Chapter 12
Yelena
Iwoke because the place beside me had gone cold.
For one confused second, I reached across the sheets for Sal and found only the dent his body had left behind. The scratchy blanket was tucked around my shoulders. The lake beyond the windows was a slab of pale morning light.
Then I heard voices below.
Not loud. Nobody in this house needed to shout to make danger real.
I pulled on Sal’s sweater from the chair, shoved my feet into slippers, and went downstairs.
The library door stood open three inches.
Serafina’s voice came through first. Flat. Precise.
“Lev has given Gianni thirty Sokolov soldiers. Access to the trucking unions. Permission to recover both his children by force.”
I stopped.
Both his children.
Like Kiryl and I were missing documents. Like we had been misplaced from the drawer where my father kept the things he owned.
Sal answered, and something in his voice made my hand tighten around the doorframe.
“Yelena will never be returned.”
After a few more mumbled words, I pushed the door open.
Every face turned.
The wall screen showed flames climbing the back of Mezza Notte. Orange fire ate the brick around the loading door. Men in dark clothes moved through smoke. One lifted his arm and threw something burning inside.
Tonio stood beside the table with his hands locked behind his back. Pietro had gone still near the fireplace. Serafina held a paper folder against the wood.
Sal’s face changed when he saw me.
Not guilt. Not irritation.
Concern.
“Little one,” he said.
“What happened?”
Serafina tapped the screen. “Gianni’s people firebombed Mezza Notte. Everyone got out. One guard was shot at the produce yard. He’s alive. Kateriana’s bakery, thank god, was unharmed.”
My stomach dropped anyway.
The restaurant. Tonio’s restaurant.
Fire moved across the screen again.
“He did this because of me.”
“No,” Sal said.
“Yes.” I looked at the paperwork in front of Serafina. “He did this because I left. Because you took me. Because my father decided I am worth more as an example than a daughter.”
“Gianni prepared the attack before your rescue,” Serafina said.
I looked at her.
“He acquired the loans months ago. He built the defaults into the financial structures. He positioned people before you came to Chicago. He’s been after that block for months—it was a whole thing.”
That should have helped.
It did not.
“He might have planned it,” I said. “But I gave him the reason to pull the trigger.”
Tonio’s jaw flexed. He did not contradict me.
That hurt worse.
I walked to the table and stared down at the documents. Shell companies. Lenders. Receivership notices. My father’s name did not appear anywhere, but I could see him in every clean line of the strategy. Lev Sokolov did not need to sign a paper to make blood spill.
“There’s an obvious solution,” I said.
Sal’s eyes narrowed slightly.
I hated that he knew before I finished.
“I transfer my shares to a neutral trust. Everything Gianni needs from me becomes unavailable. Then I leave this house. I make contact through someone he trusts. He follows me, and he stops burning your businesses to flush me out.”
“No,” Serafina said.
The word cracked through the room before Sal could speak.
I turned to her. “You have not heard the complete proposal.”
“I heard enough.”
“You have a restaurant on fire.”
“And surrendering you puts another fire in Gianni’s hands.”
“He wants me.”
“He wants to win,” she said. “There is a difference.”
I stared at her.
Serafina stepped closer. She was smaller than Sal, smaller than Tonio, but she carried herself with the cold exactness of a blade laid on a table.
“If you walk out now, he learns that he can hurt people around you and control you that way. The loans stay. The trucks stay stolen. The injured guard stays injured. He gets you and keeps every advantage he prepared.”
I opened my mouth, but she did not let me use it.
“And more importantly,” she said, quieter now, “you are family.”
The word landed wrong at first.
I almost laughed.
I had a family. A father who called me his finest piece. Brothers who looked at me with a mixture of pity and resentment because nobody wanted to admit what had been done. A bloodline that treated love like an opening in a wall.
Serafina saw something on my face.
“Scordatos do not invoice family for protection,” she said. “Not in money. Not in obedience. Not in your body. Not in your future.”
The room blurred around the edges.
I looked at Sal.
He stood beside the table, broad and motionless. The cut on his cheek had darkened overnight. He had not slept much. None of them had, probably.
“This is not your bill,” he said.
“But it’s your restaurant.”
“It is Tonio’s restaurant.”
Tonio lifted his ice pack from his jaw. “And I’m very attached to it. But I’m also attached to you not being handed to that bastard.”
My throat tightened.
“You barely know me.”
Tonio’s expression turned offended. “I rescued your brother from a house full of Russians. I’ve heard him complain about my food. We are basically relatives.”
A sound came out of me. It might have been a laugh.
