38. Delilah #2
“I know.” His hand moves up the outside of my thigh, then the inside, and my leg starts to close out of pure animal habit, thirty-one years of muscle memory.
Until his palm meets it and pushes it open again.
“There it is,” he says.
“Shut up.”
“No.” He pushes my knee out further and holds it. “This is the point. You cannot run and you cannot hide, Lilah. You’re mine to devour as I please.”
He works his way up. He takes his time about it. There is a long stretch in there where I lose the plot entirely, where I can’t tell which part of me he’s kissing because I can’t see, and everything my body does happens without me getting a vote on it.
My hips lift.
My knees fall open on their own.
My hands strain against the chain and can’t come down and can’t cover anything, so they grip the spindle instead.
And that’s how Kane works his black magic.
When I can’t put my hands over my stomach, my brain has nowhere to go with the thought. It shows up, finds the mental door locked, and leaves.
“You’re quiet,” he says against the inside of my thigh.
“I’m concentrating.”
“On what?”
“Not saying something stupid.”
He laughs, and I feel it, and then he stops talking and puts his mouth right where I need it and doesn’t move it for a long time.
It builds and builds until I’m bowed up off the mattress and the chain is rattling against the iron and I come so hard that I make a sound I have never made in my life, one long note that isn’t a word in any language.
I’m still shuddering when he pushes the blindfold up onto my forehead. The candlelight floods back in, orange and gold and swimming.
“Hi,” I croak.
“Hello.” He unbuckles the cuffs, one and then the other, and rubs both my wrists with his thumbs. “How are your arms?”
“Fine. Attached.”
“Any numbness?”
“No, warden.”
He kisses the inside of my wrist and then sits back on his heels. “I’m going to ask you again about the bar.”
“Ask.”
“Do you want it?”
I look at it, sitting on the bench with a cuff at each end. It’s a stupid-looking object. There’s nothing menacing about it at all, and it means the only thing that could make it hard is me.
“Yes,” I say.
He gets it. He does the ankles the same careful way he did the cuffs—buckle, two fingers, pull, check. Then he sits back.
My legs are open. They stay open.
Every cell in my body wants to roll onto my side. I can’t. I can’t—
“Sugar!” I yelp.
Kane’s hands are on the buckle before I finish the word. “Which one—”
“No. No, don’t take it off.” I put a hand on his forearm. “I just needed to know it worked.”
He stops. He sits there with his fingers on the strap and looks at me for a second, and then his face settles.
“It works,” he says.
“Okay.” I breathe out. “You can let go of it now.”
He lets go. Then he stands up off the bed, walks around to the end, and drags the armchair over from the corner until it faces me square. He sits down in it, settles his elbows on the arms, pants still on, and waits.
“What are you doing over there?” I ask.
“Watching.” He tips his chin. “Touch yourself.”
My whole face goes hot. “Kane.”
“You heard me.”
“There’s a— I mean, c’mon, you’re all the way over there with your clothes on and I’m—”
“I intend to look at you until you can’t stand it, and then a little longer than that.” He doesn’t move. “Touch yourself, Lilah.”
This I didn’t plan for. The cuffs were easy because they took the choice away. This one hands the choice right back and forces me to confront it.
I put my hand between my legs.
“Look at me.”
I drag my eyes up.
“Good girl. Now, keep going.”
But I don’t know how to do that. I’m stuck in a place I never thought I’d be stuck in.
Trapped between my own hand and a man in a chair and nowhere at all to go, and the terrible, incredible discovery that when you can’t hide, and the person keeps looking anyway, and doesn’t leave, the shame doesn’t grow.
It thins out.
Less of it.
Less of it.
Until…
I come with my eyes open, watching him watch me.
I don’t turn my face into the pillow. I don’t cover anything. I don’t crack a single joke.
Kane is out of the chair before I finish gasping. He gets the ankle cuffs off, both of them, fast but not rough, and then his belt is going and he’s over me and in me in one long push that knocks the air out of me.
“You didn’t hide,” he says into my throat.
“No.”
“Not once.”
“I can’t hide.” My nails rake his back. “Not from you.”
He doesn’t last long after that, which I take as a compliment, and I go over again with him because where else in the world could I possibly want to be?
We cuddle for a long time afterward. Kane kisses and touches every part of me, whispering an endless stream of praise. I drift in and out of consciousness. It’s like floating through the clouds. Weightless and carefree.
Eventually, he pulls out and goes to the bathroom, blowing out candles on his way. The shower kicks on.
I lie in the dark and take stock. Wrists fine. Ankles fine. Hips are going to complain tomorrow. Throat’s raw.
