19. Delilah
DELILAH
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Then come the trains.
The R to Thirty-Sixth.
The D to Columbus Circle.
The 1 uptown.
A walk of two and a half blocks in wind coming off the river hard enough to make my eyes sting and, yes, make me grateful for Kane’s passed-along reminder to wear a warm coat.
The sight of a pretentious woman reprimanding a doorman for accidentally spraying her sweater-clad Chihuahua with his salt spreader reminds me of Vivian and her stupid little rodent of a dog.
I shiver and keep walking.
Predictably, Kane’s block contains one brownstone after the next. An endless row of black railings and window boxes with dead cedar in them. His is on the north side. When I approach, there’s a man in a black jacket standing at the bottom of the steps with his hands folded in front of him.
I stop in front of him. “I’m—”
“Ms. Dorsey,” he says. He bows and steps aside.
In theory, it’s very polite.
In reality, it feels less like being welcomed by an expectant host and more like being processed through the gates of hell.
The door opens before I get to it. The man in the doorway is older and severe-looking, with gray at the temples. He’s wearing a black shirt buttoned to the collar and starched to within an inch of its life.
“May I take your coat, Ms. Dorsey?”
Wordlessly, I hand it over. He pivots on his heel and hangs it in a coat closet that’s bigger than my entire bakery.
The inside of the house makes me feel enormous and grubby. Dark wood paneling on the walls, cold light through the high, thin windows. The floors are so shiny that I can see my chins from below. I decide to keep my eyes fixed firmly ahead.
There’s a staircase with a runner held down by iron rods, and a hallway with a closed door on the left and a smell of roast pork drifting up. Two more men are standing at the far end of the hall looking intently at the opposite wall. Neither of them says a word to me as I go past.
“He’s in the office,” the man who answered the door says.
When we reach a thick black door at the end of a long corridor, he knocks twice, turns the knob, and then steps aside for me to push through myself.
With a deep swallow, I enter.
Kane is behind a desk looking like Lucifer himself. Black shirt, sleeves rolled. Inked forearms, veiny and strong. Rings glinting.
Thick books and strange-looking nautical instruments made of brass line the shelves behind him. A window looks out on a courtyard garden filled with snow and chunky sculptures.
He doesn’t get up. He just looks at me, and I get that feeling I got in the pantry, of being added up, dissected, X-rayed, exposed.
My hands go straight into the pockets of my cardigan and I cross one leg in front of the other automatically. An old habit, like I think I can hide myself if I squeeze all my limbs close enough together.
“Lilah,” Kane breathes. “Welcome.”
“Quite the hospitality squad you’ve got out there,” I say, with a jerk of my chin toward the rest of the house.
Kane frowns. “Was someone rude to you?”
“No, no,” I hurry to say, feeling guilty for even accidentally getting someone in trouble. “They were fine, just… distant. Don’t, like, cut off their pinkies as punishment or anything.”
He relaxes. “As long as they were not disrespectful.”
“Nothing like that, I promise.” I fidget in place as I look around at the rest of the office.
One side is all glass, framed with black steel, showcasing nothing but a wall of rough-hewn black concrete on the far side.
“You have a lot of guys standing around your house not doing anything, though. Isn’t that expensive? ”
He chuckles. “They’re doing plenty.”
“Are you preparing to be invaded or something? Are you, like, New York’s answer to Attila the Hun?”
“Someone is in a quippy mood this afternoon,” he remarks. He tips his head at the chair on my side of the desk. “Sit.”
“I’d rather not.”
He lifts an eyebrow.
“It’s not a defiant thing,” I explain. “I’ve been on my feet since four, so if I sit down in a nice chair, I might not get back up.”
He looks at me strangely. Then he shoves his chair back and stands.
“What are you doing?” I ask in alarm.
Instead of answering, he storms around the desk and comes charging up to me, eating up the ground between us in his huge strides.
