23. Delilah
DELILAH
But The Shift never comes.
Kane reaches me without looking toward the door. He does not slow down. His smile never dims.
He stops in front of me and looks down at my empty hands. “Where’s your plate?”
I have to shake myself back to reality. “What?”
“You had food.”
“Oh.” I glance at the table beside me. “I put it down.”
He follows my glance to see the still-full plate. “You ate none of it.”
“I was talking.”
“That’s never stopped Niko from shoving food down his throat at every opportunity.”
Niko holds up both hands, protesting his innocence. Unfortunately for his case, one still has a bone in it. “No need to drag me into this,” he complains.
“Go away,” Kane says.
Niko looks past his brother and meets my eye. He gives me a quick smile, a What’re ya gonna do? shrug, and backs off into the crowd.
When he’s gone, Kane touches my elbow. “Are you cold?”
“No.”
He adjusts the shawl around my shoulders anyway.
Behind him, the room is still reacting to Alisa. People are crossing the ballroom to greet her. Men straighten their jackets and fix their cuffs. A waiter nearly walks into a chair because he is watching her instead of where he is going.
I keep waiting for Kane’s eyes to join the flow in that direction.
They don’t.
“Lilah.”
“What?”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m thinking.”
He studies me. “What did Niko say to you?”
“Nothing interesting.”
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m actually an excellent liar. I fooled my husband for a whole day while building a public presentation about his affair.”
“You didn’t fool him. He was too stupid to see you.”
That shuts me up.
A server passes nearby with two glasses of champagne. Kane stops him, takes both, and gives me one. Touching the rim of his glass to mine, he says, “To new memories.”
I echo the toast in a mumble and take a sip, grateful for the distraction.
But the ruckus is growing in intensity. I look back at Kane, sure that he’s going to at least take a peek in that direction any second now.
Now?
Now?!
Nope. As far as his eyeline is concerned, I’m the only thing in the room worth looking at.
I want that to be flattering—and don’t get me wrong, it is.
But I’ve spent thirty-one years learning that no one ever spends time looking at me when there’s something as beautiful as her to look at instead.
He just hasn’t noticed yet. Once he does, he’ll forget I ever existed.
Yet as more and more time passes, I lose my patience. Finally, I’ve had enough.
“You’re really not going to look?”
He frowns, perplexed. “At what?”
I tip my head toward the door. “That.”
Kane finally glances in that direction.
But it’s like he resents every inch that his eyes have to travel. His brow is furrowed, his jaw clenched, his hands tight at his side. As if it hurts him to look at her.
Even once he does, he doesn’t linger. Half a second, maybe less, before he swings his attention back toward me.
“Alisa Vetrova,” he says. “Her father rinses money out of a chop shop in Brighton Beach. She’ll be gone before the ball drops.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“What else would you like?”
“She’s the most beautiful woman in this building. Maybe in this universe, actually.”
Kane’s mouth screws up. “No,” he says, “she isn’t.”
“Oh, come on. You have eyeballs. Do they work? I’m not normally inclined like that, but even I have a raging girl crush on her.”
But Kane shows no signs of being swayed by my arguments. “She’s ornamental. As empty inside as a matryoshka doll.” He drinks his champagne. “I’ve seen a hundred of her, and they’re each more disappointing than the last.”
“That doesn’t mean she isn’t nice to look at,” I mumble into my drink.
I don’t know why I keep going at this.
It’s like poking a bruise. I know what’s under there and I want to feel it anyway. I want him to say the thing everybody always says, in some polite version of it. Yeah, she’s a knockout.
Is that so hard? Just admit it, and then the world will go back to how it always has been. At least I’ll know where I stand in it.
But he won’t even give me that.
Instead, he’s standing here, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the obvious pecking order. There’s her, there’s all the other lifeforms above and below sea level, and then there’s me. The choice, if he had to make it, is obvious.
So why won’t he?
Just confirm the truth of it, dammit.
Stop being so fucking chivalrous.
Honestly, it’s pissing me off.
“Look,” I say. “I’m not fishing. I’m just saying. Objectively. Like, in a court of law. If you lined up every woman in this room and made a jury vote—”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“Just listen,” I insist. “It’s a hypothetical.”
“No. It’s a stupid one.”
I slap my glass down on a nearby table, hard enough for the champagne to slosh over the edge and start bubbling on the tablecloth. “Fine. Then just say she’s pretty. You can say it. I’m not going to burst into tears in the middle of a mob party. I’ve made it through worse.”
He angles his body toward me, blocking my view of the rest of the room—and, I notice, of the hubbub that’s still surrounding Alisa.
