Page 182 of Dark King Daddy

“Thank you.”

I opened my mouth to say something else—to say what, I did not know, something that would be adequate to what this woman had done, something that would convey the fact that she had called the police and guided my wife behind a counter and been threatened with death for it—and nothing came. My throat closed. I stood in a tile showroom and I could not speak.

The woman looked at me. She reached across the counter. She touched my hand—a brief, light pressure, the gesture of a person who understood that the man standing in front of her was holding himself together with something thinner than thread.

“She’s strong,” the woman said. “You know that.”

“I know.”

“She’ll be okay.”

I nodded. I did not trust my voice. I turned and I walked out of the showroom and the cold air hit my face and I stood on the sidewalk beside the police tape and I breathed.

I took out my phone. I called Sal.

He answered on the first ring.

“Daniil, cugino.”

“She’s been taken. Oleg Voronin. Near Teterboro. I need everything you can spare. The plane—keep it available. A doctor. Men. Whatever you have in New York or can get here within the hour.”

Sal was quiet for two seconds. I heard the silence of a man who had fought his own war and understood what the words meant.

“The plane is yours,” he said. “I have four men in the city—Scordato security, armed, licensed. I’ll have them at your location in twenty minutes. A doctor—I’ll find one. Give me the address of where you need them.”

I gave him the address of Sokolov House. “We’re heading there now.”

“Yelena knows,” Sal said. “She’s ready.”

“Thank you.”

“Daniil.”

“Yes.”

“Bring her home.”

I hung up.

She was a fighter. She had done everything in her power to escape. For herself, but for me, too. I couldn’t just give up everything my father had built, Ksenia wouldn’t want that. I had to be a fighter, like her.

Arkady stood beside me. Nikita stood beside him. My brothers. The road. The grey sky. The wrecked SUV against the concrete barrier and the police tape across the glass door and the blood on the carpet inside.

I looked at Arkady.

“How do we get her out alive?”

307 Brighton Beach Avenue. The building rose from the street in dark stone and smoked glass, discreet and immovable. I had walked through these doors ten thousand times. I had sat in my father’s office and listened to him give orders. I had stood in this hallway as a boy and watched men kiss his ring.

Now I walked through the doors as a man whose wife was in a garage in Hackensack with a man who had helped murder her father.

Men stood in clusters—Sokolov soldiers, captains, people who had heard something was wrong and come to headquarters because headquarters was where you went when things were wrong. They parted for me. They watched my face. Whatever they saw there, they did not ask questions.

Arkady followed. Nikita followed. We went upstairs to the office. Lev’s office. My office.

I stood at the window and I looked at the street below and I waited for my brothers.

Arkady entered first. He closed the door. He stood with his back against it, arms crossed, his face set in the hard blank mask that meant he was ready to do violence and waiting for the word.