Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 36

My hands go straight to the tag on the black dress. I flip it over and…

It’s a size six.

The next one is a six, too. The next two are eights and cut like potato sacks.

If this woman thinks I can fit into a size six, she either has glaucoma or a time machine.

But that doesn’t seem to be the biggest issue. I look up and realize there’s a sharp animosity in the air—and it’s coming from Kane.

“Delilah’s what?” he says. His voice is stripped of all emotion, almost to a scary extent.

The saleswoman hesitates. “I’m sorry?”

“You said her proportions were ‘unique.’ I want to know what you meant by that.”

“Oh—I just meant that she’s got a really lovely shape, and there are certain silhouettes that⁠—”

“Because it sounded like an insult,” Kane says, straight over the top of her. “But not even to her. You said it to me. As if she isn’t standing in the room.”

“That’s not⁠—”

“You brought her two garments she can’t get her arm through.” He nods at the hook. “You know it and I know it. And then you brought three designed to make her disappear. Unique. Tell me what that meant. Say it now.”

“Mr. Makov⁠—”

“I’ve heard this exact conversation before,” he snarls. He pushes off the wall and advances on the woman, who seems to be shrinking more and more with every passing second. “Word for word. From women who looked like you, in places like this, about a woman who was worth ten of you. So on second thought, don’t finish what you were saying. I know how it ends. And I don’t want to f*****g hear it.”

The saleswoman’s face has gone blotchy. She looks at me for the first time like I’m a person, and what’s in her face is less of an apology and more of a terrified panic that she picked the wrong customer to be a snooty b***h toward.

“We’re finished,” Kane says. “Take your things off the hook.”

“I can absolutely pull other⁠—”

“You had one chance to see her correctly. You failed.”

He turns and storms out. I stand there for a second, holding a size six by the tag, wondering what in the hell just happened.

I think he was defending my honor? But there were maybe also some other things involved?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

So, with one more glance at the humbled woman, I let the dress go, pick up my coat, and follow him out.

Outside, Kane is holding the car door for me. “Get in.”

I stand my ground. “Are you going to tell me what that was?”

“Get in the car, Lilah.”

“No. Not until you explain yourself. I’ve had enough cryptic stuff for one day, thank you very much.”

“There’s nothing to explain,” Kane says. But he’s looking over my head, not at me, and there’s a stiffness in his jaw that argues the exact opposite.

“You just ripped a woman’s head off over the word ‘unique.’ I’ve been called worse than that by my own mother in public. I don’t need somebody swooping in⁠—”

“I won’t f*****g tolerate it.” His jaw thrums. “Nobody disrespects you like that. Not while you’re with me.”

I recoil, not in shock or horror, but simple, dumb surprise.

I meant what I said: Mom has said worse to me plenty of times, in front of prying eyes and gawking onlookers. Hell, she said worse at my own wedding reception, and I just laughed along. When Vivian said my jaw looked fat over the counter last week, I laughed along with her, too.

But this strange force of nature just swept into my life and said, No more.

“It’s fine,” I mumble. “It’s not a big deal. It happens.”

“Not anymore, it doesn’t.”

“You can’t just…” I sigh and let it go. Snow is starting up again, little dry flakes that don’t stick. I hold out a hand and watch as one lands on my fingertip and melts. “Okay.”

“Get in the car, Lilah.”

I get in the car. He shuts the door and comes around the other side, and the seat starts kneading my back again like nothing happened.

Kane pulls his phone out, types something short, and puts it away.

“Where now, sir?” Stepan asks through the partition.

“Sunset Park,” Kane says. “Forty-Fourth.”

I look at him. “That’s my neighborhood.”

“No, sladkaya,” he murmurs. “It’s mine.”

This shopfront comes from a different world than Maison d’Hiver. It sits on a corner, a walk-up with a dry cleaner on the ground floor and a hand-painted sign in the second-floor window that says ALTERATIONS — BRIDAL — MEN’S.

