Page 8 of Bred By the Savage Bidder
She takes my arm.
The drive is forty minutes, and she spends the first ten in silence, watching the dark go past, and I let her, because whatever is happening behind that composure has earned the time. When she finally speaks, it's in French, soft, almost to the window.
"Maman doesn't even know."
"She'll know by morning. France is six hours ahead and your father will want to tell the story while it's still his version." I keep my eyes on the road. "You can give her a better version tomorrow. From my house. On a phone he isn't listening in on."
She turns from the window. "You think of everything."
My house sits at the top of the bluff above the harbor, and I watch her as she sees it for the first time. Not the house itself, stone and glass and the security my brothers find excessive. The view. The whole port spread out below in chains of light, the cranes, the berths, the container ships warping in against the dark water.
She stands in my living room with her wrap still on, looking down at the industry that has owned every year of her life, and she goes very still.
"You can see the berths from here," she says.
"Eleven of them. The Maréchale came through last month. Slip nine." I let that sit a moment. "You'll find I have a professional interest in your father's traffic."
"Is that what I am? Professional interest?"
"You're the one acquisition I've ever made that the numbers don't explain." I nod down the hall. "Your rooms are in the eastwing. Anna has stocked them with the basics and will get more tomorrow."
She turns, and the firelight flashes in her eyes. "You knew you’d be bringing someone home."
"I knew my brother would expect me to. I wasn’t sure I’d find someone worth bringing home."
She crosses the room toward me instead of the east wing, and for a moment I genuinely don't know what she intends, which makes her one of perhaps three people alive who can do that to me. She takes my right hand and turns it over, and frowns at my palm like a discrepancy.
"You didn't clean it." She lifts her eyes to mine.
"It's a tradition. It heals."
"It's an infection risk is what it is. Where do you keep your medical supplies?"
Two minutes later she is cleaning the cut and applying gauze and an adhesive dressing to my palm.
"There." She presses the edges down gently and looks up at me, suddenly aware of the distance she crossed to do this, and doesn't retreat from it. "Goodnight, Serik."
"Goodnight, Juliette."
She walks to the east wing and doesn't look back, and I stand there with my hand still outstretched in front of me until I hear her door close.
Then I go to my office, because the evening has a second half.
The port glitters through the window while the line connects. Pavel picks up on the second ring, the way he's paid to.
"It's me," I say. "First thing tomorrow, find out who holds the paper on a vessel called the Maréchale. New Jersey entity,deliberately boring. Buy it. All of it. Quietly, through the Liechtenstein structure. Nothing traces home."
A pause. "And when we hold it?"
"Nothing. We just hold it." I watch a crane swing a container through the dark, slow and certain. "And Pavel. Start a folder. Koralev. Everything he owes, everyone he owes it to. Thread by thread."
I hang up and flex my bandaged hand, and look down at the berths.
Her father sold her to get into our ports.
By the time I'm finished, he’ll have nothing left.
Juliette
