Page 255 of Sweet Ruin

“You know what this is,” he says. “Twenty years we’ve been at this shit, Kane. All the battles we went through… And you just spent five days undoing it with a lawyer and a fax machine. For a square you already had in all but name.”

He waits for me to explain that the sacrifice will bring her back. That would mean I’m still trading—putting something on the table and expecting payment, arranging the pieces so she has to end up beside me.

I’ve done nothing but arrange pieces since Christmas Eve. It’s the only way I know.

Because of me, she lost the last possession nobody gave her.

“If you think this is some grand gesture, it’s not. It won’t change a damn thing. She’s not coming back because of this. She may sell that building to Osip Vetrov on Monday and take his money and move to Vermont. If she does, it’s hers to sell, and she won’t need my permission or my blessing or my signature. That’s the whole point, Nik. She gets to decide, and I don’t get a vote in it.”

Niko looks at the map. “What do we do with this, then?”

“We do this.”

I roll the map up and toss it into the crackling fire.

The laminate doesn’t burn like paper. It curls first, blackening at the edges, and then the plastic coating goes up with a chemical hiss that smells like all the sins that went into the making of it.

Third Avenue goes.

The water goes.

Forty-Fourth Street bubbles and lifts off the log in a sheet of ash.

Niko comes and stands next to me with his hands in his pockets. We watch it go like mourners at a funeral.

Twenty years, in twenty seconds.

Ninety-one parcels. Every hand I broke, every envelope I passed, every night I sat in a car outside a warehouse with a folder on my lap waiting for a man to sign. Every shell company Niko incorporated at two in the morning. All of it, shading in green, one square at a time.

The last thing to go is the white one.

It holds out longer than the rest, the way she would. Then the edge catches and Lot 22 goes gold, then orange, then nothing.

“Well,” Niko says finally. “Ma would’ve liked her.”

“Yeah,” I say. “She would have.”

47

DELILAH

Easter Sunday, and the bakery is closed.

Guess what?

I’m here anyway.

I got in at six because I couldn’t sleep and there was nowhere else I wanted to be. I ran the dishwasher with nothing in it. I wiped down the front of the case with vinegar and newspaper, which is what my dad used on windows and what I still use even though it leaves my hands smelling like a chip shop. I counted the till twice. My need to be busy got so desperate that I sorted the sprinkles jars by color.

I’d have moved onto scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush if the text hadn’t arrived.

KANE: I’m outside. I have the things I promised. If you’d rather I leave them with Josef, say the word and I’ll go.

I look at that message for a while.

The week has been quiet in a way I don’t know what to do with. No gifts. No envelopes on my desk. No screenshots of Connor losing yet another precious thing.

There were documents, too. Wednesday, a courier brought a thick envelope from a law office on Fifty-Third Street. I gave it to Skye without opening it. She called me back that afternoon and talked for fifteen minutes straight without stopping.