Chapter 44 Jillian
JILLIAN
“How unfair, it’s just our love / Found something real that’s out of touch / But if you’d search the whole wide world / Would you dare to let it go?”
— “Not About Angels” by Birdy
There’s a Kir-shaped hole in the fog. He was there a second ago, and now, he’s gone, and there’s an empty outline in my heart to match the one he left behind.
What the hell happened? We were having a good time! I want so badly to chase him down, grab him by the collar, and demand an explanation. Why do you have to ruin everything just when it’s getting nice? Why can’t we just be fucking normal for once? Don’t I deserve that? Don’t you? Don’t we?
It’s the look I saw on his face that stops me from following in his footsteps.
Whatever that haunted daze, it wasn’t about me.
There was something behind his eyes that I couldn’t reach.
And chasing a man into the dark when he looks at you with that much dread in his face is a surefire way to make everything worse.
So I don’t go after him right away.
I look back out through the eyeholes of my mask at the ongoing scene.
The actor on the bed is still dead, obviously.
That’s how that tends to work, in my experience.
The killer has dropped to his knees beside the body and is now cradling the dead man’s hand, nuzzling it against his own cheek.
Grief, guilt, horror—all of it is written across his painted face in perfect, wordless agony.
My hand is still warm where Kir was holding it.
I curl my fingers into a fist and press it against my cheek, just like the actor on stage.
Kir’s scent and heat are there, as reassuring as ever.
If this is the last time I ever see Kir Lazarev, I know that I’ll still have this gut-level pang of attraction and guilt whenever I so much as smell a stick of Big Red for the rest of my life.
Cinnamon has become my one and only aphrodisiac.
The scent of dreams and nightmares alike.
The lights fade to black and the four-poster bed falls into shadow.
Around me, a few audience members drift toward the exits, following other actors into other rooms, other stories.
The ballroom thins out. The fog machine hisses from above the bed, pumping more gray vapor into a room that already has too much of it.
I replay the last sixty seconds. We were fine.
We were better than fine. I was holding his hand and watching the performance and everything felt easy for once.
Just two people on a date—what a concept.
And then the actor put his hands around the sleeping man’s throat and Kir went somewhere else entirely.
I know what that looks like. I’ve done it myself. Checked out, vacated, left the building while my body stayed behind. It usually means something in the present just collided with something from the past, and the collision knocked everything offline.
What did he see up there on that stage that I didn’t?
A man killing another man in his bed. Hands around a throat. A body going limp.
I think about what Kir told me in my kitchen. His mother. The pills. His father walking past with her body in his arms.
Oh. Can’t say that doesn’t make perfect sense.
I stand there for another ten seconds, fist pressed to my cheek, breathing in the remnants of him. Then I drop my hand, and one word fills up my head like a billboard in bright neon.
No.
No, he doesn’t get to do this.
He doesn’t get to hold my hand through five floors of this haunted hotel, kiss me behind a curtain, look at me the way he looked at me when I told him this was the best date of my life, and then bolt the second it gets hard.
That’s not how this works. And yeah, I know the irony of me being the one to say that, because I’ve been running from hard things since I was nineteen years old.
I have a black belt in Avoid-Kwon-Do. I could teach a fucking masterclass.
But I’m here, aren’t I? Me, the woman who hasn’t let a man get past a second drink in five years.
I still sleep with the lights on, for God’s sake, but I came here, despite the fear and the memories that haunt me day in and day out.
I showed the fuck up for something that terrified me, on the mere sliver of a chance that there might still be a happy-ever-after hidden in the shadows.
If I can do it, he can damn well do it, too.
His father murdered his mother in cold blood and then buried her in an unmarked grave, and their son saw it all, and yeah, that’s about as horrible as things get.
But a stranger stole my body and my innocence from me, and in a sick fucking way, stole the greatest blessing of my life from me, too, so it’s not as if I’m not speaking from experience here.
We both arrived at the beginning of this nightmare with baggage aplenty.
But when Kir killed the lights in my house, pushed me to my knees, and told me to stay, I fucking stayed, didn’t I?
I did. I know I did. I stayed for everything that came after, too, all the uncertainty and fear.
I stayed not because he is safe—he is categorically the least safe person I have ever met—but because he didn’t let me float away.
He grabbed me by the chin, pulled me back into my own skin, and made me feel every single second of it.
That mattered more than safety ever has.
So now, it’s my turn.
He’s out there somewhere, shivering in the dark with his father’s metaphorical hand wrapped around his throat, convincing himself he’s a monster.
And maybe he is. Maybe we both are.
But monsters don’t get to quit on each other. Not when we’re on the verge of finding our way out of the darkness.
I rip my mask off, tuck it into my clutch, and start running for the nearest exit sign.
I push through the curtain and back out into the corridor.
