44. Kane
KANE
I stand when I hear Delilah’s car start.
Connor pushes his chair back.
“Stay here,” I tell him.
He stops, face going pale. He might’ve forgotten our past for long enough to convince himself he was the big man here. But as long as I’m in the room, that will never be true.
Vivian reaches for the packet beside her plate as she huffs, “Well, someone had to tell her.”
I don’t answer. Delilah is gone. Nothing I say to her sister now will help her. Even though there are several choice words I wouldn’t mind firing in that bitch’s direction.
Leanne takes a step toward the hallway, but I hold out a hand to stop her, too.
“Give her some time,” I say.
“This is my family,” she says, drawing herself up tall and haughty.
I nod. “Then give her some time.”
It’s a standoff for a few tense moments, but after a sniff, she sits back down. Through the front window, I watch Delilah turn the corner.
Five…
Four…
Three…
Two…
One…
That’s enough space for a fucking lifetime. Time to go fix this shit.
I get my coat and leave.
My phone rings while I’m on the steps. Niko.
“We have the report,” he says.
“Well?”
“Vetrov paid Boyd to yap. We have confirmation from Kolchin’s end. Boyd identified you as the man behind V Haven. He gave them the loan terms, including the collateral you rejected.”
“And the bakery I accepted.”
“He told them you wouldn’t say yes to anything else. Told ‘em you were all hung up on it.”
I grind to a halt beside the short brick wall out in front of Leanne’s house.
“Vetrov already had years of paperwork on the corridor,” Niko continues. “Deeds and corporate records. Boyd gave him the connection he needed. Vetrov’s people put the packet together and delivered it to Vivian.”
“She just handed it around the dinner table.”
Niko sucks in a breath. “No, she fuckin’ didn’t. Really? Dammit. Fuck. Shit.”
I look back at the house. A pale face ducks out of sight and hands whip the curtain closed.
“What exactly did she say?” Niko is asking in my ear.
I stare in the direction Lilah went, longing to tear after her. But this is important, too. I can’t grovel to get this shit fixed properly without Niko taking care of the logistical details. So I catch him up.
When I finish, he asks, “And you corrected her?”
“No.”
“Then what’d you say?”
“Nothing?”
“Like, nothing during the presentation, you mean. But what about after?”
“Nothing then, either.”
“Jesus H., man, you just stood there silently? Why?”
I grit my teeth. “Because Lilah left.”
To my surprise, Niko snorts. “Can’t say I blame her.”
I grip the phone harder. “Care to repeat that, brat?”
“The packet makes it look like you directed the whole thing,” he explains. “Down to telling that shithead ex of hers to forge her signature. It looks like you coerced him. You’re the boogeyman in her eyes, brother.”
“I wasn’t going to explain myself in front of them,” I snarl. “You know my rule.”
“From where I’m standing, dude, that rule did a whole lot more harm than good just now.”
“I’m not giving Vivian a fucking argument to enjoy.”
“This isn’t about Vivian enjoying herself.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because an innocent woman just stood in front of that family alone while you protected your precious code.”
“Watch yourself.”
“Dad would have understood.”
“Don’t you fucking—”
“He always had a reason he couldn’t put Mom first, too.”
My first thought is to hang up. My second is to find him so I can throttle him myself.
“I am nothing like him. Do you hear me? Nothing.”
Niko is unmoved. “Then stop making his choices.”
I have no answer to that one.
Josef is standing guard outside the bakery’s back door when I arrive.
“She’s inside,” he explains as I storm up. “She asked me to stay out.”
“Then I suggest you do as she said.”
I, however, am not smart enough to follow suit.
Instead, I stride up to the door and pound on it with my fist.
For a while, nothing happens. Then Lilah appears behind the glass. She’s still wearing her coat. Her keys are in her hand, thrusting out from between her knuckles like claws. Her face is murky, but I can still see tears and anger warring in her eyes.
She looks at me before unlocking the door.
“I want answers,” she says. “That’s why I’m letting you in. The only reason. Copy that?”
“Loud and clear.”
