42. Kane
KANE
That night, she falls asleep on top of the covers.
I keep coming back to that. Not the shape of her, though I look at that, too, of course—I’m only human, only a man, and I’ve never met a woman quite like her before.
But no. It’s that she doesn’t reach for anything. No sheet dragged up over her hip, no arm folded over herself like she used to do, back when she thought I wouldn’t see all the little ways she hid herself.
She’s just there.
On her front, one leg bent, hair stuck to her cheek, mouth barely open.
Goddamn, she’s beautiful.
I sit against the headboard with my phone in my hand and watch her sleep. At some point, she stirs and shoves her face into my thigh.
“What time is it?” she mumbles.
“Late.” I put my hand in her hair. “Go back to sleep.”
Instead, she rolls over and props herself up against my ribs. Then she holds out a hand, palm-up.
“Album,” she demands.
We have a shared photo album now. She named it HOLIDAYS (DEBT SERVICE) as a joke and then never changed it. Little by little, we’ve added moments worth remembering.
The first is the coat closet kiss on New Year’s Eve, taken by a man who is currently missing two fingers.
Then Orthodox Christmas. Forty-something Makovs crammed into a frame, Lilah on my thigh with her mouth open in shock, me looking at nothing but her.
Then a bad photo of my own hands in a strawberry apron, which she took on Valentine’s Day while I was washing a sheet pan.
She scrolls to the end.
There it is. Her birthday. Her seated behind a crooked cake with Zara on her hip and thirty-two candles that pale in comparison to the bright joy in her eyes.
“Look at that,” she says. “That’s a person having a good time.”
“Sorry, who? I’m busy looking at that delicious cake.”
She laughs and punches me in the leg. “The cake was a war crime.” She zooms in with two fingers on herself, which she also would not have done in December. “I look happy, don’t I?”
I comb her hair back. “Sladkaya, my sweetness, you look the way you’re meant to look.”
She smiles, then settles back down with her head in my lap. “So I was thinking,” she says.
“Uh-oh. Dangerous activity.”
“Hush and listen. Priya’s cousin has a place in the Poconos she can’t rent out because the deck’s rotten. Which means it’s free.” She yawns. “I’ve never taken more than two days off in three years. I want to sleep for days and eat nothing but chips.”
“I’ll have the deck fixed.”
“You absolutely will not, sir. You will sit on the rotten deck like a normal man and take your chances.” She elbows me.
“Also, I want to redo the front of the shop. Not the kitchen, the kitchen’s fine.
But the cases are ancient and the light in there makes everything look gray.
I’ve got the money now. January and February were the best months I’ve ever had. ”
“Then do it.”
“Yeah. I think I’m going to.” She goes quiet a second. “It’s weird. I keep making plans past April and not flinching. I used to plan in two-week blocks because anything further out felt like tempting fate.”
“Nothing’s coming for you.”
“I know.” She turns her head and kisses my thigh. “That’s what’s weird.”
She’s asleep again inside a minute.
I sit there with the phone still open on the photo of her face in the candlelight. It’s a sick irony I’m the one who used to plan decades in advance, but now, I’m reduced to looking no more than two weeks into the future.
All because of one white square on a map colored green, lying one floor below us.
What the fuck do I do? So many things hang in the balance.
We’re right at the tipping point. Lies and truths, theft and violence, Osip Vetrov and my mother’s neighborhood and all the dozens of shell companies that, as soon as I snap my fingers, will arrange themselves into an empire like New York City has never seen before.
I can have everything I’ve ever wanted.
Or I can have her.
But I can’t have both.
There’s a knock on the doorframe at ten to three.
I already have my pants on. I sleep four hours a night when I sleep at all, and Lilah’s alarm is at three-thirty. I like those minutes before it.
Niko is in the hall in his coat with snow still on the shoulders. “Let’s talk downstairs,” he says. “Something’s happened.”
I pull the door shut behind me and follow him.
We go downstairs to the map room. The map has been stashed out of sight for over a week, but Niko grabs it from the closet and unrolls it on the table.
“Boyd,” he says.
I frown. I never wanted to hear that name again.
“What about him?”
“We’ve been keeping eyes on him, like you wanted. Yesterday afternoon, he met with a guy named Marat Kolchin. Kolchin does errands for Vetrov. He’s a money man, usually. The guy they send when they want a quiet purchase done off the books.”
Niko pulls out his phone and sets it down right on top of Lot 22. The photograph on the screen is grainy and shot through the glass window of a diner. It’s Connor Boyd, hunched over a coffee cup with his sunglasses on, mouth open mid-conversation.
“We saw a payment,” Niko says. “You can see the envelope in the corner of the frame there. Boyd went straight from the meeting to the check cashing place on Fourth and Eighty-Sixth.”
“How much?”