The hallway is cramped and dark, and there are masked bodies everywhere, drifting in that slow, dreamlike way the show demands.
I don’t bother excuse me-ing my way through the bewitched herd; I just start to shove.
A guy in a peacoat stumbles sideways as I clip his shoulder and complains, but I pay him no mind.
As I bump through, I’m scanning every silhouette for the one that’s his.
He’s impossible to miss. It’s not like I need to see his face to know it’s him; I’ve known his smell and his shape for far longer than I’ve known what his face looks like.
That tall, proud posture, looming over everyone even when he’s falling the fuck apart.
But none of them are him. It’s just a sea of white ovals floating in the dim light, all identical and all wrong.
I keep moving anyway, because there’s this feeling that’s building in my chest. Like every step I take in his direction is a step closer to a version of us that could actually survive past tonight.
I’ve spent five years running from.
This is running toward.
I round a corner and nearly collide with an actress in a blood-soaked wedding dress. She reaches for me with outstretched fingers and I duck under her arm and keep going.
Another staircase. I grab the railing and race down the steps.
I feel like a hunting dog, because I could almost swear that it’s Kir’s cinnamon scent I catch on the drafty breeze wafting in my face.
Overhead, taxidermied birds have their wings spread wide like they were frozen in the middle of swooping down to peck out my eyeballs.
The cinnamon is getting stronger. He’s this way; I know he is. I redouble my pace even though my feet are aching and protesting.
He doesn’t have to carry this alone. Neither of us do. That’s the whole point of whatever this is. The right two broken pieces can make something whole if you just take the time to line up the jagged edges.
So if I can just find him, if I can get my hands on him before the spiral drags him under, I can show him that.
I’ll press my palm against his chest the way I did in the confessional and say, I’m here, I see it all, and I’m not leaving.
That might not fix a single thing. After all, his father will still be a monster and the kill order will still be hanging over both our heads and the article will still be inching its way closer to front page news.
But we’ll face those things together, shoulder to shoulder, and together is not nothing.
Together is, in fact, everything.
So fuck the fear. I’m going to find my masked man, grab him by that ridiculous jaw, and tell him that whatever he saw on that stage is not our future. The darkness only gets the last word if you let it.
There’s a fire door waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The push bar is crooked, not seated flush in its housing, the way it would be if someone had just hit it hard. I slam into it without breaking stride.
I burst into an alley. It’s cold enough to shock tears into my eyes, but when I blink them away, I see a huddled mass at the foot of the wall, and I see that he’s…
… not here.
It’s a bag of trash, nothing more. I walk up to it unsteadily, my vision still blurry from the cold. I don’t know what I’m looking for until my gaze falls to my feet and I see it.
Kir’s mask is on the ground, right at the base of the wall, sitting on the concrete where he left it behind. It’s staring up through empty eyeholes at the equally empty sky above. The elastic strap is stretched and twisted, like it was yanked off in a hurry.
I pick it up. It’s still warm, but somehow, I know he’s gone.
I want to scream, but then that word flares bright in my head again.
No.
Fuck no!
I won’t let him run. No, goddammit, no, no, no.
I spin on my heel and yank the fire door back open, plunging into the stairwell. I flash a double-bird to the taxidermied birds just because I don’t like the way they’re looking at me.
Back on the main floor, the fog is thicker than before. A new scene must be starting somewhere, because most of the masked audience members have migrated toward the far end of the building, leaving this corridor half-empty. I scan every figure I pass. Too short. Too stocky. Wrong coat.
Then I see him.
Two rooms ahead, moving through a doorway. It’s him, it has to be. He’s walking fast, head down, and he’s about to disappear around the corner.
I break into a run. My heels snag on a cable taped to the floor and I stumble, catch myself on a doorframe, then keep going.
Through the first room, some kind of apothecary, shelves lined with brown glass bottles and murky, indescribable contents, and into the second, a grim detective’s office with typewriters and fedoras hanging from hooks on the wall.
He’s right there. Ten feet away, his back to me, about to disappear again.
I lunge forward and grab his hand. He stops.
And I know immediately:
It’s not Kir.
The hand is wrong. The fingers are too thick, the palm too wide, the skin too soft. Kir’s hands are large but lean, long-fingered, and I know every ridge and knuckle of them by now. This hand belongs to someone else entirely.
I pull back as fast as I can, but I can’t help feeling like I let something loose that should’ve been kept caged for as long as possible.
The man turns around. The white mask covers him from forehead to cheekbone, but below it, the jaw is heavier, squarer, and more stubbled, with a grim mouth set in a flat line.
He looks down at me. The flickering lamplight catches the edge of his jaw and throws the rest of his face into shadow.
“Ah. You must be the girl.”
There’s nothing friendly in his voice, and in no way is it a question. He knows exactly who I am.
And the spark of violent pleasure in his black eyes says I’m just the woman he was looking for.