Dagger in the Sea

by Cat Porter

  “He sponsors terrorism and kills innocent people who are only trying to do the right thing,” I said.

  My father made a face. “Fokas has no control over what those extremists do.”

  “They killed Grigori!” I said.

  “That was a terrible thing, Adriana. That boy did not deserve that, but this is not related.”

  “Not related?” said Turo, the deep boom of his voice sliced the tension and created more. “How about your daughter getting shot at to send you a message?”

  No reply.

  An icy tremor shuddered through me and I gripped my hands together in a fist. Turo’s hand went to my leg, and I sucked in a breath. “I’ve helped you whenever you needed help. But this, this…”

  “If I pay them the money, all this will be over, of course,” said Yianni.

  Was he implying that my getting shot at was a result of not having come through for him when he’d wanted me to? All this would just go away once I came up with the cash for him? Life would go on, and he would go on as he did before.

  “Did Fokas ask you for special favors on your new party boat?” Turo asked.

  Yianni scowled at Turo again. “What?”

  “That he’d have a presence at your parties, be able to sell his drugs there? Prostitutes?”

  Yianni only flicked his ash in the ashtray, and let out a thick stream of smoke, rubbing what was left of his hand rolled cigarette between his fingers.

  “Of course,” I murmured.

  “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 was simple?

  “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 your luck.” 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.

  “Don’t you ever talk to her like that,” Turo cut him off.

  “This is none of your business, eh?” Yianni shot back.

  “Oh, it is,” Turo replied, and a chill stole over me at the cold simplicity of his hiss. Surgical steel. “You’re the one who has no say in any of this any longer. The moment Adriana’s life was put in danger by you, she became my business. Mine to keep safe.”

  The air went out of the room, and my heart stumbled in my chest. Turo’s fierce tone shred my father’s acrimony and shoved it back in his face, making him smell his own foul stench. His biting words were fangs that sank in and delivered their poison with clear cut precision.

  The snake had trounced the tiger.

  Perhaps it should have frightened me, his cold threatening stance, his obvious satisfaction in his victim’s withdrawal. But it didn’t. Every cell in my being tensed and pulled and cried out for him.

  He’s mine. And he was standing up for my worth, for my voice. For me.

  I pulled myself up to that place that was new, steadied myself, there, where I needed to be. “My mother paid your price once,” I said. “Now I will pay, and there will be no more. No more.”

  Yianni only ran a hand through his unruly hair, his lips twisting. No words, no more of his words.

  “How does Fokas contact you, Yianni?” Turo continued.

  “On my mobile. There can be no police. He’s very connected to the police. He can find out very easily if we are working with them. No police.”

  “There is no ‘we’, Yianni.” Taking my hand in his, Turo rose from the sofa. “You let us know the moment they contact you. Time, location. All of it. You leave anything out, I’ll know. I’m not forgiving like your daughter. I don’t give a fuck about forgiveness.”

  I whispered in Turo’s ear, “I don’t feel forgiving right now.”

  He laid a hand on my leg in the backseat of the Porsche. “I’m sure you don’t. You have every right not to, and that’s okay, no obligation.”

  “He’s scraped out what’s left of it in me. I used to think him misunderstood. A larger than life man who just could never get the right break. So handsome, charismatic, strong. But that doesn’t count for much when the going gets tough. It’s underneath that veneer that counts. He’s had lots of opportunities, lots of shining moments, but no follow through. No sense of personal responsibility. It’s as if he cannot compute those things. They simply do not occur to him naturally.”

  “It doesn’t for some people. You can’t expect it to.”

 
“It’s difficult when it’s your father.”

  “Fathers aren’t Supermen.” A heavy breath heaved from Turo’s lips, his jaw set. “They’re just another guy.”

  I squeezed his hand on my leg. “Before Petros adopted me, I would stay with my father on the occasional weekend. One night he was going to take me out for pizza at one of the new American chain restaurants that had just opened in Glyfada. I was so excited. But Yianni didn’t take me to the pizzeria. We went to a café bar on the beach where a woman was waiting at a table for him. He put me at a table next to theirs, ordered me a toasted cheese sandwich, and the two of them had lots to drink and lots to laugh about. I was so disappointed, but I swallowed it. It wasn’t anything new, this crushed anticipation. We were there a while, it was late, and I fell asleep.

