Page 95 of Ruthless Daddy
His wrists were behind him, zip-tied. His ankles were tied to the legs of the chair. He had been crying. The skin under his eyes was wet and his lower lip was bleeding where someone had hit him, not hard, just enough to start the lip. He was still in the parka. He was still wearing Pietro’s gloves.
When he saw me his whole face broke.
“Oh, Miss Anna. Oh no, Miss Anna. No, no, no, no — “
“Wendell.” I made my voice the way I had made my voice at Halberd, in the rooms where the principals had wanted me afraid. Low, even, useful. “It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay.”
“I told them not to call you. I told them — “
“I know you did.”
The man who had opened the door was now behind me. Another man had come up on my left. The third was at the back wall with a long coat over his arm and one hand inside the coat in a way that was not subtle and was not meant to be. The fourth was sitting on the edge of a workbench against the right wall with his ankles crossed and a phone in his hand. He looked up at me when I stopped walking.
He was the voice from the phone. I knew him before he spoke.
“Madame Ancelotti.” He slid the phone into his pocket. “Thank you. You are six minutes early. That is unusual. We appreciate it.”
“Let him go.”
“Of course.”
He said it so quickly that for one full second I thought he meant it. I thought I had read the situation wrong. I thought—the way a person thinks when she is drowning—that the surface was a few inches closer than I had calculated.
“He walks out the door,” I said. My voice was steady. “He walks out and goes north and you watch him go for two blocks and then I am yours. You have the address of a bench he sits on every afternoon. You can find him again if I do not cooperate. But he walks out now.”
“Of course,” the man said again.
He turned his head a quarter inch toward the man at the back wall with his hand in his coat.
He nodded.
The man at the back wall took the hand out of the coat. The hand had a gun in it. The gun was small and matte and had a tube on the end of it that I understood, with the slow stupid clarity of a person whose brain had stopped working in real time, was a suppressor.
He raised the gun to the back of Wendell’s head.
I lunged.
I lunged the way an animal lunges—without plan, without the body knowing why, the whole organism going forward at once—and the man behind me caught me by both arms above the elbows and lifted me bodily off the floor and the man on my left got an arm across my throat and the lunge ended six inches into its trajectory with my feet off the concrete and my breath gone.
The gun made a small, dry, polite noise.
Wendell’s head went forward.
That was all. There was no theater. There was no last word.
I made a noise. I was agony.
“Madame,” the man at the workbench said. Pleasantly. “I told you on the telephone what would happen if any condition was not met. You have met all of the conditions. I commend you. You have been a model of compliance. This — “ he gestured, lightly, at Wendell, at the chair, at the small careful red on the concrete, “— this was always going to happen. He had seen our faces. I am sorry that you misunderstood. It was not for sale.”
I was looking at Wendell.
I could not look anywhere else.
His face was turned a quarter toward me. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. The expression on his face was the expression of a man who had been about to say something and had not been given time.
A hand came across my eyes from behind.
A cloth came across the hand.
