Chapter 39 Kir
KIR
“If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks / Then I’ll follow you into the dark”
— “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie
I take the long way home.
Not because I need the air, though I do, but because my legs won’t carry me in a straight line tonight. Jillian’s question is a poison thorn in my side. What do you think she’d say if she could see you now?
I gave her the answer that sounded right: that her vengeance was overdue.
But the truth I swallowed before it could crawl out of my mouth is both simpler and worse: She’d be disappointed. She’d look at me and see exactly what Lukas made.
I cross through the park at Seventieth, cut east on Lexington, then loop south again aimlessly. By the time I reach my building, it’s nearly midnight. The doorman nods. The elevator climbs thirty-two floors in silence.
I unlock the penthouse door and know immediately that I’m not alone.
Afon Satyrin, my father’s lead henchman, is sitting on my couch.
He’s got a glass of my vodka in one hand and his boots on my coffee table, right across the crack in the marble. He was simply sitting in the dark, waiting, the way a spider waits.
“Kirill,” he greets.
“Afon.” I close the door behind me. “Help yourself, by all means.”
He takes a slow, unapologetic sip and sets the glass down. “Your father sent me.”
“Thanks,” I tell him, “but no thanks.” I jerk my chin toward the door. “No need to waste your time.”
Afon pulls his boots off the table and stands. He’s shorter than me by a few inches but twice as wide, built like a shipping container that someone gave arms and legs. His nephew Mat got the family looks; Afon got the blunt force brutality. “We have an errand.”
I wrinkle my nose. “What kind of errand?”
“The Bratva kind.”
I don’t move from the doorway. “Then I’m definitely out.”
“Your old man thinks you’ve gone soft,” Afon says emotionlessly. “He wants you to come along tonight. Prove him wrong.”
“I don’t—”
“You and I both know it wasn’t a question, son.” He drains the glass and politely sets it back on my kitchen counter, then trudges over, brushing past me on his way out of the apartment.
Afon drives. I sit in the passenger seat with my hands on my knees and watch the city as we go, a haze of sodium yellow streetlights and blackened windows.
We cross the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Afon turns south on Bedford, then east, and parks in front of a laundromat with a handwritten sign taped to the door: DRYERS brOKE SORRY.
He kills the engine but leaves the headlights on. Their glow illuminates a narrow gap between the laundromat and a boarded-up nail salon. At the far end of the gap, visible only because the headlights reach just far enough, a man is zip-tied to a folding chair.
The man’s head is down. He’s wearing a gray hoodie, dark jeans, and sneakers with the laces removed.
Nobody I recognize, which I’m sure is exactly the point.
This isn’t a high-value target or a rival or someone who wronged the family in any meaningful way.
This is a test with a pulse. A pop quiz Lukas put together over dinner to see if his son still has the stomach for the family business.
It’s two-question multiple choice.
(A) Kill him.
(B) Fail.
Afon pops the glove compartment and hands me a Makarov with the serial number filed smooth. I check the magazine out of habit and chamber a round.
“Who is he?” I ask needlessly.
“A rat. Fed some names to a detective in the sixty-eighth precinct.” Afon picks something from under his thumbnail. “Your father wants it handled tonight.”
“Anyone could’ve done this.”
“Yeah.” Afon looks at me for the first time since we left Manhattan. His eyes are flat, bovine, incurious. “But your father wanted you to do it.”
With a grimace, I get out of the car.
The alley reeks of piss. My shoes squelch in the liquid leaking from a nearby dumpster. The man hears me coming and lifts his head, and his face is so ordinary it makes my chest hurt. He looks like someone’s accountant. He looks like someone’s father. He starts to cry before I’m within ten feet.
With no hesitation, I raise the Makarov and shoot him once in the center of the forehead. The sound is a dull, silencer-suppressed pop. His head snaps back, then drops forward, chin to chest. A thin, dark trickle runs from the hole down the bridge of his nose.
I stand there for a moment, gun still raised, listening to the nothing that follows.
It stretches, the silence. It fills the alley like standing water, rising around my ankles, then higher and higher still.
The man’s chin rests on his chest in a posture that could be mistaken for sleep if you didn’t notice the red-black hole between his eyebrows or the way his fingers have already gone slack against the zip-ties.
I lower the Makarov.
My hand isn’t shaking. That bothers me only because it proves something I’ve been trying to disprove for weeks: that I am perfectly capable of this.
The mechanics are second nature. I did not hesitate.
Not so long ago, Elliot Wilkinson’s orbital bone cracked under my fist and I felt good about it.
This stranger zip-tied to a folding chair in a piss-soaked alley in Brooklyn is now dead because I pointed a gun at his face and pulled the trigger without my pulse climbing a single beat per minute.
So why is she still breathing?
Jillian Pierce ought to be dead, too. There are so many ways I could do it.
A gun, a knife—fuck, I’ve had my hand literally around her throat and I couldn’t bring myself to squeeze.
I’ve stood over her in the dark while she slept and watched the rise and fall of her chest and known exactly how easy it would be.
Yet I can’t.
My father could, and what am I if not my father’s son?
He murdered the woman he loved and buried her body somewhere out there in the city, then went to work the next day.
Am I him? The evidence says yes. So too does the blood cooling on a folding chair ten feet away and the scabs on my knuckles from beating Elliot Wilkinson senseless.
But I can’t do to Jillian what he did to Elena. Not with a gun, not with pills, not with my bare hands. Not even if Lukas held a blade to my throat and counted down from ten. Do it or else.