  “When he woke me up, the lady had left, and we got back on his motorcycle to go home. I was so tired, he was drunk and driving fast, weaving around in the traffic. I still remember that feeling of hanging on to him so tightly, my legs squeezing so hard around the bike that they hurt. I couldn’t breathe the entire fifteen minutes. When we finally got home, he asked me if I’d enjoyed the ride, because I was his little “mánga”—slang for ‘tough guy.’ I didn’t want to show any fear or disappointment. He never liked that. He was all about spontaneous adrenaline rush living. So I said, “It was the best. You’re the best.”

  “Why is it I remember these moments so clearly? More than when he taught me to water ski, took me jet skiing. The street fairs where he bought me all sorts of candy. The first time he took me sailing. Not those times.” My breath hitched and I averted my gaze out the window, to the palm trees whipping past us on the shore road.

  Turo took my hand in his and kissed it. “Because the times he broke your heart cut deep.” His voice low, husky, his touch tender. He knew what I was talking about, and I ached that Turo knew this sort of painful cut that wouldn’t heal. I leaned my head on his shoulder.

  “I get it, sweetheart.” Turo’s voice was low, soft. “I do.”

  I squeezed his hand and stroked his arm.

  He kissed the top of my head. “You’ve got to accept them, those bad times, and just push them to the back of the memory line. Let the good ones move up front. Stop clinging to the crap. It won’t change it, and you won’t understand them any better.”

  “There’s an idea.” I’d never had this before, this genuine understanding and respect, and I wanted to offer him the same. Help him the same way he was helping me.

  “Why did your mother decide on the adoption?” he asked.

  I stroked the cuff of his jacket. “She had an undercover security guard following me that weekend I spent with my father. The next day she offered him money to get him to sign the papers for Petros to adopt me. She didn’t have to twist his arm. He signed and took the money.”

  “I like your mother more and more.”

  “She doesn’t put up with bullshit, not like me.”

  “You want to see the good in people first. You search for it, cling to it. That’s admirable, but it can get you into trouble.”

  “I used to think Mum was so cold when it came to my father, like she is with her business. Strategic, logical. But she was right. The constant giving in a little here and a little there only leads to a disaster. They lead you on, you lead them on. False expectations on all sides.”

  Turo’s jaw stiffened and his gaze fell on our hands entwined. He kissed my hand once more as if he needed to in order to steady himself.

  I needed him too.

  I’d never shared any of this with anyone before. From a young age, my mother had ingrained in me the notion of never discussing “private issues,” as she called them, with anyone outside the family; it was a dangerous thing when your family was in the public eye. Always the responsible one, I never had—until now. It felt good, it felt right to share it with Turo, and he understood without explanation, and I cherished that.

  “Has Petros been a good dad?”

  “Yes, he’s a very good dad. Concern and generosity come naturally to him. It was easy to let him love me and to love him back. I never felt that he cared for me any less than my brother.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  Turo’s phone rang, and he took it out. “It’s Alessio.” He answered, putting his mobile on speaker. “Hey.”

  “I have news,” Alessio said.

  “Good,” Turo said. “We’re on our way.” He shut off his phone and scowled at the traffic on the road.

  “We need your driving skills, Lovely. This traffic is insane.”

  I laughed.

  “What is it?”

  “Remember when I told you that my father had taught me how to drive?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was Petros, not Yianni.”

  “Petros is the former rally race car driver?”

  “Yes. He was a good teacher, too. Very patient, very calm.”

  “There’s a really good memory to bump up the list and push the shitty ones to the back of the line.”

  “Turo DeMarco, you are a very smart man.”

  40

  Turo

  Alessio’s waterfront bungalow at the Grand Resort hotel in Lagonísi, its own peninsula on the other end of the Athenian Riviera, this one quiet, removed from the bustle of town, was pretty damned spectacular. Luca and four of his men were huddled at a table with Adri’s two Greek bodyguards courtesy of Petros.

  Alessio handed her a huge juice smoothie.

