16. Delilah
DELILAH
The boss is coming to see you in person.
The gruff stranger hangs up before I can ask when.
Okay. Fine.
I mean, like, good. Great. Grand. Wonderful.
That’s what I wanted, isn’t it? I called the number. This is what happens when you do such things. People answer.
I guess it’s just all happening a little too fast for me to process.
Feeling unsettled, I grab my things, get up, and go out into the front of the bakery. It’s five to five and it’s already full dark outside, that matte, blue-black winter dark that makes me feel like the concept of color is just something I once saw in a dream.
All the lights are out except for the single pendant bulb hanging over the register. It’s casting long, crooked shadows everywhere. Really dialing up the spooky atmosphere here.
A few minutes pass in silence. Pedestrians hustle by on the other side of the window, bustled against the cold. Car headlights sweep through and beyond. Wind groans.
Kane does not appear.
By quarter to seven, I’ve stopped believing anybody’s coming. I go to the bathroom for a nervous pee. It’s as I’m coming out, of course, that the bell over the door chimes.
Which is a neat trick, seeing as I locked it.
I race around the counter fast and there he is, filling up the whole doorway with his hand still on the door, snow melting in his hair, a long black coat, black gloves, and green eyes that pick up the light from the pendant over the register and hold onto it jealously.
Behind him, out on the sidewalk, two men in dark jackets take up positions on either side of my door with their backs to the glass, like a couple of concrete planters.
“The lock’s broken,” Kane says.
I frown. “It worked just fine a little while ago.”
He extends an open palm and shows me the metallic guts of my lock lying in his gloved hand. A few of the bits are melted into brass blobs and still smoking.
I gawk at him in disbelief. “Did you… blast open my lock?”
His eyes sparkle as he shrugs. “Can neither confirm nor deny. Regardless, it’s really shoddy security. Can’t have that. I’ll have someone come install a proper one.”
“Shoddy?” I cry out. “It’s supposed to keep people from wandering in when we’re closed, you lunatic! I’m not being raided by freaking SEAL Team Six!”
“Well, if that does occur, your new lock will ensure they’ll at least have to go around back.” He smirks, completely unapologetic.
I have to take a deep breath to settle myself down. Arguing with this nutcase about proper and improper ways to enter a place of business is not getting me any closer to my goals here. I certainly didn’t call him here to debate manners.
Woosah. In and out through the nose. You are calm, you are grace, you are beauty.
After a few rounds of affirmations and inhales, I do feel a bit more centered.
He takes his gloves off and pushes them into his coat pocket.
He doesn’t take the coat off, and he doesn’t take his eyes off me, either.
I glare back. I can’t let him think I’m rattled.
This is a negotiation, or at least, that was my intention in calling him here.
I need help and I’ll offer whatever it takes to get things done.
What remains to be seen is exactly how much that will cost me.
Kane walks over to the counter and stands on the customer side of it. I go around to my side, because that’s where I feel most comfortable, and also because I want three feet of scarred wood between us while I do this.
“So,” he says. “What did you call me for?”
Did I script out a speech, practice it several times in a variety of voices, and then throw it away because no version of me can deliver a stern message to a literal mob boss without sounding insane?
Uh… Maybe. The world may never know.
Regardless, I go with the short version. Straight to the point, Shark Tank style.
“I want to make you a deal.”
Kane rests his forearms on the counter. He’s so big that leaning on it makes my counter look like something out of a dollhouse. “Let me get this straight: You want to make me a deal?”
“That’s what I said.”
“With what?”
“… I’m still working on that part.”
He laughs. “‘Deal’ implies you have some leverage to utilize. If you don’t have that, I’d call this more of a ‘request.’ And even that’s being generous.”
“It’s a deal,” I insist. “I’m calling it that since I’m the one talking.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not how leverage works.”
“How would you know? Since when are you the one on this side of the bargaining table?”
That gets a small twitch out of the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t answer my rhetorical question. He looks at me for a second, then straightens up off my counter, rises to his full height, and puts his hands in his coat pockets.
It’s kind of terrifying. All joy and light get sucked out of the room. There’s only the bare bulb over my head and the emerald shimmer of his eyes. Everything else is dark and scary.
Suddenly, I’m not enjoying this so much.
And I’m wondering if I made the worst mistake of my life when I dialed his number.
“Lilah,” he rumbles, “I didn’t come here to negotiate.”
