Chapter 11 Kir #2
Mat watches me over the rim of his glass. “A rough Kir night, or rough Lukas night? Because those are two very different conversations and I need to know which one to prepare for.”
I swirl the tequila in my glass. “Little bit of both.”
“Ah. A double feature.” Mat takes a sip of his own drink, relaxed, unhurried. “Well, start wherever you want. I’ve got nowhere to be.”
I don’t start anywhere. I just sit there, rolling the glass between my palms, thinking about blood on white tile and the way Jillian’s body wash smelled in the billowing steam.
Mat tilts his head. “You gonna talk, or did you drag me out here to watch you brood? I’ve had a lifetime supply of the latter already.”
“Can you shut the fuck up, for once in your life?”
He chuckles. “One: Have you met me? Two: I’m a lawyer; talking a lot is a professional hazard. Three: You’re ducking the question.” He sets his glass down. “What happened, bro?”
I scowl. Unfortunately for my current need for silence, I have met him.
Matvei Satyrin and I have been friends since we were thirteen years old.
He showed up in my life the year after my mother died, when my father shipped me off to an elite boarding school in Connecticut that catered to the sons of men who needed their children educated far from public scrutiny.
Mat was the kid in the next dorm room over.
Skinny, dark-haired, too smart for his own good, with a mouth that got him into trouble on a daily basis.
His father, Grigori, was mid-level Bratva.
Not my father’s crew, though. He belonged to a smaller outfit operating out of Brighton Beach.
Grigori ran protection rackets and laundered money through a chain of dry cleaners, which Mat always thought was hilarious for some reason.
“Cleaning money through cleaners? He’s the biggest fuckin’ cliché I’ve ever met! ”
Mat wanted out from the jump. He watched his father get arrested twice before he turned ten and decided early on that he’d go a different route.
So he became a lawyer. A damn good one, too.
Georgetown undergrad, Columbia Law, top of his class.
He clerked for a federal judge and then went into private practice at a white-shoe firm in Midtown.
On paper, he’s completely clean.
In practice, he’s the person I call when things get complicated, because Mat understands both worlds and moves between them without breaking a sweat.
He’s also the only person alive I trust.
“My father happened,” I sigh at last. “Same as always.”
“Okay. And?”
“And what?”
“And whatever else is eating you alive right now. Because that—” He gestures at my face. “—is not just a Lukas face. That’s something else.”
“It’s not something else.”
“It’s a girl,” he decides.
“It’s not a girl.”
“It’s definitely a girl.” Mat grins and picks his drink back up. “I’ve known you for almost eighteen years, Kir. I know what your daddy issues face looks like, and I know what your girl trouble face looks like, and right now, you’re wearing both at the same time.”
“Fuck off, man.”
Jillian is not a girl. I don’t know what she is yet, but I know what she isn’t, and she isn’t fucking that.
Girls don’t make me flip marble coffee tables.
Girls don’t make me beat a man until his face caves in because he had the audacity to sit across from her and eat green curry.
Girls don’t make me stand in their showers with my hand around my cock, shaking, drooling, cumming so hard my vision blacks out.
Jillian Pierce is a goddamn catastrophe, and yet I keep walking toward her instead of away. Why is that? Good fucking question. I can’t even explain it, not to Mat, not to myself, not to anyone.
Right now, this problem lives in the dark, where I can pretend it’s manageable. The moment I drag it into the light and let someone else look at it, I lose the only control I have left.
“I’m not discussing a girl with you,” I add when he opens his mouth to keep prying. “So move the fuck on.”
“Fine. Grouchy today.” He waves a hand. “So, setting the not-a-girl aside, let’s discuss whatever Lukas has done to you lately.”
I look at him. “He—”
Mat holds up both hands, palms out. “In broad strokes, though,” he interrupts. “Very broad. I don’t want details. I never want details. You know this.”
“I know.”
“I’m your lawyer and your friend, in that specific order, when it comes to anything with your father’s fingerprints on it. So keep it vague and keep me clean.”
I nod. That’s always been the deal. Mat got out of the Bratva world for a reason. He doesn’t want back in, not even through me.
“He gave me a… a job,” I say carefully. “A person. Someone who’s becoming a problem for the family.”
