Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 48

But hearing it out loud hurts a little more.

Kane uncrosses his arms. I lift one hand without looking at him.

He stops.

“You didn’t even want him,” she spits to finish her temper tantrum. “You just don’t like it when I win.”

For years, that would have worked. I would have pretended Connor didn’t matter. I would have laughed and agreed that our marriage was stale anyway. I might have handed her the victory pre-polished just so it didn’t hurt so bad when she snatched it away from me anyway.

But not today.

Not anymore.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Viv,” I say softly. “I did want him.”

She frowns in confusion.

“I thought I loved him,” I explain. “I wanted my husband to choose me. There’s nothing pathetic about that.”

I advance toward her, brandishing the photograph like a baton. “I wanted the Burberry coat, too. The one I saved four months for before Mom made me give it to you. I wanted the pastry program that I delayed so you could go skip class at Berkeley instead. I wanted Kellen Estrada.”

“Kellen Estrada? Are you f*****g serious, Dee? Oh my God, that was literally high school⁠—”

“I’m not finished.” I keep moving forward until I’m toe to toe with her. “I wanted all of it. Every single time. I just learned really early that if I said so out loud, it would stop being mine. So I got very good at pretending I didn’t want anything.”

I let out a breath I’ve been holding for almost twenty years.

“I’m done pretending now.”

My sister looks at me like she’s never seen me before. She’s shrunken in some weird, non-physical way I can’t explain. Like her aura has diminished. The halo over her head has lost all its luster.

She’s still beautiful, and skinny, and confident. All the things I always wanted to be.

They just no longer intimidate me quite so much.

Finally, she says, “You’ve gotten so weird.”

“Yeah,” I agree with a laugh. “I think it’s long overdue.”

She turns and walks to the door. In the doorway, she stops and looks back.

But it isn’t at me.

It’s at Kane. One more check. One more flip of the switch.

He’s looking at me, and grinning.

Vivian rushes down the stairs. I hear her heels on the wood. The front door slams hard enough to shake the window.

I stand until the sound fades.

Then my knees give out.

I crumple to a seat on the floor in the middle of the room, legs folding awkwardly beneath me. My hands shake.

Winning is supposed to feel better than this. I have imagined saying no to Vivian in countless shower arguments. In those fantasies, refusing her makes me powerful. There may have been applause. Once, Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared.

The real thing is awful.

I stare at the bare floor. “She’s never going to admit it,” I whisper. “Or say sorry.”

Kane comes away from the wall to stand over me.

“None of them will. Connor won’t. My mother won’t.” I press my palm to my sternum to calm my racing, aching heart. “I’m never getting anything from them that makes this make sense.”

“No. You aren’t.”

He lowers himself to the floor beside me. His suit pulls tight over his knees.

For a while, he says nothing. He just sits beside me on the stripped bedroom floor, one knee bent, his shoulder close enough that heat seeps through my sweater.

Kane looks at the doorway Vivian disappeared through. “‘There’s just more of you every year,’” he whispers. Then he shakes his head. “I want you to know that’s the stupidest f*****g thing I’ve ever heard.”

I flinch.

His head turns. “That was false when Connor typed it. It was false when she said it. It’s false now.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“I know.” His gaze moves over my face. “I’m not comforting you. I’m correcting the record.”

Right. Naturally. Comfort would be dangerously tender.

Correcting the record sounds like something he can do while still wearing a shoulder holster.

“It still hurt,” I admit.

“That’s what she wanted.”

I drag my sleeve across my damp cheek. “You know, for someone who hates explaining things, you have a lot of aggressively stated insights.”

His mouth quirks. “You prefer uncertainty?”

“No. I prefer being right.”

“Then you must be having a difficult life.”

A laugh escapes me. Kane glances at my mouth, and the air changes. Not completely. Grief still sits inside my ribs like badly poured concrete. But it’s less achy than it was before.

I look around the bare room. The fresh paint has reached that tacky stage where it smells less like chemicals and more like possibility. Downstairs, someone closes a toolbox. The house settles around us, unfamiliar in its newness.

