, lacquered and displayed, furs in the coat check and diamonds at her throat, a centerpiece with a pulse. That was the role. She performed it flawlessly, and if you watched her for thirty seconds, that’s all you would see.

I watched her for forty minutes.

Eleven minutes in, a supplier’s man came to the service corridor with an invoice. Not to Lev. Not to the manager. To her. She read it standing, one finger tracking the lines, and then her finger stopped, and she tapped a figure twice, and the man went pale and took the paper back. There was no audio on the recording. There didn’t need to be. I have made men go that color over a manifest myself, and I know exactly what the conversation was: this number is wrong, you knew it was wrong, fix it before someone less pleasant than me sees it.

Twenty minutes in, I watched her cross the room and greet three different tables of powerful looking men. Gianni’s people, maybe some Americans in expesnive suits. I could read the respect on their faces. It was not a hostess making conversation. It was an operator working a room.

Then, at the thirty-eight minute mark, Gianni stood up.

A young waitress had made some mistake at the big table—a dropped fork, a wrong glass, something small enough that the camera didn’t catch it—and my cousin rose out of his chair with impatience. He was angry—furious.

The waitress was maybe twenty. She had gone rigid the way Luis had gone rigid in my garage. And Yelena crossed the dining room in six unhurried steps, put herself between the girl and my cousin, and knocked a glass of wine off the table with her own hand.

It looked like an accident. It was framed as an accident—the little startle, the apologetic tilt of her head, the napkin already moving. But I ran it back four times, and there was a quarter of a second where her hand paused above that glass, above the stem, choosing, and then swept through it. Red wine across the white cloth. Every eye at the table moved to her. Gianni’s anger—I watched it happen—swung off the waitress and onto Yelena like a weathervane, and she took it. The waitress escaped to the kitchen. Yelena had a fresh cloth on the table in ninety seconds and Gianni preening over her apology in two minutes, soothed, managed, redirected — a man being handled so expertly he would have sworn on his life he’d won the exchange.

I sat back and looked at the frozen frame.