Page 142 of Dagger in the Sea

“Adri mou.” Yianni’s tone lowered, softened. The tone of the caring father who had a simple solution to every problem. The tone he’d used with me for years. “If we pay them the money, this will be finished. I know this is asking a great deal, but it is simple.”

I’d been shot at, my life was on the table, and this wassimple?

“Yia pes, Babá,” I threw at him. “Tell me, will he send kidnappers after me next? A car bomb?”

Yianni’s eyes flared, his fingers thumping on the table. I was being the difficult, disruptive child. “If we pay the money—”

“You promised them that Adri would pay, didn’t you?” Turo said. “So when that didn’t happen, they shot at her. Now what? Did you assure them that she got their message? Did you make a new arrangement with him? He’ll do you a favor and set you up somewhere else if you pay them back everything in one go?”

Yianni took in a breath and held it, his face simmering.

“Póso?” I asked. “How much do you owe them?”

My father leaned back in the sofa. “One hundred fifty-thousand euro.”

Turo made a rough noise in the back of his throat.

Sour bile swirled in my stomach, a cold creature slithering through my intestines, buckling there, stinging up my throat. I shot up from the sofa and went to the open veranda door, gulping in air. How could he be so stupid? How?

Because he only thinks about what he wants and how he must have it immediately.

Turo was right. God had nothing to do with this perverse folly of men like Evgeny, Fokas, and my father. Selfish, greedy choices over and over again. Wasn’t that what evil was? The absence of God?

I was at the center of this horror show my father had created. If my money would keep my family safe, I would do it.

I turned to face Yianni. To face my years long denial of my reality, my adversary, my own father. “I’ll pay. But I want you to know I’m not doing this for you, to get you out of your mess. I’m doing this for my family—my mother and Petros, my brother, because Fokas just might go after them too, and they don’t deserve that. You don’t know the meaning of the word family. You don’t.”

“You are my family!” he spit out and my heart clutched. “You forget, you were taken away from me.”

“You didn’t fight for me. You didn’t tell my mother no, I won’t sign your papers, I won’t take your money.”

“Ach, none of that mattered, Adri, not really.”

“It mattered to me!” I said, my own words stinging.

Yianni pressed his lips together, his eyes darkening, a long finger pointing at me. “You will always be my daughter, Adriana. It is my blood that runs through your veins, and nothing can change that, nothing. That new last name of yours is just another word.”

“You really don’t understand, do you?” My shoulders dropped. “It’s always about you, what you want, what you think you deserve. What you could get out of it for the least amount of effort. Ah, and yourluck.” The word came out of my mouth like a spear cracking glass. My spear. Mine.

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that,” Yianni hissed. “You have no idea how the real world works.”

Turo cleared his throat, his eyes darting between us. “Yianni, your friends and business partners—did they just swallow the money and move on?”

He slanted his head. “Yes.”

“Did Fokas give you a deadline for payment?” Turo asked.

“Thursday.”

“It’s Tuesday today,” I said.

“You weren’t answering my calls!” Yianni’s voice flared. “You were in Mykonos having your good time. I saw the pictures in a magazine yesterday.” A hand flicked at Turo. “Kissing this one on the deck of your boyfriend’s fancy yacht.”

My face heated.

“You like your good time too, don’t you,agápi mou?”my father threw at me. “Just like me, and just like your mother.”

His icy spatter stung my skin.

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