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CHAPTER TWO
DAMIEN
My father calls me at eleven in the morning, which is never good, because
my father does not believe in phone calls before noon unless someone is dead
or someone owes him money.
"Come to the house," he says. No hello. Yevgeni Kovalenko has never once
in my life said hello to me on the phone. "We have a delivery."
"I'm at the restaurant."
"The restaurant will survive an hour without you."
I look out through the pass window at the dining room of Severny, half-full
for a Tuesday lunch, waiters moving between the tables like it's a normal day
in a normal restaurant that just happens to be owned by a man who launders
through the wine list. Sasha's at the bar, arguing with a delivery guy about a
case of vermouth that's apparently three bottles short, and for one small,
stupid second I want to stay exactly where I am and let it be somebody else's
Tuesday.
"What kind of delivery," I say.
"Come and see."
He hangs up before I can ask again. That's the other thing about my father
— he never explains himself twice, and he never explains himself to a question
he can instead make you drive forty minutes to answer in person, because
making people drive to him is its own kind of leash.
Sasha catches my face when I come out from the back. He's known me
since we were nine, which means he's one of maybe three people alive who
can read what's under my expression instead of just what's on it.
"House?" he says.
"House."
"He say why?"
"He said 'delivery.'" Sasha's eyebrows do something complicated. "That's either very good or
very bad."
"With him, it's usually both."
I take the black car, not the one from the restaurant lot — the one that's
actually mine, the only thing in my life that's fully, uncomplicatedly mine —
and I drive the forty minutes out to the estate with the radio off, because I
already know what this is going to be about before I get there, the way you
know a storm's coming from the pressure in your ears before the sky does
anything.
It's going to be about Aleksei.
Everything with my father, for eighteen months, has secretly been about
Aleksei, even the things that aren't, even the things that are supposedly about
vermouth deliveries or restaurant permits or which cousin gets which
territory. My brother went into Marchetti land a year and a half ago to deliver
a message about renegotiating the truce, and he never came back out, and my
father has told everyone, including me, including himself, that the Marchettis
killed him and buried the body somewhere we'll never find it, and that we
don't retaliate because the peace is worth more than the truth.
I don't believe that. I've never said so out loud, because saying it out loud
means admitting I think my father chose the easier lie over the harder war,
and there is no version of that conversation that ends with both of us still
speaking to each other.
The estate gates are already open when I pull up, which means he's been
watching for my car, which means whatever this is, he wants it done before
lunch.
Ruslan is on the front steps when I get out. My father's consigliere since
before I was born, the man who taught me how to shake a hand hard enough
to mean something and soft enough not to start a war doing it. He's got a face
built for patience, the kind of stillness that reads as wisdom right up until you
notice it never actually changes, no matter what's happening around it.
"Damien." He says my name like he's tasting it. "Good. He's waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"You'll see." Everyone in my life, this morning, apparently only speaks in things I'll see.
I follow Ruslan through the house, past the room where my mother's
photographs still hang even though she's been gone nine years, past the office
where my father conducts every piece of business that matters, and out
through the back toward the guest wing, which nobody has used since before
Aleksei disappeared.
My father is standing in the hallway outside one of the guest rooms with
his hands behind his back, the posture he uses when he wants to look like a
general instead of a man in his sixties with a bad hip. Two of our people are
with him — Grishin and a younger guy I don't fully know yet — and between
them, sitting very straight in a hard-backed chair with her wrists zip-tied in
front of her, is a girl.
Not a soldier. Not anyone's wife or mistress or message. A girl in a diner
uniform, dark hair coming loose from a ponytail, an apron still tied around her
waist like whoever grabbed her didn't give her time to take it off. She's
looking at the floor when I come around the corner, jaw set so hard I can see
the muscle working, and when she finally looks up at me, there's no fear in it.
There's fury. Pure, focused, absolutely useless fury, the kind you only see in
people who haven't yet understood how much trouble they're actually in.
"Who is this," I say.
"Carlo Rossetti's daughter," my father says. "The Marchettis found her an
hour ago. Enzo's people delivered her here personally, as a gesture of good
faith."
"Good faith for what?"
"Carlo Rossetti kept the Marchetti books for ten years. He disappeared
eight months ago with eleven million dollars of Marchetti money that, as it
happens, was never fully Marchetti to begin with." My father's mouth does
something that isn't quite a smile. "Some of it was ours. Laundered through
three accounts and a shell company Enzo's people set up on our behalf, as
part of an arrangement I don't need to explain to you. When Rossetti
vanished, that money vanished with him. Almost two million of it was
Kovalenko money."
"So we're owed." "We're owed, and Enzo Marchetti doesn't have the cash on hand to make it
whole today, and every year that debt sits unpaid is a year the truce gets
thinner." My father finally looks past me, at the girl in the chair, the way you'd
look at a piece of collateral sitting in a bank vault. "So instead, until Rossetti is
found or the debt is settled, she stays with us. A guarantee. Something Enzo
actually cares about not losing, which tells me Rossetti's daughter is worth
more to him alive and unhappy in our house than she is anywhere else."