Which doesn’t make me better than him. Sparing one life doesn’t cancel out taking another. Mercy toward the woman I want doesn’t redeem the violence I’ve done to everyone else. It just means my cruelty is selective, which is maybe the worst kind.
Because there’s no telling who it will choose next.
I tuck the Makarov into my waistband, turn my back on the body, and walk to the car.
Afon doesn’t say a word until we’re back over the bridge. The Williamsburg’s suspension cables tick past the windshield like the bars of a cage, and the East River below is oil-black.
“Your father worries about you,” he says at last.
I snort a derisive laugh. “No, he doesn’t. Schemes? Manipulates? Sure. But he does not worry about me.”
Afon bobs a shoulder. “Different facets of the same thing, when it’s your son.”
“How would you know? You don’t have a son, Afon.”
“No.” He stops at a red light and watches it bleed across the hood. “But I have a nephew.”
I think of Mat in the back booth of that speakeasy on East 4th, the last time I saw him in person. He was the smarter of the two of us: He knew to run before the Bratva could sink its hooks into him. I never had that choice, and even if I did, I’m not sure if I would’ve been wise enough to take it.
“Mat’s a good man,” I say. It’s partially true—well, sometimes; Mat is cut from the same cloth as me, even if he’s made better decisions with the hand he was dealt. But I also say it as bait. I’m curious where Afon is steering this.
Afon’s jaw works beneath the heavy shelf of his cheekbone.
“Mat’s a clever man. Good? I’m not as sure.
” He accelerates through the intersection with the light still yellow.
“He was supposed to come into the family proper. His father—my brother—wanted that for him. Instead, he gets a law degree and a corner office and thinks he’s above it all. ”
“Maybe he just wanted something different.”
He clucks his tongue dismissively. “That’s not an option. Not when you’re choosing who you are. The boy’s lost his way.” He glances at me. “Family’s important, Kirill. Gotta stick by your blood. Mat will learn that, too, sooner or later. Just like you’re learning it now.”
I turn my head and stare out the passenger window at a row of shuttered storefronts sliding by, each one gated and dark. A closed flower shop. A closed barbershop. A closed everything.
Family’s important. Lukas would say the same thing. I’m not sure I agree with the sentiment. But I keep that to myself. Some disagreements are better left unsaid.
Afon pulls up to the curb outside my building and stops. The dashboard clock reads 4:41 A.M. I reach for the door handle.
“Kirill.”
I stop, but I don’t turn.
Afon keeps his hands on the wheel, eyes forward. He doesn’t look at me. “A piece of advice. Free of charge.”
“I didn’t realize you gave those out.”
“I don’t.” He lets the engine idle for a few seconds. “The reporter. The redhead.”
Every muscle in my body locks up.
“You need to make your move,” he advises. “Soon.”
I keep my hand on the door handle and try to control my breathing. “I told my father it would be handled.”
“Yeah, you did. And he believed you the first time. Maybe the second.” Afon drums one thick thumb against the steering wheel. “He doesn’t believe you anymore.”
“That’s between me and him.”
“It won’t be for much longer.” He finally turns his head. His face is unreadable in the dim glow of the dashboard instruments. “He’s already making the plans, son. Reaching out. Putting feelers on the street. You know how it goes.”
I do know how it goes. Lukas has a short list of people he trusts for this kind of work. “Not you?”
He shakes his head. “I told him it’d be better done by someone outside the organization. Hired gun.”
“Then who?” I ask.
Afon shakes his head. “I don’t know the specifics.
I just know the wheels are turning, and they’re turning faster than you think.
” He looks back at the windshield. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it quick.
Because the window where you still get to be the one making the choice is closing.
And once it closes—” He shrugs those enormous shoulders. “It don’t open again.”
I sit there for a long moment, considering. “Why are you telling me this at last?” I ask.
Afon takes his time considering the question.
“Because your father asked me to bring you out tonight so he could see if you still had it in you. And you do. That man in the alley is proof.” He pauses.
“But I’ve been around long enough to know that having it in you and being willing to use it aren’t always the same thing. Not when it comes to certain people.”
I open the door. The cold air rushes in.
“Clock’s ticking,” Afon says behind me. “Don’t let it run out.”
Inside the penthouse, I don’t turn on the lights. I drop my jacket on the back of the couch and pour three fingers of vodka, then drink it standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the cracked marble coffee table I never replaced.
Then I do the thing I always do.
I open the feed.
Jillian’s apartment loads in crystal night-vision green. The kitchen is empty, cleaned up, glasses put away like I was never even there. I swipe to the bedroom camera, now that it’s been restored to its original location. Despite the late hour, the bed is still made. Jillian is nowhere to be seen.
I switch to the tracking app. Her phone’s location appears on the map as a small green dot. It’s not in any of the places I might’ve guessed. Not at Rae’s place or the office.
It’s on Mulberry Street. Little Italy. I pinch to zoom and the pin resolves over an unusual site: the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.
When I see that, I frown at the screen. Why is she in a cathedral at five in the morning?
I know the answer before I’ve finished asking: Some weight gets too heavy to carry alone.
I pocket the phone, pick my jacket back up off the couch, and stride out. I haven’t set foot in a church since my mother’s memorial. I swore that day I’d never go back. I wanted nothing to do with a God who’d make a man like Lukas Lazarev.
But for her, I’ll go.