I’d probably have run if my feet were a little more responsive, but since I fall more on the Bambi end of the fight-or-flight-or-freeze spectrum, all I do is stand in place.
He stops one step away and holds out his hand, palm up.
I stare at it and don’t move.
“Give me your hand, Lilah. I won’t hurt you.”
I do it. Couldn’t tell you why. His fingers close around mine and his other hand settles at my elbow. He guides me around and lowers me into the chair like I’m a precious little china doll. Slow. Careful. He waits until I’m all the way down before he lets go.
The skin-to-skin contact is electric. Rings cold against my knuckles, his palm hot.
But that’s not the part that gets me.
The part that gets me is the rest of it. Men don’t hold chairs for me. Men don’t put a hand under my elbow. Not since I was a kid, and even then it was only my dad who ever cared enough to bother.
“Better?” he says.
“I… think so? Sure. Let’s just go with yes.”
“Good.” He nods, then retreats back to his side of the desk. It’s only once he’s seated, too, that I can breathe again.
“So,” he says. “How are you?”
I blink at him. “What?”
“Kak ty?”
“I’m lost.”
“Comment ca va? Wie geht es dir? Tudo bem? Nǐ hǎo ma?”
“Are you having a stroke?”
That mysterious smile spreads across his face. “Pick your language, sladkaya. I just asked how you are.”
“Yeah,” I say, “it was the bit in English that confused me most of all. Since when do you care how I am?”
He lifts a hand. “What kind of host would I be if I didn’t ask?”
“You’re weirdly courteous for a mob boss loan shark.”
Kane just smiles again. “If the shoe fits.” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “If you’d prefer, we can skip past the pleasantries and go straight to business. Unless you like the banter…?”
“Business,” I blurt way too fast. My hands find each other in my lap and start worrying the hem of my cardigan. “Definitely business, please.”
“Pity,” he says. “I was looking forward to it.”
I take a breath and seal my fate before I can talk myself out of it.
“Yes.”
Kane doesn’t move. “Yes to what, specifically?”
I wag a finger at him. “Don’t do that.”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m doing it anyway.”
I roll my eyes even as I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. “Yes to your deal. I will spend every holiday until Easter with you. In return, on Easter, you give me back all the rights to my bakery and you never darken my doorstep again.”
He settles back and toys with a bladed letter opener made out of what appears to be solid gold. He rotates it between his fingers again and again.
“Good,” he says at last.
I wrinkle my nose. “That’s it? ‘Good’?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something with more paperwork in it.” I shift in the chair. “How does this work? Do I sign something? Do we shake on it? Do you cut my palm with a knife and we press them together? Your guy on the phone was mum about the sacrificial lamb.”
“We don’t do that.”
“What a bummer. I’ve got a great goat guy. Extremely reliable. Pleases the gods every time.”
“Save it for the next full moon,” he jokes. “For now, we shake.”
He holds out his hand across the desk.
I look at it and hesitate.
I have a bad track record with this hand. In the pantry, the first time we ever met, it cuffed my wrist and ordered me to apologize to myself. Ninety seconds ago, it planted me down into this chair and my skin still feels like it’s sizzling all over from that briefest instant of contact.
I eye it suspiciously. Ink skitters along the backs of his knuckles, some of it faded, some of it fresh.
Two rings, one plain and heavy, one with a stone so dark it just drinks the light.
A shiny seam of scar tissue running along the outside of his thumb.
And under all of it, an obvious, unbothered strength.
Hands that have never once been soft or delicate for a living.
Hands that were born to break.
“Don’t leave me hanging, Lilah.”
I don’t.
I reach out and shake.
But before I can let go, I add something else. “I want to make it very clear that this is a business transaction and nothing more, okay?”
Kane’s eyes hood over, but he waits patiently for me to finish.
“This is debt service,” I continue. “That’s all this is.
It’s not a date. It’s not a courtship. It’s not you and me getting to know each other.