"You're keeping her."
"I'm keeping her here," my father says, "which is a phrase I'd like you to
notice is different from keeping her myself. I have a business to run and a hip
that doesn't let me deal with a hostage situation personally. You have a
restaurant with a private wing and staff who already understand discretion.
She stays with you."
I look at the girl again. She's watching this entire exchange with the
specific, brittle attention of someone doing math she doesn't like the answer
to, and when my eyes land back on her, she doesn't look away.
"I'm not a babysitter," I say.
"You're not babysitting," my father says. "You're holding leverage until it's
spent. There's a difference, and I'd like you to learn it, because it's a skill
you're going to need a great deal more of very soon."
There's a weight under that sentence I don't like, something about the
word soon that sounds less like scheduling and more like a warning, but I
don't get to ask, because Ruslan steps in smoothly the way he always does
when a conversation's about to go somewhere my father doesn't want it to go.
"It's a simple arrangement," Ruslan says. "She's an asset. Treat her like
one. Comfortable, contained, unharmed. The Marchettis need to see we can
be trusted with something they care about, or the whole gesture means
nothing."
"And if Rossetti's found?"
"Then she goes home," my father says, "with an apology and a fruit basket,
for all I care. This isn't about the girl, Damien. It's about proving to Enzo
Marchetti that we can hold something precious to him without breaking it, so
that the next time we need him to trust us with something larger, he
remembers this." I look at her one more time. Up close, I can see the eviction notice sticking
half out of her apron pocket, crumpled soft at the folds like it's been handled a
hundred times, and something about that detail — the fact that whoever this
girl is, she was worried about rent this morning, and now she's a bargaining
chip in a war she's never heard of — lodges somewhere under my ribs that I
don't have time to examine.
"Fine," I say. "She comes with me."
For the first time since I walked in, she speaks.
"I have a name," she says. Her voice is rougher than I expect, like she's
been holding something back in her throat since before I walked into the
room. "You could use it instead of talking about me like I'm a car you're
borrowing."
Grishin moves like he's going to tell her to shut up. My father lifts one
finger, barely, and Grishin stops.
"What's your name," I say.
"Mila."
"Mila." I test the shape of it. "Do you know what your father did, Mila?"
Something flickers across her face — grief, I think, real grief, fast and
involuntary, the kind that doesn't look manufactured because nobody's that
good an actor at eleven in the morning with zip ties cutting into their wrists.
"My father's dead. He died eight months ago. Whatever this is, whatever you
people think he did, you have the wrong—"
"He's not dead," I say. "He's in Uruguay."
I watch it hit her. Watch the fury drain out and something much worse
move in behind it, something that looks less like fear of me and more like the
specific, private devastation of finding out that eight months of grief were
spent on a lie. It's not a performance. Nobody performs that well.
"You're lying," she says, but there's no conviction in it anymore.
"I don't lie," I say. "I don't need to. Untie her hands."
Grishin looks at my father. My father, after a second, nods, and Grishin
cuts the zip tie with a pocketknife, and Mila immediately rubs at the red
marks on her wrists like she's trying to erase the last hour. "You're coming with me," I tell her.
"I'm not going anywhere with you."
"You don't actually have a door marked otherwise," I say, and I hear how it
sounds the second it's out of my mouth — like my father, like Ruslan, like
every man in this family who's ever explained to someone smaller than them
exactly how few choices they have left. I don't take it back. I can't, not here,
not in front of my father, not with Ruslan watching the whole exchange with
that patient, unreadable stillness that misses nothing.
Mila stands up. She's shorter than I expected, and she still has flour or
sugar or something white dusted along one forearm, some small domestic
detail from a shift she never got to finish, and when she walks past me toward
the door, she does it like she's choosing to, like this was her idea all along and
not a zip-tied ride in the back of somebody else's car.
I almost respect it. I definitely don't say so.
"Damien," my father says, before I follow her out. "Don't get attached to
the collateral."
"I'm not going to."
"See that you don't," Ruslan says, mild as ever, and something about the
mildness of it, this time, sits wrong with me in a way I don't have a name for
yet.
I follow her out into the hallway, past my mother's photographs, past the
office where my father decides who lives inside the walls of the peace he's
built and who doesn't, and I tell myself the whole way to the car that this is
simple. Contained. A month, maybe two, and then she goes home and I go
back to not asking my father about my brother, and everything stays exactly
as thin and exactly as cold as it's been for eighteen months.
I don't believe it even as I'm thinking it. I just don't know yet how badly I'm
about to be wrong.
DON’T STOP HERE—THE REAL DANGER IS JUST BEGINNING. 🔥
Damien just claimed his collateral... but keeping Mila in his world is a dangerous game neither of them is prepared for.
Will she break under his control, or will she burn his empire to the ground?
🖤 Read Chapter 3 and the full book for FREE!
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