12. Kane
KANE
“I could help you with that, you know,” I offer as Delilah struggles to turn the key in the lock of her bakery door.
“No thanks.”
“I can open a door.”
“So can I. It’s my door.” She puts her shoulder into it and jiggles the key in some secret combination that only she knows. “Also, you’d break it, and then I’d have a broken door and a mob boss in my kitchen instead of just a mob boss in my kitchen.”
So be it.
With a resigned sigh, I lean against the glass and watch her work.
This is not the night I planned. Not by a fucking long shot. If it had all gone the way I’d anticipated, I’d already be home, reclining on my couch and drinking much better whiskey than the swill I stole at Delilah’s mother’s house.
More importantly, Connor Boyd would have gotten the message, and sooner or later—almost certainly sooner—I would have gotten my money.
Instead, I’m standing in the cold on Fourth Avenue at ten on Christmas Eve, watching a woman who just ruined her life hissing insults at a deadbolt.
“… stupid, stubborn motherfucker… Think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t you…? Piece of shit ass rusted clanking garbage son of a bitch… I’ll kill you, I swear I will…”
It’s been hard work not to smirk at her too much. She’s funnier than she gives herself credit for. The way she shrinks after every joke, the flinch like life is about to smack her back into the place it’s designated for her…
I despise that shit.
Someone taught her to hate herself. Multiple someones, probably.
I have pretty good guesses as to who those someones are.
She’s also braver than she gives herself credit for. She’s made it clear that this isn’t her normal self and tonight’s insane circumstances have broken something loose inside of her.
But I like this version. She’s fearless.
And quite possibly has a death wish. After all, she’s willingly stayed with me even after I made it clear who I was and what kinds of things I’m capable of doing. That’s unusual, to say the least.
“There!” she declares triumphantly as the key turns and she goes stumbling in. “Told you. Say, ‘Good job, Delilah.’“
“Good job, Delilah,” I drawl in a sarcastic monotone.
She grimaces. “Oh, sure, you’re theatrical, right up until I need you to fake a little enthusiasm. Don’t quit your day job, Kane Makov. You’d never make it in show biz.” She pushes the door with her hip and holds it for me. “Come in. Don’t touch anything.”
I start to walk across the threshold, but then I pause for a moment.
The address hangs over the door.
4412 Fourth Avenue.
I know this address.
I know the lot number, too. And the square footage, the year the building went up, the tax history, the name of the man who sold it to her and how much she paid him.
I know everything there is to know about this chunk of earth, because it’s the last thing that stands between me and a promise I swore over my mother’s grave two decades ago.
I’ve never once been inside it.
Until now.
I step through and Delilah lets the door swing closed behind me. She bustles inside, flipping switches, setting down her laptop, stripping off my coat and setting it aside, fussing with this and that and the other thing.
Lights bloom. I see glass cases, a chalkboard menu, a little brass bell on the counter. Photographs taped to the wall by the register, curling at the corners.
“Come to the back,” she calls over her shoulder. “The ovens make it warmer.”
“Is it wise to breathe that in?” I joke.
“You saw what I did tonight,” she sasses back. “Do I seem ‘wise’ to you?”
“Touché.”
Delilah disappears through a swinging door. I follow her into the kitchen.
The back is narrow and clean. Steel table down the middle, ovens on the left, and a wall of sheet pans slotted haphazardly in some shelving. A cot lies folded against the wall by the office. By the looks of it, it gets regular use.
She pulls a flour-dusted apron off a hook and puts it on over her party dress. She ties the strings behind her back without looking.
Then she reaches up and twists her hair into a knot on top of her head. I get a glimpse of the curve of her throat and the line of her shoulders.
Fuck.
She doesn’t know I’m watching. She doesn’t know what she’s just done.
She’s thinking about ovens.
But I’m thinking about her.
Her in only the apron, nothing else, bending over these stainless steel countertops in front of me.
Her with sugar on her lips and frosting smeared between her thighs.
Her sinking down on—
“You can sit,” she says without bothering to glance at me. “There’s a stool around here somewhere.”
“I’m fine standing,” I say gruffly.
If I sit, my erection will give me away in a fucking second. Better to stand up here on the other side of this cart, out of the worst of the light.
As she moves around the kitchen, grabbing things and dropping them into a huge silver bowl, I ponder my next move.
