Page 31 of Merciless Daddy

“Now,” I said. “Your brother. Tonio didn’t get on this plane.”

Her head came up.

“He’s in a car in Mill Basin with two of Dante Caruso’s men and a third arriving from Cicero on the red-eye. He has line of sight on the east wing and the guard station and both service entrances, and by midnight he’ll have a man inside the catering company that supplies that house.” I let that land. “Kiryl doesn’t move without us knowing. If anybody puts a hand on him, we know inside the hour. And if the situation deteriorates, I have thirty-one men on this continent who will go into that house, and I will spend all of them.”

She was very still.

“That’s not the same as having him,” she said.

“No. It isn’t,” I conceded.

“You took me.” Her voice was quiet now. “You took the asset, Scordato. You left the liability.” She said it without heat. “Don’t dress it up. You’re no better than Gianni.”

I could have defended myself. Could have got angry about the fact she was comparing me to a patricide. But I didn’t.

She was owed the insult and I couldn’t have changed her mind anyway, and because some of what she said was accurate.

“I had no choice,” I said. “There was no other option. Going into the house for your brother while the convoy was still moving means fighting inside a building with him in it, and Yelena—I’ve done that. Boys get shot in hallways. He’d have been the first one hit.” I held her eyes. “So yes. I made a choice. But I didn’t leave him. My brother will look out for him.”

“Your brother,” she said. “Wonderful. And what is your brother like?”

“Well. He’s a chef.”

She stood up.

I was out of my seat before she’d taken the second step, and I got between her and the cabin door with my back to it, and she came up short a foot away.

“Move.”

“There’s nowhere to go.”

“There is a door and you are standing in front of it—”

“We’re in the fucking sky, Yelena.”

She hit me.

Open hand, hard, across the face—across the left side, the side with four butterfly closures in it—and it landed like a thrown brick.

She went to do it again and I caught her wrists.

Both of them, the way I had on the road. I brought them in and crossed them and held them against my own chest, over my sternum.

We were very close then. Close enough that I could feel her breath on the wet part of my face. Her hair was down on one side and her shoulder was bare where the silk had torn away and there was a purple ring around her left wrist under my thumb that I had not put there. She was breathing in fast hard pulls. So was I. My heart was going like a winch under load and hers was going against the backs of my knuckles, and she was so angry she was shaking, and something else was happening in that four inches of air and we both knew it, and it was the single most dangerous thing on that aircraft.

“You can hate me,” I said.

“I do.”

“Good. Keep it. You can scream, and nobody on this plane will come. You can take another piece out of my face—you’re welcome to it, you’ve made a start.” My voice dropped. “But hear the one thing, Yelena Lvovna, and then I’ll let go. That paper in your hand is a man writing down, in advance, what he intends to do the moment you say no to him. He put it in a movement order. He had it countersigned. He considered your refusal and decided it was a procedural inconvenience.” I looked at her mouth, and then made myself look at her eyes. “I don’t hand women back to men who do that. Not for a case, not for a war, not for the whole of Sicily. So there’s no version of tonight where I turn this plane around.”

Her wrists were still in my hands. Her pulse was still going against my knuckles, fast, wild, and I could feel exactly the moment she stopped pulling.

I let go immediately.

She stepped back. Two steps, three. Sat down in the seat across the aisle with her spine straight and her ruined bodice held up against her shoulder with one hand, and put the dispatch order in her lap and smoothed it flat.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.