Page 181 of Dark King Daddy

“What.”

“If she gets out and I don’t—if Oleg takes me, if it goes sideways, if the deal breaks—you take her and you go. You put her on that plane to Chicago. You don’t come back for me.”

Arkady’s hands tightened further. The knuckles went white.

“Daniil—”

“Promise me.”

“I can’t—”

“Arkady. Promise me. If she is out and I am not, you take her and you go. That is not a request.”

The truck was silent. The engine. The road. The gray sky through the windshield. My brother’s face, working through something he did not want to accept.

“I promise,” he said.

“Now, let’s go to that tile showroom. We have work to do.”

I picked up the phone. I opened the camera. I looked at the screen—my own face, pale, the ice-blue eyes flat and hard, the face of a man about to record the end of everything his father had built.

I pressed record.

The tile showroom sat on a flat stretch of industrial road between two warehouses, its glass front reflecting the grey November sky and the red and blue lights of three emergency vehicles still parked at the curb. Police tape crossed the entrance in a loose X. The wrecked SUV was fifty yards east, lodged against a concrete barrier at an angle that made the vehicle look like it had been dropped from a height. The driver’s door was open. The rear window was gone—not shattered, simply absent, the frame holding nothing but cold air.

Arkady pulled the truck to the curb. I was out before he stopped.

A police officer tried to intercept me at the tape. Nikita handled him—credentials, rapid Russian-accented English. I did not hear the exchange. I was already through the door.

The showroom was small. Carpeted. Sample boards on the walls. A reception counter at the center, behind which a woman sat in a chair with a blanket around her shoulders and a paper cup of water in her hands. She was middle-aged. Brown hair. Her face was pale and her hands shook when she lifted the cup.

I looked at the carpet.

The blood was there. Four feet from the counter—a smear, dark against the gray industrial fiber. I could see the path of it: a drop near the door where she must have entered, a streak along the display rack where she had run between the tile samples, and the larger stain where she had sheltered behind the counter and waited.

I knelt beside the stain. I put my hand on the carpet, next to where hers had been. The fiber was stiff. Drying.

“Sir?”

I stood. The woman was looking at me. Her eyes were red. The blanket slipped from one shoulder and she pulled it back.

“You’re her husband,” she said.

“Yes. Tell me what happened.”

She told me.

Ksenia had come in bare-armed. No coat. Her blouse torn at the collar. Her hand bleeding. She had said: they’re trying to take me. Please. The woman had called the police. She had guided Ksenia behind the counter. She had thought—for a moment, for two minutes—that it would be enough. That the police would come and the glass door would hold and the woman crouching behind her counter would be safe.

Then Oleg had come through the door.

“He was enormous,” she said. “I’ve never seen a man that big in a suit. And he was—he was polite. He introduced himself. She hit him.”

The woman’s mouth moved — not a smile, something closer to disbelief. “She came up from behind the counter and she went for the side door and he caught her and she turned around and she punched him in the mouth. With her fist. With the hand that was bleeding. She hit him so hard his head went sideways.”

I looked at the counter. At the carpet. At the space between them where my wife had stood and fought a man who outweighed her by a hundred pounds.

“He had a pistol,” the woman said. “He pointed it at me. He said she had to come with him, or I would die. Right here. In my showroom.” She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “She stopped. She just—stopped. She looked at me and she stopped fighting. She went with him.”