“Then why did you come?”
“To collect.”
A surge of icy fear terrorizes my insides. “Collect what? The building? That signature isn’t mine! Connor forged it. I have a lawyer who says the whole thing is worthless and it won’t survive a court battle.”
To my surprise, Kane laughs. “I know the signature isn’t yours.”
That stops me. “You know?”
“I’ve known since before the ink was dry.”
“Then you know you can’t take my building.”
“I can take it on January 15th and you can spend a year and two hundred thousand dollars trying to get it back,” he says cruelly. “How’s your savings account, Lilah?”
Sneering, he leans closer, so his face is all I can see.
“And let’s say you somehow found the cash. You checked all your pockets and shook out the couch cushions and there it is. Do you know what happens then, sladkaya?”
I’d retreat, but there’s nowhere to go. Half a step back and I’ll bump into the espresso machine. I’m trapped, in my own bakery, while a huge, terrifying man with my destroyed deadbolt in his fist threatens to rip away the last thing I have left.
I shake my head. “What happens?”
“It goes a little something like this: You spend a lot of money dragging me into court. Eventually, you get your wish. You’ll get all dressed up, fierce, battle face on, because you’d hate for me to see you as anything less than an equal. And then, someone we both know would take the stand.”
“Who?” I’m frowning, too flustered to keep up.
“Why, your husband, of course,” Kane says innocently. “He’s witnessed every part of this.”
“Connor would have to admit he forged it,” I say. “In front of a judge, under oath? That’s a crime if he lies.”
“Yes,” Kane agrees, “it is. And if that’s how the world worked, then people like you would always win and people like me would get the punishment we deserve.
” He reaches out and strokes one finger on the back of my exposed wrist until I rip it away.
“Unfortunately, that isn’t how the world works.
In this life, when you hurt people, they say the things you want them to say.
Oaths have a funny way of becoming unimportant when there’s a crowbar swinging at your kneecap. ”
My jaw drops. “You… You wouldn’t…”
“In my world, Connor will take that stand,” he continues.
“And he’ll say his wife knew everything.
She was there when it was discussed. She was worried about the tax exposure, so she asked him to sign for her.
The four million went into a business he was building for the two of you, he’ll tell the judge and jury.
And she’s doing this to him now because she’s a vengeful harpy who caught him with her sister and wants him ruined.
” He pauses. “He cries a little on the stand. He’s good at that, isn’t he? I bet he’d cry so good.”
I’m crumbling. If it weren’t for the counter keeping me upright, I’d be a defeated puddle on the floor.
“You’d argue back, of course. But then it’s your word against his,” Kane says. “A judge will take a year to figure out which one of you is lying, and you’ll pay dearly for every hour of it.”
“You’re not really that much of a monster. You wouldn’t hurt Connor to make him do that.”
He shrugs. “I bet I wouldn’t even have to.
He’s got a taste for gambling, doesn’t he?
I wouldn’t have to pay much at all. Frankly, he’s got nothing left.
Between the alimony he’ll owe you and whatever your parasite of a sister sucks out of him, he’s desperate.
Right and wrong don’t factor into his decision making anymore. It’s rent or no rent.”
I look down at my sad, callused hands. The cracking knuckles. The stubs of nails I never have time to paint. “You know, when I called that number, I had this whole idea that I was doing something brave.”
“You were, sladkaya,” purrs Kane. “It takes a brave soul to admit you’ve lost.”
“Oh, shut up.” But I can’t even be properly mad. I just feel lost.
I move a stack of takeout menus from one side of the register to the other for no reason at all. Then I ask him the question that’s been bothering me. It doesn’t matter much in the long run. It’s just something I wanted to know.
“Why my building?”
Kane goes still.
“You loaned out four million dollars,” I remind him.
“Connor could barely be trusted with a lotto scratch-off. He plays cards in a basement in Marine Park for forty bucks a hand. Nobody hands a man like that four million bucks… unless the money was never the point.” I spread my hands.
Twenty-four hundred square feet with two ovens and a walk-in that whines at night.
“It’s a bakery in Sunset Park, not a diamond mine. So why my building?”
Still nothing.
“Kane. Give me that much at least.”
“You’re not ready for that answer,” he says at last.
“Oh, come on.”
He shakes his head. “No. I won’t discuss it further.”
I don’t know this man well at all, but I’ve spent enough time with him to hear the finality in his voice.
Which means I’m done.