Pietro’s mouth shifted once. Almost a smile.
Then the guilt came back, heavy and familiar.
I folded my arms around myself. “I don’t know how to stand here while you all suffer for me. I don’t even know where to look.”
Sal came toward me.
He did not touch me immediately. He stopped an arm’s length away, leaving the choice visible between us.
“Do you want Daddy active?” he asked quietly.
The question cut through the library. Through the burning footage. Through the old reflex that told me to solve everything before someone punished me for failing.
I looked down at my hands.
I wanted to argue. I wanted to demand the operational details. I wanted to prove I was useful enough that nobody could decide I was a burden.
Instead, I felt the floor holding me up. I felt Sal waiting.
“Yes,” I said.
His face softened.
“Then listen to me, little one.” His voice stayed low, but it carried. “You are not responsible for repairing damage Gianni chose to cause. You will eat breakfast. You will sit with Kiryl if you want. You will leave strategy to us for two hours.”
My head lifted. “Two?”
“Two.”
I glared at him.
The glare had no real heat. Not now.
Sal held out his hand.
“Breakfast,” he said. “Then we reassess.”
My fingers went into his.
The relief was instant and humiliating and so sweet it made my eyes sting. Someone else was carrying the room. Not taking my mind from me. Not telling me I was too delicate to understand.
Just carrying it while I rested.
“Yes, Daddy,” I said.
He squeezed my hand once.
“Good girl.”
Every feather on the firebird became black beneath my pencil.
I sat on the rug in the sitting room with the coloring book open across my knees. The bird should have been red and gold. Flame and glory. Instead, I shaded its wings charcoal, its tail black, its eye a hard little dot of ink.
Olimpo slept beside the fireplace with one paw over his nose.
The door opened.
Angela came in carrying a box of gel pens and a plate covered in iced biscuits. She wore an oversized cream cardigan, jeans, and socks with tiny blue stars on them.
I looked at the socks.
She noticed.
“It’s not what you think,” she said.
“I said nothing.”
“Yes but you thought several things.”
“I thought you’d chosen them because they were strategically intimidating.”
She laughed. “That is exactly the sort of lie Pietro would tell.”
She sat on the rug opposite me and opened her own coloring book. Not beside mine. Opposite. Enough space to make it clear she had not come to inspect me.
For several minutes, we colored in silence.
Angela selected a green pen and began filling in leaves around a small house.
“You’re making the firebird black,” she said eventually.
“He’s in mourning.”
“Poor little guy.”
Her hands were steady. Her nails were short and unpainted. A faint pale line crossed one knuckle. I had seen those hands move over financial records with surgical precision. I had watched her find the hidden bones inside Gianni’s accounts.
Now she was adding tiny pink flowers to a hedge.
I looked at her again.
“Do you do this often?”
“Color?”
“This.”
She knew what I meant.
Angela capped the green pen. “Sometimes. Helps me . . be me.”
“Pietro lets you?”
Her eyes came up to mine. Not offended. Just clear.
“Pietro doesn’t let me do anything.”
I flushed. “That came out wrong.”
“I know you dindn’t mean it badly.” She picked up a purple pen. “He takes care of me when I ask him to. Sometimes before I ask, which is irritating. But I’m still the person who decides whether an offshore structure is a fraud or merely ugly.”
“Mostly ugly.”
“Usually ugly.”
I looked down at my black bird.
“Does it make you feel less . . .” I searched for the word. “Capable?”
“No.” Angela’s voice stayed soft. “It makes me capable of continuing.”
The room was quiet except for pencils moving over paper.
“I spent two years acting like I didn’t need anything,” she said. “Food. Sleep. Someone who knew where I was. I thought needing care made me stupid. Or compromised.”
“And now?”
“Now I think Little space is where I recover enough softness to face difficult things.” She glanced at me. “It isn’t where I hide from them.”
Something inside me loosened.
I had been afraid that being Sal’s Little meant becoming a smaller version of myself. A decorative one. A girl who colored while men made decisions.
But Angela knew the numbers. She saw the patterns. Pietro trusted her with work that could change the outcome of the war.
She could be soft on the rug and formidable at the table.
The possibility made my chest ache.
Tonio had left the biscuits on the coffee table. Round shortbread ones, thick with icing and ridiculous amounts of colored sugar. Angela handed me a small knife.
“Would you like to decorate?”
“I have no artistic instincts.”
“You spent ten minutes giving a mythological bird a very authentic-looking trauma response. I think you’ll manage.”
I iced one biscuit blue and added three black dots.
“What is it?” Angela asked.
“Gianni’s face.”