Page 4 of Reckless Heir
"The ransom," Dante says. "I can cover half. I need a bridge for the remainder."
"The figure," my father says.
Dante names it.
It's the number I calibrated eighteen months ago for exactly this scenario. My father doesn't react — of course he doesn't — but his fingers shift slightly on the table, lacing more precisely, and I know he's heard something worth continuing.
"Collateral," my father says.
"I have accounts. Liquidatable assets?—"
"Not accounts." My father's voice is pleasant. Final. The pleasantness is real, which is more frightening than if it weren't. "Accounts can be moved. Hidden. Delayed. I want something with a heartbeat."
The silence that follows has weight. Dante is running options. I know from the file I've spent six months building that he's running them in order — Marco first, then the property portfolio, then the Commission contacts, then the connection in Palermo that he thinks we don't know about. All of them exhausted in the eleven days before this room. All of them calculated to be exhausted.
He has one option left.
I watch him arrive at it.
"A marriage," Dante says.
Very quiet. The words of a man who has carried them for three days and still isn't certain he can say them.
"Your son. My sister."
The room goes very still.
Not the negotiating quiet — not the deliberate silence of parties pausing for effect. A real quiet. The kind that falls when something irreversible has been named.
I keep my face exactly as it was.
My father turns his head toward me — a fraction, barely visible, the equivalent in Aleksander Romanov's vocabulary of a full pivot and a raised eyebrow. Checking whether I've considered this. Whether it's acceptable. He trusts my read on these rooms, always has. He's waiting for my signal.
I incline my head.Yes.
"Sofia," I say. Confirming the name. Letting Dante hear it said in this room, by me, so that the weight of the confirmation is clear. "Age twenty. No public record."
Something moves through Dante's expression. He proposed it — he said it himself. But hearing it confirmed, hearing his sister's name come back from my mouth in this conference room — some part of him was still hoping for a different answer.
"She doesn't know," he says. "About any of it. We've kept her?—"
"I know what you've kept her from."
"She'll hate you." Not a warning. A statement of fact, delivered with the flat certainty of someone who knows the person in question very well.
I consider this.
"That's her prerogative," I say. "My condition stands."
He is very still.
The reason I want her is a surveillance photograph of a woman laughing in a courtyard that I didn't delete and haven't been able to stop seeing in the space behind my eyes when I'mdoing other things. The reason is a margin note in my own hand that I wrote without deciding to. The reason is not strategic and I have no clean category for it and so I present only the confirmation, which is true enough to hold under scrutiny.
Dante looks at me for a long time. He's looking for the lie and finding something else instead, which is worse for him because whatever he's found is stranger than whatever lie he expected.
"One condition," he says. "From me."
"Name it."
