Chapter 18
Yelena
They washed the smoke out of my hair as if kidnapping could be made respectable with expensive shampoo.
Two women did it under armed supervision. Neither spoke to me. One tested the water against her wrist before guiding me into the shower. The other stood near the locked bathroom door with my discarded clothes sealed inside a clear evidence bag.
Not evidence for the police.
Evidence that I had entered Gianni’s custody wearing another man’s touch on my skin.
The water ran hot. I let it.
The sedative had left my muscles weak and my mouth coated in the taste of metal. Smoke still clung to my throat. I stood beneath the spray and watched grey water circle the drain.
No window. No vent large enough for a hand. Smooth stone walls. Steel fixtures fixed flush to the surface.
The mirror had been removed. I felt like I wasn’t even a person. No reflection, no sense of self. Nothing.
I counted seconds between the low vibrations beneath my feet. Eleven. Then twenty-three. Then eight. Cooling machinery, perhaps. Freight equipment. Something industrial and heavy.
One woman handed me soap.
I looked at her wrist. No watch. No jewelry. No key card.
“Where are we?”
She stared at the floor.
The guard by the door shifted his rifle.
“Quite the conversationalist,” I said.
Nobody answered.
They dressed me in pale silk afterward. A blouse with pearl buttons. A long skirt. Soft underthings. Flat shoes.
No zipper teeth. No underwire. No belt. Nothing I could break apart or turn into an edge.
Gianni had thought of everything. Almost everything, I told myself.
He had not thought of Sal. Or maybe he had, but he hadn’t reckoned with him.
The belief came with pain attached. I held it anyway.
They led me from the bathroom into a corridor between archive shelves.
The facility was enormous. Rows of grey steel climbed toward a ceiling crossed by pipes and cable trays. White labels marked boxes with numbers instead of names. Cooling equipment hummed behind mesh cages. Small green lights blinked in ordered lines.
There were no windows.
No dust either.
Whatever this place was, it was well maintained. Obsessively so.
My footsteps disappeared into the machinery’s low drone. Armed men stood at every intersection. Some belonged to Gianni. A few looked Russian. None wore insignia.
I counted doors.
One behind the bathroom.
Two along the archive corridor.
A freight lift with a keyed control.
A wide loading door at the far end, too distant to reach before a rifle found my spine.
Then the steel security door.
It opened after three separate credentials. A card. A thumbprint. A six-digit code.
I watched the hand entering it.
Four. Seven. One. Nine.
The guard blocked the last two numbers with his shoulder.
Inside was a corporate suite built in the belly of the records facility. Glass partitions. Black carpet. Conference rooms. A small kitchen. Clean white walls that could have belonged to an investment firm in Manhattan.
A terminal sat in the center office. Gianni stood by the desk with a cup of espresso. He had changed suits since the SUV. Navy now. White shirt. Silver cuff links. He looked rested.
I hoped Sal tore the face from him.
“Better, cutie?” Gianni said as he looked me over.
“Go fuck yourself.”
His smile was small.
“Sit.”
I remained standing.
Two guards entered behind me.
They did not touch me. They did not have to.
Gianni placed his espresso on the desk.
“Your wrists are free,” he said. “There are no restraints. No marks on your face. The drug should be out of your system within the hour.”
“How thoughtful.”
“It is practical. The terminal records everything. Voice. Face. Eye movement. Speech pattern.” He tapped the camera. “You need to appear alert.”
“I am alert enough to tell it I was kidnapped.”
“You could.”
His lack of concern tightened something in my stomach.
I sat because standing gained me nothing. The chair rolled half an inch beneath my weight. I noted that too.
Gianni lowered himself into the chair across from me.
“The employee trust you created contains an emergency provision,” he said. “If the trust is challenged before final certification, your shares become inaccessible for ninety days.”
“I know what I wrote.”
“Then you understand the problem.”
“For you.”
“Darling, we’re to be married. My problems are your problems, too.
” He folded one leg over the other. “At noon, the challenge period closes. Your suspension of my administrator access becomes permanent pending litigation. The trust takes control of the protected accounts. Nobody can use the shares. Not you. Not me. Not your little worker council.”
“You kidnapped me because Angela wrote good bylaws.”
“I kidnapped you because you belong to me.”
“I belong to nobody.”
“Fiction.”
He turned the monitor toward me. A transaction window waited on-screen. My name appeared at the top.
YELENA LVOVNA SOKOLOVA.
Below it sat two pending instruments.
Cancellation of the emergency trust.
Grant of full voting proxy to Gianni Scordato.
