Page 13 of Merciless Daddy

Here is the thing I have never told anyone, not even Kiryl, not even the version of my mother I still talk to in the study: this is the only hour I am allowed to be small. Kiryl was right. I am still that nine year old girl. All day I am the pakhan’s daughter. I am poised, I am armored, I am handling the invoice and the compressor and the fiancé and the fear, and I am twenty-six going on a thousand. And then, after midnight, behind a lock that means nothing, a person no one has ever met sits on a nursery floor in a scratchy blanket and colors a children’s book with her mother’s pencils, and breathes. Just breathes. The pencil whispers against the paper. The feathers fill, one by one, slowly, because the bird doesn’t fly if you rush her. If my father ever saw it, he would find it useful, and that is precisely why he never, ever will. The men in my life have taken my name, my shares, my exits, and my wedding. This they don’t get. This is mine.

For ten minutes I colored nothing at all. Aimless. A curl of orange, a lick of red along a wing. My shoulders came down from around my ears. The crescent in my palm stopped throbbing. My breath found the bottom of my lungs for the first time since the brooch.

Then, when my hands were steady, I turned to the centerfold—the great firebird, wings spread across both pages, her plumage a spray of hundreds of feathers—and I went to work. Because here is the other thing no one knows about the colouring book.

It was a map.

I started it two years ago, the night I understood that my father was actually going to find a buyer for me and that no one was coming. Any diary would be found. Any file would be opened. But a woman’s sentimental coloring habit, hidden with her dead mother’s things—even if they found it, what would they see? An overworked illustration. A childish mess of color So I built my intelligence into the bird, feather by feather, in a language of pencils. Blue feathers were cameras—one feather per lens, placed on the bird’s body where the camera sat in the house. Black were armed men, their posts, their overlaps. Gold were locked doors, and the shading told me the kind of lock. Green—there were painfully few green—were the gaps. The exits. The places where, for a minute or an hour or a shift change, the cage forgot itself.

Two years of watching lived in that plumage. The whole anatomy of my father’s fortress, disguised as a little girl’s comfort.

Tonight I added the day’s harvest. A gold feather on the bird’s left wing, shaded dark and cross-hatched: the terrace doors, latch replaced by keypad, six digits I didn’t have yet. A new blue feather along the spine: the eastern corridor camera, with a fleck of white at its root for the three blind feet by the stairwell door. Two black feathers restacked at the shoulder for the nine-o’clock rotation and the unfamiliar men. Into the tail — the tail was Kiryl’s, the whole streaming tail was my brother — I worked the night guard’s hours, eleven to seven, a black feather barred with the hours in tiny strokes that looked like texture. Along the crest, I numbered six small feathers in a sequence any casual eye would read as a colourist counting her work, and which I would read as Gianni Scordato’s birthday, his phone, his mail, his whole preening life, six digits long. And at the bird’s breast, one small red dot, no bigger than a pencil’s kiss: the lipstick tube, and where it slept.

My phone lit on the floor beside me. My father’s secretary—a man who transmitted Lev’s will at all hours in prose as warm as a toe tag.

Friday, 8 pm, Zhar-Ptitsa. Formal. Your presence is required. A representative of the Scordato family arrives from Chicago.

I read it twice, and the cold walked up my back on little feet. Another Scordato. Another serious man at another long table, flying in to inspect the merchandise, or the alliance, or both—and I would stand there in silk and smile while they discussed the daughter’s trucks over the black bread.

And then the other part of my brain—the part that colors in code, the part my mother built and my father never once thought to look for—sat up.

A guest changed things. A guest from Chicago changed the seating, the security, the schedule, the temperature of the whole room. Doors would open that stayed shut. Men would watch the stranger instead of the bird. My father would perform, Gianni would preen, and everyone’s eyes would be exactly where mine were not. I didn’t know what this Scordato wanted. I knew nothing about him except that his family had produced Gianni, which was not what you’d call a reference. But I have never needed men to be good. I have only ever needed them to be useful, and every new piece on the board makes the board move.

I chose a pencil. Green.

Slowly—because the bird doesn’t fly if you rush her—I colored one final feather at the tip of the firebird’s wing, out at the farthest edge of her reach, where the wing becomes flight.

“All right, Friday,” I said to the bird, to the room, to my mother, to nobody. “Let’s see what you bring me.”

Then I put the book under the floorboard, and the tin beside it, and the scarf over both, and fitted the plank back into the silence, and went to bed a pakhan’s daughter.

Chapter 3

Salvatore

Brighton Beach smelled of fried dough, salt, and old, dank snow. The Zhar-Ptitsa sat near the boardwalk end of the avenue with a firebird burning in neon over the door, gold on black, wings spread. I had watched this room for a week through a camera. Now I was going to walk in and eat my cousin’s future off my enemy’s plates.

“I don’t like it,” Pietro said, for the third time since LaGuardia.

“You don’t have to like it.”

Two men waited inside the vestibule. Big, quiet, well-dressed, with the settled patience of professionals who have never once needed to raise their voices at work. The taller one held out a lacquered tray like a communion plate.

“The pakhan’s house,” he said. His English was careful. “No iron under this roof. His rule. For everyone.”

Pietro’s jaw did something small and expensive. I took my pistol from the holster at my back, ejected the magazine, cleared the chamber, and laid all three pieces on the tray. Then I looked at my brother and waited.

“Sal.”

“When you accept a man’s hospitality,” I said, “you accept his terms. All of them. Or you eat somewhere else.”

“And if his terms include burying us in the parking lot?”

“Then he loses the boardwalk, the avenue, and the next twenty years to a war he didn’t budget for, and Lev Sokolov has never in his life bought anything he didn’t budget for.” I nodded at the tray. “The knife too. The one in your boot that you think no-one knows about.”

Pietro surrendered his weapons with the enthusiasm of a man donating organs. The tall guard’s mouth twitched and the doors opened onto gold.

The dining room was exactly what the camera had shown me. Firebird murals climbed the walls, plumage in ochre and flame licking up toward a ceiling strung with amber light. White cloths. Silver samovars. Sixty tables of Brighton Beach on a Friday night, furs over chair backs, cognac and pickled fish and three generations of Russian arguing warmly over the tablecloths. The camera had given me the layout. It had not given me the heat of the place, the noise, the smell of dill and butter and candle smoke.