My Father Sold Me to the Man This City Fears · Nadia Voss

Chapter 1: The Price of a Toast

My sister got engaged on a Thursday, and by eleven that night I had been given away as a debt.

The party was at the Rylan Hotel, four hundred guests, my father's idea of modest. He'd been broke for two years. I found out later he'd paid for it with money that wasn't his, which is the shortest possible summary of the entire life of Gordon Ward.

At 10:40 he stood up on the dais with a glass in his hand and made a toast to Cecily and her fiancé, and everybody clapped, and I stood by the door with my coat over my arm because I'd already booked a car.

At 10:52 the room went quiet from the back forward.

That's how you know. Not a scream, not a scene — a quiet, spreading backward through a crowded room like ice forming on a pond.

Three men had come in. Two of them stayed at the doors. The third walked up the middle of the room and everyone got out of his way without appearing to move at all.

I had never seen him before. I knew exactly who he was, because everybody in this city knows: the height, the plain black coat, the face that doesn't do anything. Ilya Sokolov owns the port, twenty percent of the construction in this city, and three judges. My father used to say his name the way people say a diagnosis.

He stopped in front of the dais and looked up at my father, and my father's glass shook so badly the wine came over the rim onto his hand.

"Gordon," Sokolov said. He had a low voice and a slight accent, and it carried without any effort at all. "You're throwing a party."

"Ilya. Ilya, listen—"

"Four million, one hundred and twenty thousand," Sokolov said. "Since March. Do you know what I keep thinking about? Not the money. The nerve. A man robs me for eight months, and then invites four hundred people to a room with my name on the lease."

My father made a sound like a stepped-on animal.

"I'll have it," he said. "Ten days. Twelve—"

"You will not."

"Take the house. Take the house, the boat, take—" And then my father did the thing that I will be unpicking for the rest of my life. He looked around the room, and his eyes went past his fiancée of six years, past his older daughter in her engagement dress, past everyone, and landed on me. "Clara."

The room turned.

"What?" I said.

"Ilya." My father's voice steadied for the first time all night, because a man like that is never so calm as when he's found something to sell. "My younger girl. Clara. Twenty-four, no attachments, she's — Ilya, you've been looking for a wife, everyone knows the council's been at you for two years—"

"Dad." Cecily's voice, thin and horrified.

"Four million against my daughter," my father said. "You're a man who likes a clean settlement. That's a clean settlement."

There is a specific silence that happens when four hundred people simultaneously decide not to be involved.

I stood by the door with my coat over my arm and my keys in my hand, and I waited for one person — my sister, her fiancé, my aunt, anyone with a functioning spine — to say something.

Nobody did.

Sokolov turned around.

He looked at me across a ballroom, and it was not the way a man looks at a woman being offered to him. There was no appetite in it at all. It was the look of somebody checking a face against a photograph.

"Clara," he said. Not a question.

"I'm not for sale."

"No," he agreed. "You're not."

Then he said, to the room, mildly: "The party's finished. Everyone go home."

And four hundred people went home.

* * *

He didn't touch me. Nobody touched me.

One of the men at the door simply said, "Miss Ward, there's a car," and I walked out to it through a lobby full of people looking at the carpet, and I got in because the alternative was standing in that lobby.

The car went east, out along the port road. He sat on the other side of the back seat with his phone in his hand, answering messages, for eleven straight minutes.

"You're not afraid," he said eventually, without looking up.

"I'm extremely afraid."

"You're not showing it. That's not the same thing, but it's rarer." He put the phone away. "Your father is going to spend tomorrow telling people he had no choice. I'd like you to have accurate information before he starts. Would you like it?"

"Is that a real question?"

"They're all real questions. That's the part people find difficult."

I looked out the window at the container cranes going past, lit up orange.

"Fine," I said. "Give me accurate information."

"Your father did not lose four million dollars at cards," Sokolov said. "He has been moving money out of a freight company I hold through a chain of three accounts, and doing it badly, and I have known for six months. I let it run because I wanted to see where it went."

"Where did it go?"

"Eighty percent to a Panamanian account he doesn't control." He turned his head. "Which is interesting, Miss Ward, because a man who is stealing for himself doesn't send four-fifths of it somewhere else. Your father hasn't been robbing me. Your father has been paying somebody, and he's been paying them since March, and the payments started nine days after a man named Yuri Danilov was released from a federal prison in Marion, Illinois."

The name meant nothing to me. That's what I thought at the time, anyway. I remember my hands went cold before my brain caught up, which I have learned is how the body remembers things the mind has been told to forget.

"I don't know that name," I said.

"No," he said. "You wouldn't. You were nine."

The car slowed at a gate that opened for us.

"There's a thing I want to be honest about, because we're going to be spending time together and I would rather do it without theatre," Sokolov said. "I did not take you tonight because of the money. I would have written off four million to see how the next part played out."

"Then why?"

He looked at me, and for the first time something moved behind that flat face — and what it looked like, absurdly, was regret.

"Because seventeen years ago," he said, "a woman was killed in the back office of a laundry on Halstead Street, and there was one witness, and the entire file on that case has been sealed since the week it happened. Two people in this city have spent seventeen years trying to find that witness. I'm one of them."

"And the other?"

"Yuri Danilov," he said. "Who came out of Marion in March, and started being paid by your father nine days later."

The car stopped in a courtyard. Nobody opened the door yet.

"Miss Ward," said Ilya Sokolov, "what do you remember about the night your mother died?"