Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 25

I roll the marker back and forth under two fingers. “I made a promise about this corridor a long time ago. At our mother’s grave. That’s all you need to know about it.”

He waits for more, but he won’t be getting any tonight. I’m not in a nostalgic mood.

“Okay,” he says finally, returning to munch on his chicken. “Then buy the damn bakery off her. Wave a number at her that no baker in Brooklyn could say no to.”

“She won’t sell.”

“Everybody sells when the price is right.”

“She gave her dying father’s check back,” I say. “She won’t sell.”

Niko’s grin fades a little. He hears the snag, because he’s not stupid. “You really think she’ll stand her ground?”

I think back on Lilah’s fire. The stubborn clench of her jaw.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I do.”

I’ve known men who would have their own mother’s teeth out for a fraction of what her father offered her. This woman looked at it and said no thank you, because, like me, she’d figured out young that anything she was handed could be taken away again.

The only thing that can’t be taken is the thing nobody gave you. The s**t you earn yourself.

Niko grabs his plate and stands. “Well, then I think you go back to Plan A. Wait her out. Three weeks, and you can color in your last precious square.”

Niko takes his plate to the kitchen. I hear the tap run, then the clink of his cutlery in the sink.

I stay where I am with my hands on the edge of the table.

Plan A. Wait her out.

It’d be easy. But I haven’t built a career and an empire on the back of “easy.”

Niko is pushing for the simple route because he doesn’t have the full set of information. He doesn’t know what the corridor is. Money? A few billion dollars? A handshake with some fawning developer, and then we ride off into the sunset, richer than we ever dreamed of being?

Fuck that. I don’t give a damn about money.

Or power, or importance, or any of that s**t.

No.

I care because this was her neighborhood.

Before the Bratva world swallowed her up and spat out her bones, this was the place my mother called home. The two-family houses with the aluminum awnings and the plaster saints in the yards. The avenue with the butcher and the bakery and the place that sold live carp out of a tank in the window.

My mother came off a boat and landed there, right f*****g there. She never really left. Not in her head, at least. She spent her whole life within about nine square blocks of Fourth Avenue, and she talked about it like it was a world unto itself.

My father called it her Before Times.

He said it like that. Before. As in, That was before, Viktoriya.

He said it when she cooked too much food and he didn’t like the smell.

He said it when she talked too loud on the phone to her cousin.

He said it when she came down the stairs in a dress she’d had since she was twenty-five and he sent her back up to put on something he’d bought her instead.

Before.

As in, We don’t live there anymore, so stop bringing it with you.

He made a lot of money and moved us up and out. And he always despised her for reminding him of where he’d come from.

Eventually, he’d had enough. He wanted to purge himself of the past for good.

I was eleven the night he made it official. January 7th. Orthodox Christmas. With forty people in the house, all seated around the long table, sipping the expensive whiskey from the good glasses. My mother had been toiling in the kitchen since five in the morning.

She never sat down at that table. Not once, not that night. Not ever, as far as I can remember.

She just hovered in the doorway holding a dish and waited to see if anyone wanted more.

That night, once everyone had eaten their fill of my mother’s cooking, Father stood up with his glass and thanked them all for coming. Then he thanked a woman named Ilona, who was a twenty-six-year-old giggling fool of a girl, dressed in revealing clothing, always with a hand on my father’s thigh and a wink in his direction.

He announced her as his new bride.

Right in front of my mother’s face.

In a normal world, a world with some f*****g justice in it, the people in that room would have told him he couldn’t do such a thing.

But my father was a violent man. They knew better than to earn his wrath.

So they just toasted and laughed and congratulated the happy new couple.

My mother went back into the kitchen and finished plating the fish.

By the next morning, she was in a cockroach-infested apartment on Forty-Third Street. Back where she started, back in the Before Times. Returned to sender like a mislabeled package.

She was fifty-one.

My father paid for the apartment, but nothing beyond that. As far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.

I saw her on Sundays when he let me, and then, once I was old enough to stop asking, I went whenever I wanted. She’d feed me until I couldn’t breathe and brush me off whenever I tried to talk about her life instead of mine.

She died in that shoebox shithole. I was twenty-four and too broke to save her. I couldn’t have bought her a house that year if I’d sold my organs.

I would have, though.

If it would have saved her, I would have.

I stood at her grave with dirt still soft on it and I made a promise. It was dumb—graveside promises always are.

But I swore to her that I’d buy all of it. The blocks he sneered at. The avenue with the carp tank. The whole miserable, valuable, unwanted stretch of Brooklyn he was so proud of climbing out of.

Because it was worth something.

Her before was worth something. He thought he traded up. He was dead f*****g wrong.

He swapped a woman who fed forty people gratefully, for a money-grubbing gold-digger, simply because he liked the way she looked.

I’ve spent two decades proving just how wrong he was.

I know I sound like a rich i***t wasting a fortune on a fight nobody else knows is happening. Niko, if he knew the full extent of it, would tell me to go to therapy.

But I don’t give a f**k what it sounds like. There’s one white square left, one parcel off the corner of Forty-Fourth and Fourth, and until it’s green, the argument isn’t finished.

And if the argument isn’t finished, then my father is still right.

I can’t have that.

Footsteps ring out in the hallway. Niko comes back in, drying his hands on his shirt.

“You’re still standing there,” he says. “Brooding.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Is that what you call it? Looks the same from where I’m standing.” He leans against the wall to watch me. “I assume you’ve come to a decision?”

I look at him and nod. “I’m not going to wait her out.” I cap the marker and set it down on the laminate, on Forty-Fourth, right next to the white square. “I’m going to go see her.”

“And do what? You said she won’t sell.”

“She won’t.” I straighten up and roll my shoulder. “So I’m not going to ask her to. I’m going to make her a different offer.”

“What kind of offer?”

“The kind she can’t turn down.”

Niko goes still. There are some phrases in our world, as corny as they may be, that still carry a very clear message. “Are you sure that’s the route you want to take, brother?” he asks in a soft voice. “Kane, that’s pretty damn ugly. Even by our standards.”

I nod again, grim-faced and certain. “One little baker won’t stop me. I’m going to do what I have to do to fill in that f*****g square. Whether she likes it or not.”

I called the bank and requested ten years of my joint account statements on paper. After a lot of hemming and hawing, they finally agreed to have them shipped over.

The courier they sent was all-caps pissed at how many trips he had to make back and forth from his van to get all the boxes on my shelf. I gave him a free cookie for his trouble, but I still don’t think we’re gonna be besties anytime soon.

He can’t get mad at me, though. It’s not my fault. This is what my lawyer is telling me to do.

Skye told me what she needed, which pretty much boiled down to “everything that’s ever been recorded, ever.” Bank records, credit card statements, invoices, receipts from the Sonic drive-thru—if it had a date and a dollar amount on it, she wants it, no matter how old it is.

When I asked her why she thought my dry-cleaning stub from 2017 was important, she asked me if I cared enough to pay her for the time it would take to explain it.

I said no thanks. We’re on thin ice as it is, financially speaking.

But collecting and organizing all the receipts from a decade of my life is a time-consuming task.

So that’s what I’m doing between services on Tuesday and Wednesday.