Page 74 of Sweet Ruin

“Okay,” he says after a while. “The best thing to do is look at this with fresh eyes. Explain this whole thing to me like I’m an idiot.”

“That’s how I always explain things to you,” I drawl.

He scowls and punches me in the shoulder. “Alright, asshole. Humor me. Pretend I don’t know anything about this plan and walk me through it.”

I don’t have any better ideas right now. So, with a deep breath, I launch into the story of how I came to own this massive chunk of Brooklyn waterfront real estate.

“Twenty years ago, this was nothing. Warehouses with holes in the roofs. Truck yards. Half of it was empty and the other half was full of businesses that were about to die. You could buy a building down here for the price of a car.”

“Yeah. It was a ghost town, right?”

“Right. Nobody wanted it. The city didn’t want it. So I started buying.”

“With what money?”

“Whatever I had. Then whatever the Bratva made. Then loans against the ones I already owned.” I move my finger down the map, block by block. “I never bought two on the same street in the same year. I never bought under my own name. Every parcel on here went to a different LLC with a different address and a different signature on the paperwork. V Haven was only one of them.”

Niko taps a finger against his lips. “Why bother? You’ve got no problem letting people know who you are.”

“Because the second a seller figures out that one man is buying up a whole corridor, the price goes up. People think they can play hardball with me. One stubborn old woman can cost me eight figures.” I rap a fist on the laminate. “So I was patient. It’s taken half my life, but we’ve almost acquired all of it. Nobody’s put it together yet, but by the time they do, it won’t matter.”

“And now, the city wants it.”

“Exactly. The terminal’s coming back. There’s ferry money, a rezoning study, some hotshot developer in Manhattan who has been trying to get somebody on the phone about this corridor for years.” I straighten up. “He’s got big plans. He thinks that, if he can get the whole stretch from Third down to the water, he can knock it flat and put up whatever he wants.”

“Which means it’s worth more all together than it is in pieces.”

“Yes. Ten times over.” I look at the white square, one parcel off the corner of Forty-Fourth and Fourth. “But it isn’t whole. There’s a bakery sitting in the middle of it.”

Niko leans over the map and studies the gap like it might have changed since the last time he looked at it.

“A few billion for this stretch is a lot of money,” he whistles.

“That’s not the point.”

He does a double-take. “Since when?”

I roll the marker back and forth under two fingers. “I made a promise about this corridor a long time ago. At our mother’s grave. That’s all you need to know about it.”

He waits for more, but he won’t be getting any tonight. I’m not in a nostalgic mood.

“Okay,” he says finally, returning to munch on his chicken. “Then buy the damn bakery off her. Wave a number at her that no baker in Brooklyn could say no to.”

“She won’t sell.”

“Everybody sells when the price is right.”

“She gave her dying father’s check back,” I say. “She won’t sell.”

Niko’s grin fades a little. He hears the snag, because he’s not stupid. “You really think she’ll stand her ground?”

I think back on Lilah’s fire. The stubborn clench of her jaw.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I do.”

I’ve known men who would have their own mother’s teeth out for a fraction of what her father offered her. This woman looked at it and said no thank you, because, like me, she’d figured out young that anything she was handed could be taken away again.

The only thing that can’t be taken is the thing nobody gave you. The shit you earn yourself.