“You want me to praise her?” he asks in his dangerous voice. “You want me to tell you how attracted I am to her? How stunning she is? How much everyone else at this party pales in comparison to her?”
I raise my chin to its fullest extent. “I want you to be a normal man for ten seconds.”
“I don’t do impressions.”
God, he’s pissing me off more than I ever thought possible.
“You’re being difficult on purpose,” I accuse.
He glares down at me, dark brows knitting together. “You keep asking me to look at something I have no interest in. I’m not wasting my time on that nonsense. You can lie to yourself all you want, Lilah, but you cannot force me to do the lying for you.”
Have you ever felt your worldview get shaken?
Lemme tell you, it’s a weird feeling.
It’s like… It’s like gravity all of a sudden pulls you down a little to the left.
Is your whole life completely changed?
No, not really. But you just feel off-kilter. Something is wrong and you aren’t quite sure why.
Maybe that’s the reason I don’t have an immediate retort. I feel defensive, but even that seems misplaced.
Because Kane isn’t attacking me. Not really.
He’s just refusing to participate in a story I’ve told myself for a long time.
If there’s a ranking, I’m at the bottom of it.
And if I ever accidentally find myself up a rung or two, don’t bother enjoying it, because it won’t last long.
Sooner or later, a Vivian will come along and take it.
I look at the tablecloth where my champagne is still fizzing into the linen. There’s a pale gold ring spreading out around it.
I’ve never said this out loud, not to Priya, not to Connor, not even to my own reflection.
I need people to agree in order for that philosophy to remain true.
If someone says, She’s prettier and I say, Uh, duh, obviously, look at her, then we’re on the same team, and I’m the one who said it first, so nobody gets to hurt me with it.
I’ve been running that play since I was nine years old and my mother told me not to worry about it because Vivvy got the looks and I got the sense.
But Kane won’t play ball.
As if he can hear my thoughts, Kane reaches out, palms my hip, and pulls me flush against him.
“You don’t have to be a slave anymore, sladkaya,” he murmurs to me. “The cuffs are gone. The chains are off.”
“A slave?” I say, wrinkling my nose. “To who?”
“Everyone who ever taught you this shit.”
I look up at him. He’s watching me with an intensity that makes my neck go warm.
And then my brain, which has clearly been affected by the champagne in my bloodstream, gets away from me.
Because if he isn’t lying—hypothetically, in a court of law, as I like to say—then what is this?
A man doesn’t melt a deadbolt off a door and threaten a saleswoman on Madison Avenue and stand in a Sunset Park tailor’s shop for two hours picking a dress over a simple debt.
Debts get collected. I saw him do it, to that poor, quivering man on Christmas Eve. You have until Friday. That’s how it’s done.
So if this doesn’t look like that…
Then what is it?
What if this isn’t debt service?
What if some part of it, some small, dumb corner of it, is—
Two pale fingers settle on Kane’s sleeve.
The nails are almond-shaped and painted the exact pink of ballet slippers.
With them comes a silky, slinky, lilting voice. In her mouth, Russian sounds musical and beautiful.
“Vot ty gde! A ya tebya vsyu noch’ ishchu.”
Alisa.
Up close, she is even more beautiful than she was from across the room. Her skin has no visible pores. It’s smooth alabaster. Her hair is like a white-blonde waterfall and her hips have never even heard of cellulite.
Kane turns his head.
Not his body. Just his head.
“Alisa,” he says in crisp English. He holds out a hand toward me. “Meet my date, Delilah.”
Alisa’s eyes find me.
Her gaze takes in my wine-colored neckline. It flicks to Anna’s shawl before returning to my face.
The entire assessment lasts less than a second.
I don’t have to ask to know she’s less than impressed.
“Delilah.” She switches to English without a stumble. “I’ve heard so much.”
The sentence wears a lovely dress and carries a serrated knife.
“Oh?” I say. “That’s more than I’ve heard about you.”
She smiles like I’ve been charming. “Oh, he never says anything. I’m his favorite little secret.
” Her fingers are still on his sleeve. “You don’t mind if I steal him for a minute, do you?
He always used to let me take him whenever I wanted.
” A little tip of her head toward him and a second hand coming to rest on his chest. “Remember that, Kane?”
Kane looks down at her hand on him, his face unreadable.
Alisa laughs softly. “This hall brings back memories. The old days were better, though, weren’t they? Before all the remodeling.”
She glances toward the brass staircase.
“There was that little room at the top.” Her thumb strokes once over the dark wool at Kane’s arm. “Do you still keep the good vodka up there?”
God, she’s good.