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“I’d encourage you to take a few days⁠—”

“No. Not a few days, and not a counter or a phone call next week. Just plain old ‘No.’“ I put my finger on his offer and push it back across the counter toward him. “This building has one name on the deed and it’s mine. I bought it and I paid for it, and I turned down money from my own dying father to keep it that way. So you can put your number in the trash on your way out, because it’s not for sale to you or anybody standing behind you.”

The bell over the door dings.

I don’t have to turn around to know who’s arrived. The whole shop tightens up. Yuri comes in first and stops just inside the door, and then Kane walks past him.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look at me. He goes and stands at the end of the counter with his hands in his coat pockets and waits.

Gates has gone a shade grayer than his hair.

Then he turns away from me and faces Kane.

Bad move.

“Mr. Makov,” he says. “Perhaps you’d be willing to talk some sense into your girlfriend. This is a generous⁠—”

“The owner answered you,” Kane snarls in an icy baritone.

Gates blinks. “I’m sorry?”

Kane takes two steps and picks up the folder off my counter with two fingers, like it’s something repulsive he found in a drain, and shoves it into Gates’s chest.

“Are you stupid? She said no. That’s the end of the conversation.” He switches to glaring at the other man. “This bakery is not for sale. It belongs to Delilah Dorsey and it stays that way.”

“We’re simply⁠—”

“You’re leaving,” Kane says. “My friend here will walk you to your car and take your plate number, and if either of you comes within a block of this address again, we’ll have a longer conversation in a place with fewer windows and a drain in the floor to swallow your blood. Tell whoever pays you that I said that.”

They go. Yuri goes out behind them and stands on the sidewalk, watching their car until it turns at the corner.

Nobody in the shop moves for a second.

Then Jolene says, “Well,” and goes back to the register.

Priya comes over and squeezes my arm hard enough to hurt before returning to the ovens. Angelica exhales and starts the mixer again.

Little by little, the noise comes back in.

Kane stays where he is, at the end of my counter. When I can think straight again, I go to him.

“You have impeccable timing,” I say with a nervous laugh.

He glances at the door. “Yuri called me the moment they walked in. I sat outside for six and a half minutes to be sure you could handle them yourself.”

“Such admirable restraint, Mr. Makov.”

He tightens his fists and grimaces. “It wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”

When he sees my own hands shaking, he reaches out and covers them. “Listen to me, Lilah. Nobody is taking this building from you. I won’t let that happen.”

How fast things change. Three months ago, he was getting ready to take it.

Now, he’s… what? My boyfriend? My protector? My lover? My ruin?

Fuck it. Who needs a name? He’s mine and I’m his. That’s what matters.

“Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”