She steps back. I enter, and she locks the door behind me.
The ovens are off. A few covered racks stand beside the worktable. She takes off her coat and hangs it on a hook, then walks to the counter separating the kitchen from the front. Very carefully and intentionally, she positions herself on one side of it and points for me to stay on the other.
We look around in awkward silence for a minute. There are so many things I want to say that they’re all crowding each other out in my throat, refusing to be left behind.
In the end, she speaks first.
“I keep coming here,” she whispers. “Every time. This is where I go, because it’s mine.”
She drags her fingertip through a tiny pile of spilled sugar on the counter.
“My dad offered me money to help buy this place. Did I ever tell you that? He was sick already. He wrote me a check at his kitchen table and I gave it back to him.” She laughs, eyes blurry with the memory.
“He thought I was being proud. I wasn’t.
I just knew what would happen. Vivian would want it eventually, and my mother would find a way to explain to me why she should have it, and I’d hand it over, because that’s what I do. What I’ve always done.”
I say nothing. Just stand there in silent anguish and let her pour her broken heart out to me in bleeding little pieces.
“So I saved. It was hard. I worked doubles at a place in Bay Ridge where the owner called me sweetheart and shorted my hours when I told him not to touch my ass every time I had to squeeze by him in the kitchen. I lived in a studio next to a railroad with a radiator that banged all night. I ate ramen three meals a day and wore shoes with holes in them in the dead of winter. And then, eventually, I bought this.” She looks up at the ceiling, at the ductwork, at the light above the case.
Her face softens with pure love. “Twenty-four hundred square feet of nothing special. The floor’s uneven.
The compressor’s dying. But the deed says Delilah A. Dorsey, goddammit.”
Her throat moves as she swallows.
“This is the only thing I’ve ever had where nobody could come along and say, Well, actually, we gave you that, so we’re taking it back. Not my mother. Not my sister. Not my husband. Nobody.”
She wipes her face with the back of her wrist.
“It’s the only thing in my life that was ever mine.”
Finally, I can’t bear it anymore. “Lilah—”
“No.” She holds up a hand. “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say that isn’t an answer to my questions. I just want some information, and then you’re going to leave me alone, okay?”
It kills me, but I nod.
“Did you spend years buying the properties around me?”
“Yes.”
“And mine is the last one you needed? The final white square on that map of yours?”
“Yes.”
“Did you look into Connor’s finances before you approached him? His debts, his gambling?”
“Yes.”
“You picked him because he was desperate. You thought you could get him to do what you wanted.”
“Yes.”
“Did you offer him money you knew he couldn’t repay?”
“Yes.”
“Did you require collateral that only my bakery could satisfy?”
“Yes.”
“You expected him to default, and then you’d be able to claim the building.”
“Yes.”
She looks toward the kitchen. I wait.
When she faces me again, her eyes are wet.
“Did you tell him to sign my name?”
“No.” I lean closer, fists pressed on the counter. “Lilah, I swear I did not do that.”
“But you found out sooner or later, and at that point, did you do anything to set the record straight? Or did you just say, Hey, good enough, I’ll get what I want one way or another?”
I gnash my teeth. There’s nothing to say, and we both know it.
But that’s not good enough for her.
“Answer the question, Kane.”
My eyes fall to my fists. All the fight goes rushing out of me. “I knew,” I murmur. “Yes, I knew. And I chose to let it stand. Worse than that—I used it to keep you here.”
“With you.”
“Yes. With me. Is that so wrong?” I raise my gaze up to meet hers. “That I did it for you?”
“Ha.” Her lips twist in a sneer. “You did it to me. Not for me. And in the end, the damage is the same. You took the last thing that was mine. You’re just like them, Kane. You’re just like all of them.”
A single tear drips down her face and lands in the traces of sugar on the counter. Little crystals of the stuff swirl in her sadness.
“What’s killing me is this,” she says after a moment, composing herself and glaring at me again.
“Why spend all this time with me, all the holidays? You had everything you wanted all wrapped up with a neat little bow. You didn’t have to take me out.
