Page 227 of Sweet Ruin

“No.” I slap the table. “There’s no fucking point.”

“Telling her is the point, man! Better from you than from him!”

“I said no.” I shake my head. “She’d walk. And then she’d be out there alone with Osip Vetrov circling her, no men on her door, no one watching her staff, nothing.”

Niko looks at me with a sneer. “That’s a convenient excuse to be a coward.”

I get a fistful of his shirt in each hand and throw him on top of the table. One of the crystal ashtrays falls off the edge and cracks on the floor. The vodka bottle rolls and stops against the stapler.

“Question me again, motherfucker,” I spit in my brother’s face. “I fucking dare you.”

Even with my hands around his throat, he manages to shake his head. “Unbelievable. You’re really gonna hold onto this until Easter?”

“I’m going to burn the note in front of her, and then I’m going to tell her all of it. In that order. Like I planned.”

“And if he gets to her first?”

“Then find him,” I say. “That’s your job. Do it before he does.”

Then I let go of him and step back. My brother looks up at me, disgusted, rumpled, exhausted. Behind him, the map burns green, with a lone dot of white swimming in the midst of it.

Three weeks. Three more weeks of a little white lie.

After that, Lilah can choose what happens next.

40

DELILAH

The car turns onto Kane’s street a little after seven. I still don’t know where we’re going.

“Is it dinner?”

“There will be food.” Kane doesn’t look up from his phone. “You’ll eat. You’ll be fed until you complain about it, actually.”

It’s my birthday. The big 3-2, which as anyone knows is a milestone event in every culture on earth.

I spent the day doing what I do every other day. Priya made me stop at nine to eat a croissant and then sang at me while Cameron banged a sheet pan with a whisk.

She chased me out at four o’clock. It struck me as a little suspicious at the time, but I had other things to think about. The curb’s still half-fixed. There’s a temporary plywood ramp bolted where the brick apron used to be. The problems never end.

My birthday has never actually been my birthday. It falls in that stretch of March that runs up against Palm Sunday, and when I was a kid, my mother folded the two together every single year. One party. Palms on the table, ham in the oven, forty people from the parish, and a cake with my name on it near the back if I was lucky.

The year I turned twelve, I spent half of my own party hauling coats up to the guest bedroom. When I was fourteen, I ran the coffee urn. Efficient, my mother called it. Why do two when you can do one?

So I’ve never really had a proper birthday party. I figured more of the same was in store for this year.

But then we pull up in front of Kane’s brownstone, and I realize just how wrong I was.

“Kane… what have you done?”

“Get out of the car, Lilah.”

He pulls me by my hand up the steps. Anton opens the door and steps aside.

Behind him, the hall is full of noise—and then somebody screams.

“MISS DELILAH!”