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“No.”

She nods once, then turns back to scribbling notes on her legal pad. That’s one thin silver lining of this catastrophe: She doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to question me about the map yet.

But when she finds out both topics are my fault, the story will change.

That’s for fucking sure.

“Okay,” she says aloud, sort of to me, sort of to Priya, but mostly to herself. “So. Hearth & Harvest bails without a reason, screws us over, and tells us not to call back.”

“Should we egg their offices?” Priya asks in a numb voice.

Delilah laughs miserably. “With what eggs? They’re the ones who sold us eggs, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah. Duh.” Her head slumps lower.

“Chin up, Pri. Here’s what we’re going to do,” Delilah announces. “We’re going to split the order up and plug the gaps for the time being. Bay Mill in Maspeth can do the flour and sugar, then we beg Corrado’s out on Long Island to rush-ship us butter, dairy, and chocolate. The expedited fee is gonna suck, but we don’t have much of a choice.”

“We could raise prices,” Priya suggests.

Delilah shakes her head. “Not a chance. I’m not screwing over our customers just because we got screwed over.”

“What do you need from me?” I interrupt.

She looks up properly. Whatever she was braced for, it wasn’t that. “That’s it? You’re not just seizing the wheel? No ‘let me handle it’?”

“You are handling it,” I remind her. “I’m merely asking how I can assist.”

She exhales noisily. “Security,” she says at last. “If somebody leaned on my supplier, then that somebody scares me a little bit. I don’t want my staff walking out to their cars alone.”

I nod. “Yuri’s on his way. He’ll guard the alley himself tonight and put a man on it after.”

“Not out front, though. Not standing over customers.”

“I’ll let him know.”

I recede into the background and let Delilah work. At two in the morning, she sends Priya home in a cab she pays for. By two-thirty, she has both orders confirmed by email and the delivery windows in writing.

She’s handling this, just like I knew she could.

I’m the one letting things spiral out of control.

Osip Vetrov.

That’s the name running through my head as I sit in the corner of the bakery.

A gray-haired, steely-eyed bastard. Old-school in every sense of the word. He came over to the States in 1991 with nothing and he has spent thirty-five years turning “nothing” into one chop shop, then ten more, then enough laundered cash to fill a bank, routed through repair invoices and scrap metal and a title insurance outfit in Sheepshead Bay.

He is not a killer by preference. More of a death-by-paperwork man. He buys judges, politicians, zoning committees—all the insidious little levers that make society tick.

He has wanted the waterfront for a decade and change. But he was always a step behind me. He never thought to do things my way—which is to say, in secret, through holding companies and ghost fronts. He just tried walking in the front door.

It seems he’s learned his lesson.

Now, he’s turned to playing dirty.

Because these latest things can only lead to one conclusion: Osip has finally worked out that he doesn’t need to buy the entire block to hurt me.

He just needs to get one key piece of it.