And underneath all of it, a lightness so unfamiliar that I keep poking at it to see if it’s real.
Then my mouth turns into a desert.
I get up, pull his shirt off the floor, put it on, grab my phone, and go find water.
The hallway lights are dimmed. Downstairs, the house is dim and quiet. I go past the parlor, past the staircase—and stop, because a door stands open on my left, and there’s a light on in there.
The table is enormous. Dark oak, twelve chairs. And a map is spread across the whole length of it, held flat by two crystal ashtrays, a bottle of vodka, and a stapler.
It looks like a city planner’s map. Laminated, professional, a grid of lot lines and parcel numbers printed in tiny, cramped font.
When I get closer, I realize why it looks so weirdly familiar.
It’s Sunset Park. My Sunset Park. The BQE runs along the top, there’s the water, the terminal and the piers, Third and Fourth and Fifth Avenue laid out in stripes. Thirty-Ninth Street at one edge, Forty-Fifth at the other.
And almost every single parcel on it is colored in green. Hand-colored. You can see the marker strokes where somebody filled them in one at a time, some of them faded, some of them fresh.
I start to count and give up. Gotta be almost a hundred of them.
Each one has a little block of typed text beside it—names. V HAVEN HOLDINGS, LLC. THIRD RIDGE PROPERTIES. AZURE 44 REALTY. Dozens of names, none of them the same.
I follow Fourth Avenue down with one finger.
Forty-Second.
Forty-Third.
Forty-Fourth.
I find the cross-street and trace it to something labeled Lot 22.
It’s white.
It is the only white square on the entire map, actually. A little rectangle left blank in all that green, with a number written in the corner, and beneath it, in tiny careful print:
4412 FOURTH AVE—2 STY brICK—3,100 SF LOT.
My bakery.
I stand there with my hand on the plastic and my hair still damp from sweat and his shirt hanging off me, lost in my confusion.
I know he buys buildings. I know he wanted my bakery. But the scale of this is… I mean, it’s staggering. It’s too much. Billions of dollars’ worth of property. And all these company names…
What does that add up to?
What is Kane Makov doing?
And how do I fit in?
“Hey.”
I jump about a foot.
Niko is in the doorway with a beer in one hand and a plate in the other. He’s looking at the table, not at me.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” He sets the plate down on a chair. “You’re wearing my brother’s shirt.”
“I was looking for the kitchen.”
“Kitchen’s the other way.” He comes in and around and puts himself between me and the table, casual as anything, hip against the edge, one hand flat on the laminate right over the corner where the names are. “Water’s in the fridge. Bottled, and there’s a filter thing on the tap.”
I don’t move. “What is this?”
“It’s a table.”
“Niko.”
He drinks some of his beer. “It’s Kane’s property work.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of property work.”
“He’s been at it a long time.” Niko’s answer is friendly and completely closed at the same time. “This is what he does, Delilah. He buys stuff nobody wants and waits.”
“That’s my street.”
“It’s a lot of streets.”
“That’s my building.” I point past his arm at the white square. But he doesn’t turn to look at it, which is how I know he already knows where it is. “It’s the only one that isn’t colored in.”
Niko exhales through his nose. He sets the beer down. “Ask him,” he says. “I’m just gonna mess up the answer.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I know. I just…” He rubs the back of his neck.
“Is it bad?”
He sighs. “Just ask him,” he says again. “It’s better that way.”
Before I can keep pushing, my phone starts to ring. I look down and see that Priya is calling me, which is really weird, given the late hour.
“Pri? Everything okay?”
“Are you sitting down?” she asks. “Because I’ve been on the phone for an hour and a half and you’re going to want to be.”
“What happened?”
“Hearth & Harvest canceled.”
My knees go a little loose. “Canceled what? Thursday’s order?”
“Everything. Thursday, next week, the standing order, the account. All of it.” Something rustles on her end.
“I got an email when I was closing up shop. ‘Effective immediately, we are unable to continue servicing your account.’ No reason. I called the emergency line and got Jasper. Jasper’s known us for three years, but he wouldn’t explain a damn thing. ”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“He said, and I’m quoting him, ‘Priya, I can’t get into it, and I’m sorry. Please don’t call back.’ Then he hung up on me.” She takes a breath. “Delilah, they’ve got our flour. All of it. Our butter, our chocolate, the dairy. We have enough to get through next Wednesday and nothing after that.”
I look at the white square on the table.
Niko’s hand is still lying flat over the corner with the names on it.
I can’t shake the feeling that all of this is somehow connected.
“Don’t do anything,” I tell her. “Don’t call anybody else. I’m coming.”