You didn’t have to… to kiss me… Or the photographs, the gifts…
Did you just enjoy the games? Is it fun for you when I look stupid? ”
I wait until she looks at me.
“I wanted you from that very first night,” I tell her as solemnly as I can. “In the pantry. That was real before we ever made an agreement. It stayed real.”
Tears are still pouring down her face, but the only emotion I see in her eyes is resignation. It’s scar tissue growing in real time. Her heart hardening over.
Toward me most of all.
“I wish I could believe that,” she says.
I surge toward her, but the counter stops me from reaching her. “Lilah, you can.”
“No. I can’t.” She shakes her head slowly.
“You don’t understand—it isn’t about whether you’re telling the truth right now.
Maybe you are. I don’t know. I can’t tell anymore.
” She takes a step backward. “My husband, my sister, my mother, you. Four for four in bad decisions. So the thing in me that decides who to trust is broken. It’s just broken, Kane.
And there’s no answer you can give me that fixes it. ”
What the fuck can I say to heal this? If I knew the words, I’d say them. If I could cut my chest open and hand her my bleeding heart, I would. If I could go back in time and undo the damage, I’d already be halfway back to Christmas Eve.
But I can’t.
I can only watch the woman I love crumble in front of me.
And it’s my fucking fault.
“So here’s what happens,” she continues. “We’re done. I don’t even know what you’d call the shit we were doing, but whatever it was, that’s over.”
“Lilah—”
“The holidays are over, too. Easter would’ve been the last one.
I’m ending it a week early.” She lifts her chin.
“But I’m not letting you off the hook for the rest of it.
You promised me a release. You’re still going to give me one.
Until then, I want you to leave me alone.
Don’t come breaking into my house or my bakery, and don’t even think about using those copies of keys I know you have. ”
I take them out of my coat pocket and set them down. Two keys. The saddest of metallic clinks.
“And one more thing,” she adds. “Nothing you say or do will change my mind on this. No gifts. No envelopes. No taking anything else away from Connor. If you burn his whole life down to the ground, it won’t move me one inch. I don’t want to hear about it. Are we clear?”
I hesitate, then nod. “We’re clear.”
She waits, like she expected me to argue. I don’t. Arguing is a thing you do when you have standing.
I don’t.
“Then I want you to leave,” she concludes. She points toward the door. “Now.”
I don’t move right away. I just look at her.
Look, and let it hurt.
The bun coming loose at her nape. The flour ground permanently into the creases of her knuckles. The burn scar on her wrist from an oven rack in a kitchen she bled for. Her eyes rimmed red, her chin up anyway, defiant to the end.
My woman. Mine, until roughly forty minutes ago, when a stranger’s folder and my own goddamn silence ripped her away from me.
I have killed men for less than what I’ve done to her. I’ve had legs broken over insults that didn’t come close. And now, I stand in her kitchen, in the one place on earth she built with her own two hands, and I cannot think of a single thing in my whole miserable arsenal that fixes this.
Money won’t. She’d throw it back.
Violence won’t—there’s nobody left to hurt who isn’t already ruined, and she’s forbidden me even that.
Words won’t, because I had my chance at that hail mary and I spent it with my mouth sealed shut instead.
Tell me how, I want to say. Tell me how and I’ll do it. Anything. Name it and it’s done.
But she’s already named it, hasn’t she?
Leave.
So I leave. Not because I’m finished.
But because she asked.
Josef straightens up at attention when the door shuts behind me, but I have nothing to say to him. I walk past him to the mouth of the alley and stand there in the cold with my hands empty.
It’s funny—if you told me on Christmas Eve, before I ever slipped into that house, that this is how it would all end, I would’ve been thrilled.
I’ve got all the leverage I could need. A merciless version of me would renege on his promise, rip the bakery from her, and not give a fuck how Delilah felt about that.
I’d be a winner. The empire I spent a decade building would be mine.
I have all the keys to my prize, sitting in a drawer on Fifty-Third Street.
And if I so much as touch it, I prove her right about me.
She said I was just like all of them.
That’s the one thing I refuse to be.