My shithead ex-husband borrowed four million dollars from you and slapped my name on it without asking, and now, I’m paying it back in the only currency I’ve got, which is my time and my company, because I don’t have the money and I don’t have the year it would take to prove in court that I’m right.
This is business. Just business. It’ll only ever be just business. ”
Still, he waits.
“I’m not saying it to insult you,” I go on. “I’ve just had a real bad couple weeks in the area of finding out what people actually meant while I was busy assuming something nicer. So I’d like to be clear this time. Up front.”
Not a peep.
So I blather on. “You hold every card. You’re the Big Bad Wolf and I’m…
I’m not even Little Red Riding Hood. I’m, like, one of the two little piggies that he eats before the story even really gets going.
I know that. I know what happens on January 15th if I don’t go along with what you say, so this is me submitting to your whims and desires, okay?
But just because I’m going along with it doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Whatever this ends up looking like—dinners or parties or wherever it is you take people—I need you to understand that I’m not there because you charmed me into it.
I’m there because you’ve got a gun in the room. Metaphorically.”
Finally, Kane’s mouth curves upward. “Who said the gun is only metaphorical?”
I sigh. “I think you have a pathological addiction to scaring people.”
“Oh, sladkaya, you haven’t even scratched the surface of all my pathologies.”
I think it’s a joke, but I’m not certain enough to joke back. Instead, I shudder and wrench my gaze away to look at the snow in his little walled garden for a minute.
“So we’re good then?” I say when I give my attention back to Kane, who’s never once stopped looking at me. “That’s that?”
He’s still toying with the letter opener. “So it would seem.”
I’m halfway out of my seat. But there’s an odd tension in the air that keeps me from getting up altogether. “You know, I still don’t understand how this suits you. What are you getting out of all this?”
“I told you last night: That’s my business, not yours.”
“That’s the answer that keeps me up at night.”
“Then don’t sleep.” He stands up.
He’s very tall and I despise having to look up at him. So I get up, too.
“Fine,” I say. “Keep your secrets. I’m not going to beg. When’s the first one? Valentine’s? That’s in, like—”
“Tonight.”
I gawk at him. “Tonight what?”
“New Year’s Eve is a holiday.” He looks at his watch. “And it starts now.”
My jaw drops. “I have a shop full of people,” I protest.
“I happen to know that you left your very capable head baker, a Mrs. Priyanka Osborne, of 543 46th Street, Apt. 2, in charge.”
I do not, for even one second, want to think about how he knows that. “Okay, fine, but I’m not dressed for anything,” I argue. “Look at me. There’s dye on my arm. I’ve got sanding sugar in my bra. Whatever the plan is here, this isn’t the outfit for it.”
“If you think I don’t have solutions for that, Lilah, then you’re sorely underestimating me.”
“Fine! What if I already have plans, huh?”
He moves in closer, just a few inches away now. His scent flows over me, crowding out the sugary sweetness of the bakery and filling my nostrils with that smoky, woodsy musk of his.
“Do you?” he rasps. “Have you promised your midnight kiss to someone else?”
No, I don’t.
And no, I haven’t.
My mother’s house is closed to me and my husband is in a house I’m never sleeping in again and my sister has probably got a nightclub table booked with a champagne tower and bottomless martinis.
Tonight’s ringing in of the New Year was going to involve me on the office cot with a plastic cup of the cheap prosecco we keep for cake tastings, watching the ball drop on a laptop with a cracked corner, listening to the boiler bang.
“I had plans,” I whisper in a voice that no one, especially not Kane, would ever believe.
He bends close enough for his lips to brush my ear when he speaks. “Then consider them canceled,” he says. “Tonight, you belong to me.”
Then he straightens up, leaving me to deal with the full-body waves of heat and cold that follow pretty much everything he’s ever said.
He steps past me and opens the office door. His scary butler is standing in the hall like he’s been there the entire time, which he almost certainly has.
“Tell Stepan to bring the car around,” Kane says. “Ms. Dorsey and I have some errands to run.”