Page 51 of Savage Daddy
“That wasn’t nothing,” she said. Quiet. Not the boss. Not deadpan. Something underneath both, something gone careful and cold at the edges.
“It was family.”
“In Sicilian. Fast. With your back to me.” She uncrossed her arms. “Your face went flat. The grin went out. You’re managing something.” She said it slow, and I watched the old thing come up in her, the thing I’d spent weeks learning the shape of and three weeks swearing I’d never be—the fear that care is a leash, that being looked after is being owned, that every hand has a string on it she just hasn’t found yet. “You’re managing something behind my back. Right now.”
And there it was, on her face, in the dark, with the ink still wet in my coat.
“Katerina,” I said.
“Don’t.” The shutter started coming down. I could hear it, the crack in it, the same crack as the night I’d pulled back from the kiss. “Don’tKateriname. Tell me what’s out there. Tell me what the phone was. You don’t get to make me sign that—” she pointed at my coat, at the paper, at the trust, “—and then go cold in the dark and tell me it’s family. That’s the opposite. That’s the prison, the leash. That’s exactly the—”
“It’s not.” But it came out wrong, came out the soldier’s flat, and I watched it confirm the very thing I was trying todeny, watched the door come down another inch, watched two stubborn hands wrap back around her own ribs in the cold light of the shop I’d made warm.
“You have to trust me.”
She held my gaze for a moment, then melted into me.
“I do, Daddy. I trust you.”
The guilt I felt was the worst of my life.
Chapter 12
Katerina
Myhandsmadethetsoureki without me.
That’s what happens when you do a thing ten thousand times. The hands learn it and then they leave you out of it. Over, under, pull taut. Three strands going to a braid, glossy with egg wash, the smell of orange-blossom and yeast coming up warm off the bench, and I wasn’t there for any of it. My hands were there. The rest of me was three blocks south in the dark front of the shop, watching the back of a man on a phone.
I should have been happy.
I had every reason in the world to be happy. We’d signed the contract. He’d said I love you. We’d felt so close, so incredibly close.
This morning he’d chosen my underwear.
It was in the contract now, in my own hard small hand—Daddy picks your underwear—and I’d written it scarlet and woken up to him laying it out on the foot of the bed like it was nothing, a thing of dark green lace that echoed the dress I’d worn to dinner,soft as a held breath, and I’d put it on in his bathroom with my face hot and felt it against my skin all morning. The one vanity. Except it wasn’t mine anymore, it was his, he’d chosen it, and every time I moved I felt it and felt him choosing it and the feeling went down low and warm and stupid and made me lose count of the koulourakia twice.
I should have been settled. Settled was the whole point. He held the line so I didn’t have to. I’d put it all down—the loaf, the books, the year—and he’d taken it, and that was supposed to be the end of the holding.
You have to trust me.
That’s what he’d said. You have to trust me. And I’d melted into him and said I do, Daddy, I trust you. I’d meant it. In that second I’d meant it all the way down.
Now it was three in the morning, and the old tide came up.
Nothing’s free.
Every hand has a string. You just haven’t found it yet.
I looked up from the braid.
He was across the kitchen, hauling a sack of flour from the storeroom to the rack. He’d brought me coffee an hour ago and set it sideways at my elbow without a word, the way I’d taught him, the way that gets past me. He was being good. He was being so good it made my teeth ache.
I cataloged him.
The set of his jaw, easy. The hands, sure. The grin he threw at the dog when Olimpo grumbled in his sleep, real. All of it real. That was what made it impossible. There wasn’t a false note in the whole man this morning. I trusted him, I did. But I also had this feeling.
Something was out there. Something about me. And he was carrying it for me, to protect me.
