Page 21 of Merciless Daddy

The click of the latch was very loud. My bedroom is the one room in the house that has almost nothing of me in it—I keep myself elsewhere, in the nursery, under floorboards—but it was still mine. He stood in the middle of it with his hands loose at his sides, looking around, then looking at me.

“Quite a performance tonight,” he said.

“Which one? I gave several.”

“For my cousin.” He crossed to the window, touched the drape, some proprietary tour of premises he already considered his. “The numbers. The Italian. The mouth on you, in front of Sal, in front of your father’s captains. You made yourself very interesting to a Scordato tonight, ptichka. So.” He turned. “I think you should show me where your loyalty lies. I think you owe me that, after tonight.”

“My loyalty lies where the contract puts it. I have no choice.” I moved toward the dressing table, casual. “Three weeks, Gianni.”

“Three weeks.” He said it like a diagnosis. “You keep saying this. Your father’s tradition. The untouched bride. You know what I think? I think it’s the only clause you actually like.” He started toward me, unhurried, smiling, and my pulse began to climb the back of my throat. “We’re engaged. We’re adults. Nobody waits anymore. This isn’t the old country, this is Brooklyn, and I am tired—genuinely, ptichka, I want you to hear this—I am tired of being handled.”

“No one is handling you.”

“Everyone is handling me,” he said, with the sudden bald honesty of a vain man in the dark, “and you are the worst of them, because you’re so good at it.”

Then his hands were on my arms and his mouth was coming down and I turned my face so it landed on my jaw instead, hard, his teeth behind his lips. His cologne filled my head. He walked me backward the two steps to the dressing table and pinned me against it, the edge biting into the backs of my thighs, perfume bottles chiming, and his weight came in against me and one of his hands left my arm and found my wrist and began dragging my hand down his body with a purpose I understood completely.

“No, Gianni.”

I said it clearly and loud. With authority, with certainty.

He ignored it. His grip tightened on my wrist, pushing my hand lower, his mouth at my ear saying something about loyalty and proof and three weeks.

“I said no.”

He didn’t stop, not even for a moment.

The firebird was still pinned at my shoulder. His diamonds. His gift. My right hand was pinned but my left was free, and it took me two seconds to open the clasp and slide the brooch free with the long pin standing open like a stinger.

His hand came off my wrist to grab at my waist, palm open.

I put the stinger into it.

Not a stab. I simply let his own grasping hand close over the open pin, and the metal went into the meat of his palm, and Gianni Scordato came off me swearing in three dialects, shaking his hand, a bright bead of blood already welling in the lifeline like a small red pearl.

“You—” He stared at his palm, then at me, and his face went through its colors. “You cut me. You cut me—”

“You grabbed a brooch.” I stayed where I was against the dressing table, and I made my voice into the thing I had spent twenty-six years building — level, dry, faintly bored, the voice of a woman discussing invoices. My heart was going hard enough to hurt. He would never know it. “Pins are sharp, Gianni. It’s how they hold things.”

“You think this is funny—”

“I think you should listen to me now, because I’m going to explain your own contract to you, since your lawyers don’t seem capable.” I set the firebird down on the dressing table between us, wings spread, its pin still open, a small glittering display of threat. “My father is selling you an alliance. Part of the price is me—an untouched bride, delivered traditionally, in white, in front of witnesses, because that is what men like you are supposed to want. Clearly, it’s true. The other part is a proxy with the word irrevocable in it, which is not signed yet.” I let that sit. “So consider what happens if I come down to breakfast tomorrow with bruises. Or if I go to my father frightened and weeping and tell him I can’t go through with the ceremony. Or if it simply reaches him that his son-in-law couldn’t wait three weeks for what he’d already been promised—that you have no discipline, no patience, no control. My father has buried men for less, Gianni. He would not even be angry. He would just reopen the bidding.”

I watched it land. The rage came first. Then, behind it, moving slower and heavier, the calculation: the fleet, the warehouses, the clean American companies, the whole machine he’d confessed over the soup, all of it hanging off one old man’s approval and one signature that did not exist yet.

He wanted to hit me. I could see it in his shoulders. And I stood very still and let him look at exactly what hitting me would cost, itemized, and the contract won. The contract was always going to win. It was the only thing about Gianni I could rely on.

He stepped back. He wrapped his handkerchief around his palm, taking his time about it, reassembling himself.

“Clauses,” he said finally. His voice had gone quiet, and quiet was the only register in which Gianni was ever frightening. “Notary blocks. Traditions. Pins. You’re very good at finding things to stand behind, ptichka. It’s a talent.” He picked up the firebird from the dressing table, closed the pin with his thumb—wincing—and set it back down, a small demonstration that he could handle it now. “Six days a week I let you have this. But hear me. After the wedding there are no more clauses. No father, no contract, no little brother down the hall. Just my house, my rules, and my wife. And we will finish this conversation then, and you will find there is nothing left to stand behind at all.”

He let himself out. He closed the door gently, which was worse than slamming it.

I stood against the dressing table and listened to his shoes going down the marble, and the front door, and the cars. Then, only then, I looked down and found that my hands had started to shake—both of them, badly, the fine china-rattle shake of the body settling its accounts after the mind has refused to pay — and there was a thin smear of his blood on my palm from the brooch, and I went into the bathroom and turned the water as hot as it would go.

Iwas still at the sink when the dressing room door whispered open behind me. Only one person in this house used that door, and he used it the way mice use walls.

“Lena.”