The deadline clock in the corner read 10:41.
“You will cancel the trust,” he said. “Then you will grant me your proxy. The recording will show that you acted voluntarily, with full understanding of the consequences.”
“No.”
“You have seventy-nine minutes.”
“I could have seventy-nine thousand years. The answer would remain no.”
Gianni studied me.
I returned the stare. My heart beat too quickly, but my face belonged to the pakhan’s daughter. Lev had taught me stillness before he taught me arithmetic.
“Without your authorization,” Gianni said, “the shares disappear behind the freeze for three months. Payroll stalls. Vendor accounts fail. The court appoints interim management.”
“You.”
“Someone reasonable.”
“You don’t know anyone reasonable.”
His mouth tightened.
I looked toward the terminal camera.
“You need more than my face. The hardware token isn’t installed.”
Something moved in his eyes.
Good.
They couldn’t do any of this without a hardware token. And Angela was the only person on the planet with one of those.
One of the guards shifted behind me. Gianni lifted a finger. The man went still.
No violence on my face. No bruises where the camera could see them. Gianni had built himself a stage and needed the leading woman pretty.
That gave me room. Not much, but enough to be difficult.
“We have people working on the hardware token,” Gianni said. “It will take some time, but there will be a workaround.”
I snorted. “Some time? It’ll take days.”
“It’ll take as long as it takes.”
“No. Because with all that time, Sal will find me,” I said. “You know he will.”
Gianni laughed softly.
The sound scraped across my skin.
“Salvatore is likely tearing Chicago apart. He will hit Mill Basin. He may hit every Halberd office from Boston to Miami. He will make a great deal of noise.”
The machines hummed beyond the glass.
“But not here,” he said. “Nobody knows this facility exists.”
I looked at the archive shelves through the suite windows. Endless grey rows. Boxes buried behind shell companies and old records.
“You know,” Gianni continued, “this could have been comfortable.”
I faced him again.
“If you had married me without the drama, you could have kept your houses. Your clothes. Your little foundations. I would have let you sit in meetings and say intelligent things.”
“Well if only I’d known how generous you are! I would have done it.” The sarcasm was biting.
“You might even have believed you had authority.”
My nails pressed into my palms.
He leaned forward.
“But you embarrassed me. You made me look weak. You ran to Salvatore and opened your legs while my ring was still intended for your hand.”
The words hit. I did not let him see where.
“You should be careful,” I said. “Jealousy makes your face soft.”
His eyes changed.
There he was.
Not the heir. Not the businessman. The frightened, second-rate son who had murdered his father and still could not become the man whose chair he wanted.
“You will sign anyway,” he said.
“No.”
“You will.”
He smiled again, but nothing pleasant remained in it.
“And afterward, I will make certain every day is hell.”
I turned toward the screen and read the first clause.
Not because I intended to sign.
Because Sal had taught me what to do when fear tried to make the world small.
Breathe.
Observe.
Choose.
So I breathed.
I read.
And I waited for the man who was always coming.
The steel door opened at eleven-oh-two, and a woman walked through it. She was striking.
She wore a fitted black suit beneath a camel coat, dark hair pinned at the nape, every detail controlled. An antique ring flashed on one hand. The other carried a locked equipment case.
Four armed men escorted her.
She looked at Gianni first. Then she looked at me.
No warmth. No surprise. No apology.
Only assessment.
“Well,” she said. “Sorry we had to meet this way. Don’t take it personal, but you look like shit.”
I stared at her.
Gianni came around the desk with open delight.
“Donatella Caruso,” he said. “You look beautiful. I’m so glad we could arrange this meeting—you’re my favorite Caruso by far.”
“Don’t waste my time with flattery,” she replied.
Her English was crisp. Chicago underneath it. A trace of Italy appeared only around the hard consonants.
Gianni offered his hand.
She ignored it and placed the case on the conference table.
“Your men kept me at the gate for nine minutes,” she said. “That was not our arrangement.”
“They are careful.”
“They are stupid. Careful men check credentials once. It’s the illiterate who keep staring for minutes, trying to work out what all the squiggly shapes mean.”
One of the guards bristled.
Donatella looked at him.
“What?” she asked.
The guard looked away.
“That’s what I thought.”
She turned back to Gianni.
“You said the transfer would be ready.”
“It is.”
“The witness protocol?”
“Prepared.”
“Cancellation language?”
“On the terminal.”
“Independent legal review?”
Gianni’s gaze moved toward me.
“Yelena understands the documents.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Something unpleasant flickered through me.
She sounded like Dante.