Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 32

I snatch up the vodka and drop into a chair, propping my feet up on the table as I sip straight from the bottle. Niko comes sauntering in a moment later and claims one of the other seats.

“There’s a storm cloud over your head, my friend,” he observes. “What’s the deal?”

“Nothing. Work. Usual shit.”

He turns like he’s addressing an unseen studio audience. “Folks, he thinks we’re stupid! ‘Work,’ he says. ‘Usual s**t,’ he says. Does he really believe that we don’t see something’s got his panties in a twist?”

“Drop it, Nik.”

“As if I’d ever do something that nice.” Niko sets his plate on the corner of the map and squares up to me. “You went out last night. True or false?”

“I go out a lot of nights.”

“You went out to Sunset Park, specifically.” He licks his thumb.

“Says who?”

“Yuri. He talks.”

I clench my teeth and make a mental note to send Yuri on a one-way trip to Siberia. “He should learn not to.”

“So it’s true then. You went and saw the baker.” He leans back in his seat. “Is that sordid little saga over with? Did she sign her life away?”

“There’s nothing to sign.”

That gets him to stop chewing. “What do you mean, there’s nothing to sign? You said you were going to make her an offer she couldn’t turn down. I assumed you meant—” He stops and pales. “What did you do, Kane?”

“Relax. It’s not what you think.”

He exhales. “Well, that’s good at least. Because what I was thinking was pretty f*****g bad.”

I take another slug of room-temperature vodka and set the bottle on the table. “I went in to collect. That was the plan. She understood what I was saying pretty fast. She’s got no chance in court and even less of one outside of it, so it’ll be easier for all of us if she simply hands over the deed and walks away.”

“Mhmm. True that. How’d she handle it?”

“Well enough. She seemed ready to concede to reality.”

“‘Seemed,’“ Niko echoes. “That’s a funny word. Because it feels like this should be the end of the story. But ‘seemed’… That’s not an end-of-the-story kind of word.”

I look away. “That’s because it’s not the end of the story. Something… happened.”

My brother drags his chair around the corner so he can face me fully. “What kind of something?”

“She knocked her father’s calendar off the counter.”

He pauses. Blinks. Looks around again, up at the ceiling, back at that imaginary studio audience, and gives them all a quizzical look. Then his eyes return to mine. “Her father’s what? What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“His planner. Like, an appointment book or whatever the f**k. She’d drawn a bunch of X’s on it. Caught my eye.”

“I’m not sure if you’re stupid or I am, but I am not following this at all, man,” drawls Niko. “Can you break it down for me in a way that, like, actually makes some goddamn sense?”

I sigh and rub my temples. “She was cross-referencing bank statements and found all the days her sister and husband were conducting their affair. Mostly holidays, as it turned out. Family gatherings.”

Niko scratches at the back of his head. “I mean, tough, yeah. That’s no fun. But I still don’t understand what the hell it has to do with us. Since when do we fall for sob stories?”

“I don’t.”

“So then you did take the building?”

“… No.”

He buries his face in his hands. “If you don’t start explaining things soon, I’m going to scream, and I won’t stop until you do.”

“Christ, you’re a f*****g theatrical one,” I snap.

But even as I say it, I hear Lilah’s voice in my ear.

That’s very theatrical of you. Has anyone ever told you that you have a flair for the dramatic?

I picture her saying it. Lips pursed, smiling softly. The curves of her hips, her breasts. Her eyes, warm and teasing. Snowflakes in her hair.

“I made her a different offer.” I drop my feet off the table and sit forward. “A plan to erase the s**t her husband and sister did to her. Every holiday between New Year’s Eve and Easter Sunday, she spends with me. All of them. New Year’s, Valentine’s, the whole lot. If she keeps her end of the deal, then on Easter, I’ll release her from the lien. She’ll keep her building for good.”

Niko is so stunned that he can’t speak for a minute. In many ways, it’s the best minute of my life. I can’t get him to shut the f**k up most of the time.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this,” he says at last. “You, Kane Makov, have spent twenty years buying up every single parcel along that corridor. You’ve coerced and threatened, extorted and blackmailed. You have set up shell corporations and delivered duffel bags full of cash. And now, after the most convoluted scheme yet—a scheme that I put a s**t ton of work into, in case you forgot!—you’ve got a clear path to owning the final piece of the puzzle outright in just two short weeks. But instead of simply, I dunno, chilling the f**k out… you just traded it all away for four months of holiday parties with your new gal pal?”

“Three.”

“What?!”

“It’s three months,” I insist. “Not four.”

“Oh, well, that makes it all better then!” he cries out, throwing up his hands. “Whoopee for you! Whoopee for me! All our problems are solved!”

I grab the stapler that’s weighing down another corner of the map and hurl it at him. It’s a good thing for the structural integrity of his skull that my brother has sharp reflexes. He ducks just in time to avoid getting his face shattered.

“You’re missing the f*****g point,” I snarl. “She won’t sell and she won’t fold. Now, she’s got a reason to spend time with me, and I’ve got three months to find the pressure point that will make it an easy transition. Plus, this way, we avoid a court battle that would drag things out, make s**t public, and give our enemies time to get their greedy little paws on my territory.”

“You know,” remarks Niko, “when you say it like that, it almost sounds reasonable.”

“That’s because it is reasonable, mudak.”

“Hey, hey. No need to start slinging around rude names.” He turns back to his food and starts picking at it again. “So she said yes?”

I turn away. “She asked for a day.”

Niko immediately chokes on his food and starts laughing. “All that,” he splutters between hacking breaths, “all that big talk about savvy moves and outsmarting her and keeping things hush so you can make moves in silence like a true gangster, blah blah blah… and she didn’t even agree? You are a funny man, Kane Makov. You are a funny, funny man.”

“Keep talking and you’ll be a dead man,” I growl at him. I raise the vodka bottle over my head and Niko flinches.

“Relax, you homicidal maniac. It was a joke. I’m kidding. I’m sure it’s all gonna work out fine. Things always seem to end up that way for you anyway.”

A silence follows that seems to signal the end of the conversation. But I know better. My brother has a twinkle in his eye that says he isn’t finished quite yet.

He picks up a piece of pork, eyes it, then sets it back down. When he speaks again, it’s in his serious voice.

“Can I ask you something and not get cracked over the head?”

I sigh. “No promises.”

“Which one are you buying?”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, are you buying the block?” he asks. “Or are you buying the baker?”

I take my time to weigh an answer. Niko waits patiently.

The block is the block. It’s the exact sort of thing that a man like me is supposed to want. Land, money, power. The last white square colored in.

The block is also my mother’s block. It’s my roots, her memory, our legacy. I swore I’d get it all for her.

But what if that’s not the whole picture anymore? What would that mean?

If I say it’s the baker, then what am I? A man who spent two decades assembling the most valuable square mile in Brooklyn and then handed the last piece back because I felt bad for this beaten-down woman who deserved a better man in her life. A few black X’s on a hand-me-down calendar were enough to sway me off of a decade of planning? Of blood, sweat, and tears?

My father would have laughed himself sick, if he could see me now.

He’d have set down his glass and looked at the men around the table and muttered something out of the side of his mouth about how his boy went soft.

He’d have thrown me away just like he did my mother. Another son wouldn’t be so sympathetic, such a f*****g p***y.

That thought grates.

But not as much as the one I keep coming back to.

A thumb stroking spilled sugar off of a velvet-soft cheek. Sweet lips and snowflakes in her hair. Is trading away my empire worth it if I get that instead?

I don’t know.

But I don’t have any plans to explain myself to f*****g anybody.

I pick the vodka back up off the map instead.