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Then my mouth turns into a desert.

I get up, pull his shirt off the floor, put it on, grab my phone, and go find water.

The hallway lights are dimmed. Downstairs, the house is dim and quiet. I go past the parlor, past the staircase—and stop, because a door stands open on my left, and there’s a light on in there.

The table is enormous. Dark oak, twelve chairs. And a map is spread across the whole length of it, held flat by two crystal ashtrays, a bottle of vodka, and a stapler.

It looks like a city planner’s map. Laminated, professional, a grid of lot lines and parcel numbers printed in tiny, cramped font.

When I get closer, I realize why it looks so weirdly familiar.

It’s Sunset Park. My Sunset Park. The BQE runs along the top, there’s the water, the terminal and the piers, Third and Fourth and Fifth Avenue laid out in stripes. Thirty-Ninth Street at one edge, Forty-Fifth at the other.

And almost every single parcel on it is colored in green. Hand-colored. You can see the marker strokes where somebody filled them in one at a time, some of them faded, some of them fresh.

I start to count and give up. Gotta be almost a hundred of them.

Each one has a little block of typed text beside it—names. V HAVEN HOLDINGS, LLC. THIRD RIDGE PROPERTIES. AZURE 44 REALTY. Dozens of names, none of them the same.

I follow Fourth Avenue down with one finger.

Forty-Second.

Forty-Third.

Forty-Fourth.

I find the cross-street and trace it to something labeled Lot 22.

It’s white.

It is the only white square on the entire map, actually. A little rectangle left blank in all that green, with a number written in the corner, and beneath it, in tiny careful print:

4412 FOURTH AVE—2 STY BRICK—3,100 SF LOT.

My bakery.

I stand there with my hand on the plastic and my hair still damp from sweat and his shirt hanging off me, lost in my confusion.

I know he buys buildings. I know he wanted my bakery. But the scale of this is… I mean, it’s staggering. It’s too much. Billions of dollars’ worth of property. And all these company names…

What does that add up to?

What is Kane Makov doing?

And how do I fit in?

“Hey.”

I jump about a foot.

Niko is in the doorway with a beer in one hand and a plate in the other. He’s looking at the table, not at me.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.” He sets the plate down on a chair. “You’re wearing my brother’s shirt.”

“I was looking for the kitchen.”