Page 10 of Dark King Daddy

“You work for the Orlovs?”

The Orlovs were an ally of ours. A close ally.

“I work for Orlov Marine. I’m a dock supervisor. I’ve been there six years.”

I closed my eyes for one second. Two.

Sergei Petrov. Orlov employee. Abducted, beaten, left beside an incendiary device in a building we owned, with a Sokolov Freight union card in his jacket. They had given him my father’s name to repeat. Alive or dead, he was meant to implicate us.

The Orlovs would retaliate. We would answer. The Voronins would have their war.

“They told me Lev Sokolov authorized it,” Sergei said. “They said it three, four times. ‘Lev Sokolov knows. Lev Sokolov authorized this.’ They wanted me to believe it. They wanted me to say it — to anyone who found me, I think. To say it before I died.”

He looked at me. His swollen eyes could barely open, but through the slits I could see the fear and the confusion and the desperate need to understand what had been done to him.

“They said the old arrangement was finished,” he added. “Those words. Exactly.”

The same phrase Karpov had used with Yuri Markov. A script. The Voronins were running a script.

I stood. The fire roared behind me, throwing long shadows across the yard. The building would burn to the slab. Everything inside — the dead gunman on the mezzanine, the fuel cans, the phone timer — would be ash and metal.

“Get him to the clinic,” I told the driver. “Stay with him. Do not let anyone in that room who isn’t one of ours.”

The vehicle pulled away. I watched the taillights shrink toward the street.

Arkady appeared at my shoulder. He had noticed the cut on his forearm now. He was pressing a folded handkerchief against it with the absent irritation of a man bothered by a paper cut.

“You sent everyone out,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And then you went into that back room alone.”

“I was closest.”

“You were closest.” He repeated it flatly. “You are the heir to this family, and that is your explanation.”

“I thought I had time.”

“You had a number on a screen. That isn’t the same thing.”

He was right.

Arkady stared at me. The firelight moved across his face, filling the hollows under his cheekbones, catching the hard line of his jaw. He looked like our father in that light. The resemblance was not comforting.

“Next time,” he said, “send me.”

I did not answer. There would not be a next time, or there would, and the same argument would happen, and the same silence would follow it. That was the shape of things between Arkady and me. He wanted to stand between me and every dangerous thing in the world. I wanted to stand beside him. Neither of us would yield.

We drove north. The skyline reassembled itself around us — the turnpike, the marsh lights, the distant towers of Manhattan across the water. I sat in the front seat and called my father.

He answered on the second ring. He had not slept. I could hear it in the slight drag of his breathing, the fractional delay before he spoke. Lev at full capacity answered before the first ring finished.

I told him about Sergei, the planted card, the words his captors had made him repeat. Then I told him how close the Voronins had come to getting what they wanted.

Lev listened without interrupting. When I finished, silence held the line for five seconds.

“The Orlovs,” he said. “Friday evening. Volna. Seven o’clock. Mikhail and I will discuss what this means.”