Page 236 of Sweet Ruin

“Yeah. I think I’m going to.” She goes quiet a second. “It’s weird. I keep making plans past April and not flinching. I used to plan in two-week blocks because anything further out felt like tempting fate.”

“Nothing’s coming for you.”

“I know.” She turns her head and kisses my thigh. “That’s what’s weird.”

She’s asleep again inside a minute.

I sit there with the phone still open on the photo of her face in the candlelight. It’s a sick irony I’m the one who used to plan decades in advance, but now, I’m reduced to looking no more than two weeks into the future.

All because of one white square on a map colored green, lying one floor below us.

What the fuck do I do? So many things hang in the balance. We’re right at the tipping point. Lies and truths, theft and violence, Osip Vetrov and my mother’s neighborhood and all the dozens of shell companies that, as soon as I snap my fingers, will arrange themselves into an empire like New York City has never seen before.

I can have everything I’ve ever wanted.

Or I can have her.

But I can’t have both.

There’s a knock on the doorframe at ten to three.

I already have my pants on. I sleep four hours a night when I sleep at all, and Lilah’s alarm is at three-thirty. I like those minutes before it.

Niko is in the hall in his coat with snow still on the shoulders. “Let’s talk downstairs,” he says. “Something’s happened.”

I pull the door shut behind me and follow him.

We go downstairs to the map room. The map has been stashed out of sight for over a week, but Niko grabs it from the closet and unrolls it on the table.

“Boyd,” he says.

I frown. I never wanted to hear that name again.

“What about him?”

“We’ve been keeping eyes on him, like you wanted. Yesterday afternoon, he met with a guy named Marat Kolchin. Kolchin does errands for Vetrov. He’s a money man, usually. The guy they send when they want a quiet purchase done off the books.”

Niko pulls out his phone and sets it down right on top of Lot 22. The photograph on the screen is grainy and shot through the glass window of a diner. It’s Connor Boyd, hunched over a coffee cup with his sunglasses on, mouth open mid-conversation.

“We saw a payment,” Niko says. “You can see the envelope in the corner of the frame there. Boyd went straight from the meeting to the check cashing place on Fourth and Eighty-Sixth.”

“How much?”

“Don’t know yet. Enough to justify the trip.” He straightens up. “And before you ask—no, I don’t know what he sold. We didn’t get close enough to eavesdrop.”

Fuck.

I despise these guessing games.

I sit back and consider what Boyd knows.

He knows V Haven Holdings made the loan, and that I control V Haven. He knows the collateral was his wife’s building, because he forged her name on the line himself. He knows I was aware of what the gambling debts he owed in basements around Marine Park, because that’s why he came to me in the first place. And he knows I’ve bought at least some property in Sunset Park.

He also knows what I’ve done to him since Christmas—or more accurately, what I’ve taken from him.

But he lacks proof.

He’s never seen this table. He doesn’t know the names of any of the other entities, or the true scale of what I’ve been assembling. He couldn’t draw this map if I put a green marker in his hand myself.