“I’m sleeping here tonight,” I decide. “In my house.”

I wait for him to announce security arrangements or reveal that he’s installing himself in the Eames chair.

He doesn’t. He rises, then offers me his hand.

I take it.

We go downstairs, side by side. I watch him shrug on his coat and step toward the door.

“The next holiday is January seventh,” he says.

I turn. “What holiday is January seventh?”

“Russian Orthodox Christmas.” He cracks his neck to one side. “I’ll send Stepan to pick you up.”

“When? Where are we going? What am I supposed to⁠—”

“Goodnight, Lilah. Get some sleep. You deserve it.”

He steps outside, closes the door, and leaves before I manage a single useful question.

The door closes behind me. I stand on Lilah’s front step like an i***t.

Snow settles on my coat. Stepan waits at the curb with the engine running, wisely pretending he cannot see his pakhan staring at a pale blue door with a foolish grin on his face.

She’s a f*****g woman in every sense of the word. I was rock-hard watching her tell her sister to get the hell out of her house. It was like witnessing the first time a bird learns it can fly. She spread her wings and soared.

Vivian, on the other hand, plummeted to earth.

My obsession is worsening.

I’ve only known Lilah for nine days. But she’s already gone from a sweet voice in a pantry to a sweet tongue yielding to mine.

Who wouldn’t I maim on her behalf? Her sister? Her husband? The photographer at the gala? A random saleswoman with a holier-than-thou attitude?

As far as I’m concerned, all of them are roaches underneath her heel. If she won’t crush them, I will.

She doesn’t see what I see. The fire. The innocence. Two things shouldn’t be able to coexist within one person—but with Delilah Dorsey, they do.

It feels like an eternity ago that Niko asked me which one I’m buying: the block or the baker.

I still haven’t answered him. I don’t intend to.

But I realize, driving north through the slush with snow smearing the windows, that I haven’t thought about the map once today.

The brownstone is lit up when we pull in. Every window on the first floor. That means Niko is here, and Niko being here on New Year’s Day at four in the afternoon means he found something worthy of my attention.

Anton opens the door before I reach the top step. “Your brother is in the back office,” he says. “Yuri, too.”

I hand him my coat. “How long have they been here?”

“Since noon.”

“And nobody called me?”

“Niko said not to.”

I make a note to have a conversation with my brother about who gives orders in my house. Then I walk down the hall and forget about it, because I see Yuri waiting in the doorway of my office with somebody else’s blood on his collar.

Damn. I was hoping this was a false alarm, because I wanted to spend the rest of my evening replaying about how f*****g sexy it was for Delilah to dominate her sister so thoroughly.

The bloodstain says I’ll have to enjoy the memory later.

Anton follows me in and shuts the door. Niko is in one of the chairs with his boots on my desk, a legal pad on his lap, and a camera in pieces beside the lamp. Two memory cards are laid out in front of him.

“Feet off the desk,” I bark as I settle into my chair.

He takes them down.

I eye them all and sigh. “I assume the photographer is dead?”

Yuri glances down at his shirt and winces when he realizes just how much blood is on him. “Don’t think so. At least, he was breathing when I left him.”

“Did he give you anything useful?”

“Depends how generous you feel about the meaning of the word ‘useful.’“

“I feel no generosity toward him at all.”

“Then no. Not really.”

I remove my jacket and drape it over the back of a chair. A streak of white paint marks the cuff. Lilah must have put it there when she raised her hand to stop me from going after Vivian.

I leave it alone.

In a strange way, I like being marked by her.

Though I think I’d enjoy marking her myself just a little bit more.

“Luckily,” interjects my brother, “you have me to dig up more actionable information.” Niko flips back a few pages on the pad of notes he’s holding. “His name is Anders DeLeon. Thirty-six, freelance photog and paparazzo. Lives in Ozone Park with his mother, no priors worth mentioning. Shoots weddings and quinceañeras and does a little work for a gossip site that pays him per photo. He’s not connected to anybody. Kind of a bozo, to be honest.”