  “Perfect, grazie.” She sipped on it, curled up in a chair.

  I crouched before her, a hand on her leg. My need to constantly touch her hadn’t escaped me. Our touching was a balm for both of us. I could sense her energy charge and mellow under my touch, and I felt connected to her, to us, and I liked that. I fed off it.

  Her eyes leveled with mine. So goddamn blue right now like the bungalow’s infinity pool and the blue sea beyond.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’m glad we’re here,” she said. “Seeing you and Alessio work together is a good thing.”

  “Oh, you like that, do you?”

  She cupped my face. “I like seeing people I care about getting along and working together.”

  That wild heat she inspired in me kicked up in my blood. “All for you, baby.”

  Her cheeks reddened, her gaze falling to my mouth. That unassuming sincere appreciation of hers, that surprise and gratitude that people were doing things on her behalf set off sparks inside me. I wanted to show her my gratitude. That innocent grace of hers coupled with her wild, natural response to me in bed, her willingness to trust me to push her just a bit and then a bit more every time made me fucking wild. My guileless vixen.

  Her thumb brushed over my lips, and I kissed it. A smile tugged on the corners of her mouth. “I’m going to check in with my banker and my mother.”

  No tears, no shuddering. No anxiety. The warrior goddess was here.

  Alessio stood before us. “I have forty-thousand in the safe on the yacht, Cara. It’s yours to use.”

  “Thank you, Alessio. I’ll have it for you within days.”

  Alessio only lifted his chin at her. He trusted her completely. I liked him more and more, although his endearment for her in that growly sexual animal voice of his had me digging my heels into the floor, I’d get over it. He hadn’t needed explanations about me and Adri. He saw us together, and he knew. Of course, Adri and I locking ourselves in a cabin on his yacht to fuck for the entire trip back to Athens had pushed the point home, as it were. Still, no drama from Alessio.

  End of story.

  “I’m going to confirm that with the bank now. For the fifth time,” she said. “Greece isn’t Switzerland.”

  I kissed her quickly and left her to it.

  I crossed the room and sat with Luca. “What did you find on Fokas?”

  “He’s a former kickboxer hired by a crime boss years ago as his muscle, collecting protection money from nightclubs, bars, res
taurants. Eventually he formed his own gang involved in the same rackets and recruited young boxers and trained them as his soldiers. He expanded his activities to drugs, arms trafficking, and prostitution, bringing in women from the former Soviet bloc countries and Albania. Had his men hired as bouncers for the clubs that owed him protection. He even partnered up with a former bodyguard of the Minister of Public Order. Good one, eh? Big arms trafficker that one—explosives, weapons. This guy trained a group to rob banks, armored trucks, ATM machines with military precision.”

  “Is it the wild fucking west out here?”

  A smirk edged over Luca’s mouth.

  “How do they launder their money?”

  “It’s a big market. Luxury cars, cruisers, yachts, jet skis.”

  “Yachts and jet skis,” I murmured.

  Alessio grabbed his brother’s lighter on the table and lit a cigarette, a thick eyebrow arched high. “Sounds like someone we know?”

  “Yianni must have been doing shit for them on his charter sailboat business as payback for that first loan,” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” muttered Luca.

  “I’ve seen it before,” I said. “They get comfortable and think they’re in, that getting more or getting special deals is easy. Makes sense he’d go to Fokas for the really big bucks.”

  “People don’t trust banks here. They consider them a corrupt institution that steals from the people,” said Luca.

  I sucked on the last of my iced coffee. “Like the government, right?”

  “Si.” A grin stole across Luca’s face. “Bravo, Americano. This past year Fokas went big. His smuggling used to be only cigarettes through Cyprus. Now he’s started bringing in cocaine from Latin America through Western Europe to Greece, hiding the drugs on fishing boats. He has a legitimate fishing business, rental boats. Not all the boats are used to hide the cocaine, but plenty are.”

  “Now the summer season is on and there’s big demand for the drugs on the islands,” said Alessio. “Mykonos was nuts.”

  Luca tilted his head. “Delivering and picking up in Greece is fun. All that coastline, all those islands, so many boats big and small, really fast, and not enough Coast Guard patrols to go around.”