“Don’t know yet. Enough to justify the trip.” He straightens up. “And before you ask—no, I don’t know what he sold. We didn’t get close enough to eavesdrop.”
Fuck.
I despise these guessing games.
I sit back and consider what Boyd knows.
He knows V Haven Holdings made the loan, and that I control V Haven.
He knows the collateral was his wife’s building, because he forged her name on the line himself.
He knows I was aware of what the gambling debts he owed in basements around Marine Park, because that’s why he came to me in the first place.
And he knows I’ve bought at least some property in Sunset Park.
He also knows what I’ve done to him since Christmas—or more accurately, what I’ve taken from him.
But he lacks proof.
He’s never seen this table. He doesn’t know the names of any of the other entities, or the true scale of what I’ve been assembling. He couldn’t draw this map if I put a green marker in his hand myself.
“He can’t prove what we’re doing here,” I grit out.
“He doesn’t have to. Vetrov already has.”
I look up. “What?”
“Vetrov already has the assembly,” Niko repeats.
He jabs one finger down in the green. “Osip’s had guys pulling deeds and title records like crazy.
He’s got maybe sixty, seventy of these figured out.
What he didn’t have was you ID’d as the puppet-master pulling all these strings.
And what he really didn’t have was the last white square with a woman’s name on the deed and a reason she’s connected to you.
” He lifts the finger. “Until now. Now, Boyd just sold him the bit that ties it all together. That’s all it takes. Osip can act decisively now.”
I feel anger awakening inside of me. That old, cold ferocity. I want blood. I’ve been a money mover for too long, but the way I came up on the streets will never leave my bones.
I can wield a knife, a gun.
I can gut Osip Vetrov.
The problem is, I’d have to get to him first.
Before he gets to me.
I glance up to find Niko regarding me with a strange look in his eyes. “Tell her,” he urges. “You have to tell her, brother.”
“No.”
“Kane—”
“Boyd is full of shit,” I snap. It’s true, albeit not the full story or even the relevant part of it.
“He’d sell Vetrov a fairy tale for a few hundred dollars if he thought he could get away with it.
I’m not going to walk upstairs and hand her a story based on shit that came out of that man’s mouth. ”
“That’s not—”
“Besides, it might be Osip testing me.” I keep going. “He knows we picked up his photographer from the gala. He’d love to know how fast I move when I hear rumors. If I get loud, he’ll learn something for free.”
Niko crosses his arms. “You know what else it is,” he accuses.
I do.
It’s the end.
Because there’s only one way that conversation goes upstairs. I tell Lilah that Vetrov’s people bought something from her ex-husband, and she asks what, and I say I don’t know yet, and she says why would anyone pay Connor Boyd for anything—
And then I’d have to tell her the answer.
That I chose him. I singled him out, hunted him down, caught him in my trap.
Out of every desperate man in Brooklyn, I picked the one married to the owner of Lot 22. I set him up, gave him a loan he could never repay, and waited for him to fail.
Her husband didn’t ruin her life.
Her sister didn’t, either.
I did.
“I can’t,” I croak. “It’ll destroy everything we’ve built.”
Niko rises up and clips the table with his hip, sending it crashing over. The map flutters off and shit goes rolling everywhere. “Goddammit, man, you have to stop playing with—”
“Guys? Is everything okay?”
Niko and I both turn in unison to see Lilah standing in the doorway. She’s dressed for work, her hair up in its customary bun, with a concerned expression on her face.
“Yeah,” I say at once, coming to stand in front of her. I put my palms on her upper arms. “Everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
I hear Niko sigh behind me, then turn and stomp away through the other door.
Lilah glances after him. “You sure?”
“Just a little sibling disagreement,” I tell her. “Like I said, nothing to worry about. Business stuff. It’ll pass.”
“Alright. If you say so.” She touches my wrist. “By the way, I meant to ask you…”
I freeze. “Yes?”
“I guess I missed a call from my mom last night, but anyway, she left a voicemail. She invited us to dinner at the house for Palm Sunday tomorrow. Both of us.”
“Is your sister going to be there?”
“Probably,” she says. “Normally, I’d say no, just to spare the headache, but…
Kane, that party has been mine since I was six years old.
My birthday’s baked into it, basically. If I hand it over to Vivian just because she’s got an engagement ring on, then she gets that, too.
And I think she’s got enough of my things.
” She shrugs. “So I think I’m going to go. Just because they think I won’t.”
“Then I’ll be there, too,” I promise.
“You don’t have to look thrilled.”
I grin. “You could drag me into hell and I’d go willingly with a smile on my face, sladkaya. Just as long as you’re there with me.”
I close the door to the dining room and walk her out to where Stepan is waiting with the car to drive her to work. I kiss her goodbye, then return to pick up the map, roll it up, and tuck it out of sight once more.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell her everything she needs to know.
Tonight, I’ll let her believe there is nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.