Normally, this part is simple. A man owes me, so I go to him in the dead of night. He either pays or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, Niko handles the follow-up. I’ve done it a thousand times. Hell, I did it tonight.
But this version of things is unscripted. Delilah didn’t borrow anything. Her husband did that for her, badly. And the building I’ve wanted for twenty years is under my shoes right now, with its owner standing three feet away in an apron, arguing with a refrigerator.
I could tell her the truth tonight about who I am and what I’m here for.
I won’t.
I could take the deed in three weeks.
I still might.
But for the time being, I could simply settle into the ease of this woman’s company and beauty, and give her what no one else has given her in a long time, if ever:
Space to be herself.
“How long has this place been yours?” I ask.
She’s got her head in the display case, hauling out trays. “Are you asking that question for business or for pleasure?”
“It’s only pleasure with you, Delilah.”
“There you go with the lines again.” She plunks a tray on the steel table between us.
It contains an entire family of broken gingerbread men that have all met violent ends.
Arms missing, heads caved in, legs snapped off at the knee.
“Almost three years. Two Christmases in this building, one in a rented kitchen in Bay Ridge before that.”
“You bought it?”
“Sure did. Everybody told me to lease. Lease is smarter, it’s flexible, blah blah. Fuck that. I didn’t want flexible. I wanted a deed with my name on it and nobody else’s.”
“All by yourself? Nobody helped you?”
“My dad offered.” She pulls the tray closer and starts sorting the good gingerbread from the irreparably ruined. “He was sick already, knew his time was limited. He wrote out a check and slid it across the kitchen table. But I gave it back.”
I look down at her with curiosity. “Why?”
“Because money from my family comes with a string attached, and more often than not, that string ends up tied around my neck.” She shrugs like it means nothing to her, although anyone with functioning eyes can see the scar tissue built up around that old emotional wound.
“I could’ve said yes. But then one day, Vivian would have decided she wanted something, and it would’ve gone right back to her.
That’s how it’s always gone in my house. ”
She sounds perfectly pleasant, but she’s very careful to keep her face turned down away from me.
“These are mostly trash,” she says in an obvious bid to change the subject. “Half of them are burnt to shit. Let me see what else I can scrounge up.”
“You don’t have to feed me,” I remind her.
“Who said this has anything to do with you?” she snorts. “I’m feeding me. You’re just lucky enough to get the leftovers.”
She fires up a burner, wipes the table down with one pass of a rag, sets a plate in front of me, sets a fork beside the plate, and turns away again.
I look out of the window. The snow flurries are coming down thicker now, tumbling through the streetlight glow and piling up on the ledge.
Memories start piling up in my head just like the flakes outside.
A woman standing in a doorway with a serving dish held in both hands, waiting for a gap in the laughing that she would never dare to interrupt.
Forty plates on the table, but not one of them set for her.
My hands, before the scars and tattoos and the rings and the blood, piling up dishes so she’d have one less thing to carry. “Here, Mama. I’ll help. Let me—”
“Go sit down, Kane. This is my job.”
I shake my head until the memories go away. I try not to think of them. It doesn’t do me any good. It sure as fuck didn’t help her.
“There’s dough in the proofer,” she calls from inside the walk-in. “Do you like brioche? It was for tomorrow’s order and there’s no way in hell I’m opening after the night I’ve had, so it’s a goner if we don’t eat it now.”
“It’s just bread,” I say with a laugh. “Throw it out if you don’t want it.”
Her head comes around the door fast. “Excuse me?”
“You said it’s dead.”
“It’s not dead yet.” She comes out with a bucket of dough hugged against her hip and thumps it on the steel. “Do you know how long this stuff takes? That’s a whole day of my life in there. I’m not tossing a whole day of my life in a dumpster.”
“So what do you want to do with it?”
“I’m going to fry it,” she declares, “and then we’ll eat it, and then it can die knowing it fulfilled its purpose on earth.”
Mind made up, she gets to work. Oil gets poured into a deep pot, thermometer clipped on the side.
Sheet pan is lined. Sugar dumped in a wide bowl.
She turns the dough out and flattens it with the heels of both hands, then cuts rounds with the mouth of a water glass because she can’t find the cutter.
She’s a miracle to watch in action. Her hands flow, her hips swing, she sings little snippets of songs under her breath. I remain as still as I can so I don’t disturb her.
What’s most fascinating to me is the ease in her posture. The more she loses herself in her process, the more the tension drains from her shoulders. The furrow between her brows disappears.