Kane walks me up the steps, leaving Stepan in the car at the curb. At the top waits a door with a pane of frosted glass and a light on behind it.

The woman who opens when we ring the bell is old. Small, in a loose-fitting cardigan, with glasses on a beaded chain looped around her neck and her gray hair escaping the chopsticks she’s stabbed through the bun. The tape measure draped over her shoulders looks like it lives there day and night.

She stops short and looks up at Kane for an uncomfortably long time, saying nothing.

Then she mumbles something in what I think is Russian, steps back, and waves us in with one wrinkled hand.

The workroom is warm and packed to the brim. Two industrial machines. A pressing table with a scorched cover. Bolts of fabric piled in a corner. Dress forms in a row along the wall with pins stuck in the shoulders. There’s a radio playing accordion music until she reaches over and turns it down.

“Ekaterina, this is Delilah,” Kane says, pointing at me. “Delilah, this is Ekaterina.”

Ekaterina looks at me. Not at my middle, not up and down, not with the haughty condescension of the first saleswoman. At my face.

Then she smiles. “She’s lovely. Come here, dear. Coat off. Shoes stay on.”

I take my coat off and she immediately starts measuring. Bust. Underbust. Waist. Hip. She goes around behind me and does shoulder to waist, then waist to knee, then all the way down. She scribbles each one down on a little pad with a pencil stub.

I haven’t been sized up like this since I was getting fitted for my wedding dress. That seamstress ran a busy shop in Bay Ridge, and she kept saying, “We can let it out more” over and over again.

Kane pulls a wooden chair out from the wall, turns it to face the changing curtain, and sits down. He puts one ankle over the other knee.

“You’re staying?” I say.

“I’m the one who has to look at you all night. Yes, I’m staying.”

Ekaterina just clucks her tongue and goes to a rack in the back, where she starts pushing hangers apart.

“Nothing here is made for you,” she says over her shoulder. “But some of it can be.”

“That’s okay. I’m easy.”

“No such thing.” She pulls something out and holds it up to the light, then shakes her head and puts it back. “Every woman is hard. That’s why I have a job.”

She comes back with a few things tossed over her arm and hangs them on a hook inside the curtain. Then she pushes me inside, tugs the curtain around me, and leaves me alone in this little canvas box with a scuffed, frameless mirror screwed to the wall.

The first one is navy. Long sleeves, high neck, and a straight skirt that goes past my knees. It has a lot of fabric in it and leaves little in the way of skin showing. It’s what I’d pick out for myself, which is how I know it’s safe and boring.

It goes on without too much of a fight. The zipper is a bit of a project at the top, but after a few seconds of struggle, I get it done. I look at myself in the little mirror and think, Okay. Fine. Nobody’s going to point at me.

“Come out, please,” Ekaterina says.

I push the curtain aside and step out onto the strip of clear floor between the pressing table and the dress forms. Kane is where he was, ankle over knee, hands loose. He looks at me without saying anything, longer than he needs to.

“Turn,” he says.

“Turn?”

“All the way around. Slowly.”

“This is a lot of production for one dress.”

“Turn, Lilah.”

Blushing, I turn. If mirrors are tough for me, how am I supposed to feel under the scrutiny of a six-foot-four billionaire mob boss?

When I come back around to the front, he shakes his head once. “No.”

“You didn’t even⁠—”

“No,” he says again. “Take it off.”

Ekaterina huffs through her nose. “Which part is wrong?”

“All of it.” He gestures at me with two fingers, from my collarbone down. “It starts at her chin and ends at her shins and it never touches her once. She could be anybody in there.”

The back of my neck goes hot. “It’s a nice dress.”

“On the hanger, yes. On you? It’s not right.” He drops his hand. “Next.”

I slink back inside the curtain, strip out of the navy ensemble, and move on to the next.

The next one is dark green, with a wrap front and a tie at the side. I actually like the color. But it’s got a lot of give at the hips, whole yards of it, like somebody built a tent and then tried to repurpose it into something else.