Mat wrinkles his nose. His dark eyes go flat and careful, like storm shutters walling up the windows. Everything else stays loose—the posture, the easy grip on his glass—but the eyes give him away every time.
He’s a good-looking guy, Mat. Always has been.
Strong nose, sharp cheekbones, artfully maintained black stubble.
His hair is thick and black and pushed carelessly back off his forehead.
He’s got a face that juries trust and women want to sit on, which is why he’s so goddamn effective in both arenas.
“And,” I conclude, “I haven’t done it.”
That makes Mat put his glass down. “Why not?”
I don’t answer.
“Kir. Why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Like hell it is! It’s the opposite of complicated.
You get in, you get out. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Kir, you know damn well that dawdling is when shit gets messy.
It makes people start asking questions and forming connections, and then everything falls apart.
” He jabs a warning finger at me. “Whatever’s holding you up—which, as we clearly stated, is not a girl—I suggest you figure it out fast. Your father doesn’t give extensions. ”
“I know better than anyone what my father does and doesn’t give,” I mutter.
Mat opens his mouth to say something else, but then his phone lights up on the table between us.
He glances down at it, and when he does his face changes.
Not a lot—Mat’s too good at masks for that—but enough for me to catch.
The easy looseness in his shoulders tightens by a fraction, and he picks up the phone and reads whatever’s on the screen.
“I gotta go,” he says, reaching for his jacket.
“Now? I just got here.”
“Yes, now.” He throws back the rest of his tequila and stands, shrugging into the jacket. He tosses two hundred-dollar bills on the table. “Drinks are on me tonight. Although, as your unwilling therapist, I should really be invoicing you instead.”
I don’t let him deflect with the joke. “What is it that’s got you running?”
He pretends to be very fascinated with the clasp of his watch. “Definitely not a girl, as we agreed.”
“Mat…”
His eyes dart to mine, and to my surprise, they’re swirling and serious.
Very unusual for him. “Look, man, you keep your secrets and I’ll keep mine.
Alright? I’ll call you tomorrow.” He claps me on the shoulder once, firm, and then he’s gone, weaving through the dim red light toward the staircase and disappearing up it without looking back.
I sit there for a while, sipping my drink, bathed in hellish red light.
When I reach the bottom, the bartender brings over a fresh one and retreats without a word.
That’s why I like this place: It’s not fucking Cheers.
None asks if you’re okay or what’s ailing you.
You sit in the dark and you drink and you think, and the world leaves you the fuck alone.
Mat’s right. Dawdling is dangerous. Every hour I don’t finish the job is another hour my father’s patience erodes and another hour Afon gets closer to being unleashed.
The math is simple. A child could do it.
Kill her plus Walk away equals Problem solved.
Except I can’t.
I can’t because every time I close my eyes, I see her, kneeling on her own floor with her fingers laced behind her head and her red hair spilling over her shoulders and her whole body trembling—but not breaking.
She didn’t break. She fought me, mocked me, told me I didn’t have the balls, but she did not fucking break.
I’ve never met anyone like that.
It feels like something happened to me the moment I climbed through her window. Like I’ve been cursed, or possessed, or struck by fucking lightning. A single, annihilating bolt that rewired every circuit in my brain and pointed them all in one direction.
Toward her.
When the restlessness gets to be too much, I abandon what’s left of the tequila and head for the stairs. Outside, the night air is cold and cruel. East 4th Street is quiet. A couple stumbles past, drunk and laughing, while a cab idles at the corner with its off-duty light switched on.
I turn west. My apartment is north and east, a straight shot up the Bowery to the bridge and across. I should go home so I can shower again and sleep. When I wake up tomorrow, I’ll figure out what the hell I’m doing with my life and my father’s orders and all of it.
I’m about to do exactly that—when my hand finds the mask in my jacket pocket.
I stop walking. My fingers close around the fabric. It’s still warm from being pressed against my body all night.
Home.
The mask.
Home.
The mask.
One is right. One is very fucking wrong. Mat gave me good advice, and my own brain is practically begging me to listen to him.
But I know before I even start to move that I was never going to do that.
I pull the mask on and start to run.
Toward her.