Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 29

“February seventh,” Kane says, tapping that date with one tattooed finger. I’m not surprised that he remembers. He heard me rehearse it in a pantry. He saw the slideshow. He knows what it means.

“That one I already knew about. It can’t hurt me any more than it already did.” I close the planner. “It’s the others. Those were good days. If you’d asked me in November to name the best days I had, I’d have named half of the ones that have X’s on them now. And because of what they did to them, they’re gone. Not just the day, but the whole memory of it. It’s tainted. I can’t get at any of them anymore without them standing in it.”

My eyes are stinging, so I look at the register drawer.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s a calendar. Just a bunch of stupid holidays. Whatever.”

Kane doesn’t move for a long moment.

Then he says, “No.”

“No what?”

“That isn’t right.”

“Yeah, well.” I shrug. “Take it up with them.”

“I intend to.” He takes one step back from the counter. His face has changed. Not softer. If anything he looks angrier than he did when he was talking about buying my husband’s testimony. But I feel oddly protected from it.

His rage and violence isn’t aimed at me anymore.

“They took your holidays from you. They did it in your house, around your family, on the days you did the work. And now, you sit here and tell me it’s fine? Where’s your f*****g rage?”

“What do you want me to do, cry in front of a mob boss?”

“I want the record corrected.” He scowls at the planner in my hands. “It can’t stand like that. I won’t let it.”

“That’s a nice sentiment, but time only runs one direction, so⁠—”

“Then we don’t fix the old ones,” he declares. “We put new ones on top.”

I stop. “What?”

“I’m making you a new offer.” He reaches out to grab my hands in his and pull me toward him. The counter is between us, but Kane’s grip is tight and unrelenting. “Every holiday between New Year’s Eve and Easter, you spend with me.”

I laugh right in his face. “I’m sorry, what?”

“New Year’s Eve, whatever comes after it, Valentine’s Day. All of them, right through Easter Sunday.” He nods at the planner. “They stole those days in your book. I want them back. So we’ll take them, one at a time, and by the end of it, when you look at that page, you won’t see them anymore. You’ll see me instead.”

I blink a few times, but the mirage that is Kane Makov doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Maybe he’s real after all.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

“And what do you get?” I question. “Because you’re not a charity. You’ve made that extremely clear.”

“I get what I want,” he says, “which is my business to know, not yours.”

“That’s not⁠—”

“And you get this.” He picks up the four stapled pages off my counter, the ones with my blood dried brown on the corner, and he holds them up between two fingers. “Come Easter Sunday, if you’ve kept your end, I’ll burn it. The note, the pledge, the guaranty with your husband’s handwriting on it—all of it, in front of you. It’ll be yours. And nobody will ever come for this building again.”

I look at the note in his hand. Then at the planner in mine. Lose everything in sixteen days, but keep my dignity? Or submit to Kane Makov and retain the bakery that’s been my life’s dream?

I want to say yes right now, before he changes his mind. My mouth is already open to do it.

That’s why I don’t.

“I need a day,” I say.

Kane sets the pages down on the counter. “Alright. Take it.”

“That’s it? No ‘you have until midnight,’ no—I don’t know—ominous countdown?”

“One day,” he agrees. “Call the same number when you’ve decided. If the answer is no, then I’ll see you again on January 15th, under less accommodating terms.”

He pulls his gloves out of his pocket and tugs them back on. At the door, he stops.

“A man will be here tomorrow morning about the lock,” he says. “Let him in. He’s not coming to bother you.”

Then he goes. The bell over my broken door rattles in the cold. The two coats on the sidewalk peel off after him, until the entire black-clad trio disappears into the winter gloom.

I stand there in the dark with the pendant bulb over my head and the bloodstained note lying on the counter where he left it. I don’t have any idea what just happened.

Then I open the planner and find Easter.

I look at the X on it for a long, long time.

Three months spending holidays with a mob boss. That’s not so bad, right?

The nice lady on f*******: Marketplace who sold me this cot is a filthy liar. It is not comfortable enough to sleep on for the rest of my life. Not by a long shot.

So it goes without saying that I don’t sleep much on Wednesday night.

I guess I should go a little bit easier on that lady, because I have had some good naps here. But there’s a big, big difference between a twenty-minute I’m so tired I could fall asleep anywhere snooze with your mouth wide open and an eight-hour session of tossing and turning and replaying every mistake you’ve ever made.

“Ever saying a single word to Kane Makov” is currently at the top of the list.

I’m not even sure why I asked for a day, because one measly little twenty-four-hour window is not nearly enough to wrap my head around the enormity of his offer.

A day to decide the fate of my bakery.

A day to decide the fate of my life, really.

Because one thing is clear: Stepping into Kane’s world is a one-way ticket. There’s no world in which I return to my little old life, intact and unchanged.

Even the way he grabbed my hands over the counter has left an impression on me. That touch, those eyes… He carves off a tiny piece of me every time and keep it for himself.

A day to decide if I can spend three months with that?

Yeah, right.

It’s not even close to enough.

At quarter past four, I quit pretending I’m ever going to sleep and get up.

I brush my teeth and wash my face in the little bathroom attached to the back office. I’m out in the kitchen by twenty after, which is early even for me. In the bakery business, New Year’s Eve is a day that eats you alive if you let it. We’ve got special orders out the wazoo, plus the regular case, and all the other endless chores that come with running a place like this. It’s going to be a very long shift.

But when I get out, the kitchen lights are already on.

Huh?

I brace myself to find a certain 6’4”, green-eyed mob boss looming over my pastries.

But to my surprise, I get a 5’3” Indian woman with waist-length black hair tied back in a flawless fishtail braid instead.

Priya doesn’t hear me at first. That’s probably because she’s humming along to the Christmas music that’s coming from the radio on the high shelf. She’s a sucker for holiday music, that one. I’ve always joked that if Mariah Carey ever came into the bakery, Priya would leap over the counter trying to kiss her.

She’s easing a tray of croissants onto the rack. When she finishes and turns around, she sees me and smiles.

“Look who’s vertical!” she says. “And conscious! At the same time!”

“I’m only vertical by the good grace of the wall here,” I mumble, “and I’m only conscious by the good grace of anxiety and cortisol.”

“Well, vertical is vertical, and conscious is conscious,” she replies with a wise wink. “We’ve all gotta start the day somewhere.” She turns and starts bustling over to her next task. “Although you, my glazed little honey bun, do not need to be starting the day quite yet. Why are you awake?”

“Why are you awake?” I counter. “You’re not on ‘til six.”

“Because it’s New Year’s Eve and I have fourteen cake orders, nine dozen cupcake trays, and a boss who thinks she’s a rotisserie chicken who never needs turning.” She hands me a coffee, then wags a stern finger in my face. “Don’t speak again until you’ve had half of this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I mutter. I lean against the corner of the steel table in yesterday’s leggings and follow Priya’s orders, while Bing Crosby promises somebody a white Christmas six days too late.

Priya goes back to the rack.

I watch her work, her braid swishing back and forth beneath her jade-green silk headband. As the coffee hits my bloodstream, I realize with a jolt that it’s a blessing in disguise that she’s here.

The inside of my head is a wreck right now. Between Connor, Vivian, my mother, and Kane, I’ve got all kinds of ghosts and phantoms screaming at me from between my own ears.

What I need is an outlet. Someone non-judgmental, who will hear me out and help me through this swamp of bad thoughts.