Chapter 45 Jillian
JILLIAN
“You are my sweetest downfall / I loved you first, I loved you first”
— “Samson” by Regina Spektor
The stranger’s hand releases mine, but only so it can close around my upper arm instead. He steers me sideways through a skinny gap between two shelving units and into another small alcove tucked behind a velvet curtain. A wall sconce throws pale, weak light across his jaw and throat.
I yank my arm free. “Get your hands off me.”
He lets me go and doesn’t reach for me again. He just stands there, blocking the only way out. The mask makes it impossible to read anything above the mouth, and the mouth isn’t giving me much.
“Who are you?” I demand.
“A friend of Kir’s.”
“Kir doesn’t have friends.”
“He has one.”
“Then he should’ve mentioned you,” I say, pressing my back against the shelf behind me. “Because I’ve spent a lot of time with Kir lately and your name has never come up.”
“Do you want to know my name, or do you want to know what I came to tell you?”
My stomach drops, but I keep my face blank. Reporter Face, Reporter Face, Reporter Face, I chant inwardly. I gotta put my masks back on, all of them that matter, because I’m starting to get a very nasty feeling about what this man found me to share. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Stop.” He holds up one hand, palm out. “I didn’t come here to play games with you, Ms. Pierce, and I don’t have time for the part where you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
I shut my mouth.
“If you keep going like this, you’re going to get yourself and him killed.” The man edges closer. He smells cool and fragrant, aquamarine and forest. The stubble on his face is black as night over snow-white skin beneath.
“Kir was given an assignment,” he continues. “You know what it was. He hasn’t done it. You know that, too.” His mouth tightens. “What you don’t know is what happens on the other end of that failure. What his father does when patience runs out.”
“And what does his father do?”
“He stops delegating.”
I swallow. The air in the alcove is thick and dusty. I’m finding it harder and harder to breathe.
“Kir is lying to Lukas,” the man continues. “Telling him the job is almost done, complications have slowed things, blah fucking blah. He’s been trying to buy time, but it’s not working anymore. And the consequences will be severe. For both of you.”
“Both of us,” I repeat.
“Both of you.” He says it again, slower, like I’m hard of hearing.
“Go ahead—tell me you’ll take the risk, you don’t care, you’re not afraid.
But what about him? You think you’re the only one at risk here?
Kir is putting his own neck on the line just to keep you breathing.
And he’s doing it badly. So let me repeat myself: Get out before you’re both slaughtered and scattered. ”
I open my mouth to tell him something—I haven’t quite decided what, exactly—but I never get the chance.
Before I can, a hand shoots past my shoulder and snares the man by the front of his shirt. Kir materializes behind me so fast it’s as if the fog itself spat him out.
“Get the fuck away from her.”
Kir has changed. Everything about him—eyes, hands, posture—is different than it was ten minutes ago. The man who froze and ran from me is gone. This version of Kir is locked in and lethal, and the grip he has on the man’s shirt promises danger.
The man doesn’t seem too concerned, though.
He raises both hands slowly, palms out, fingers spread.
I’m not armed, it says. I mean no harm. He holds Kir’s gaze for a beat and something passes between them that I can’t decode.
Strangely, it feels like they really do know each other.
That’s odd. I thought the man was bullshitting, but I’m starting to second-guess myself.
Then Kir lets go. The man steps backward, out of Kir’s reach, and straightens his shirt where Kir bunched it.
He doesn’t say a word. He turns to look at me again, and his eyes are a silent reminder of what he just told me.
Then he turns and slips out through the gap in the curtain, leaving us alone.
I look up at Kir, but he isn’t returning my eye contact. He’s watching where the darkness swallowed up his maybe-friend, and he’s scowling deeply.
Then he turns to look at me. “What did he tell you?”
I’m inclined to fill him in on the whole strange, unsettling conversation, but for some reason, I hesitate.
It was sort of implied that the stranger didn’t want to have that little chat in front of Kir, so I wonder if I’m supposed to keep it secret, too.
If the man wanted me to leave Kir because I’m distracting him, am I allowed to tell Kir that’s what’s happening?
Am I allowed to ask who the hell that was?
Another part of me is seeing the growing anguish in Kir’s face and wondering what the hell is happening in his head.
“I…”
“Let me guess.” Kir’s jaw works. “He told you to run from me before we both end up chopped into fucking bits.” I don’t say anything. He drags a hand down his face. “Meddling fucking mudak.”
I touch his elbow. “Kir, who was that? Why’d he tell me that? Why does it seem like something’s about to happen if we don’t—”
Kir’s hand closes around my upper arm and shuts me up. It’s not as hard as the stranger’s grip, but it’s not exactly the softest touch he’s ever done, either. “We’re leaving.”
“Kir—”
“Now.”
He drags me out of the alcove and into the corridor, moving fast. I have to half-jog to keep up in my heels, and the cable I tripped over earlier catches my toe again.
Kir grabs me before I stumble and throws me over his shoulder.
I scream in shock, but he doesn’t set me down until we’ve gone back down the staircase decorated with the stuffed birds, out of the exit door, and into the night.
The cold hurts when I suck in a breath. The street is wet from a rain that must have started while we were inside. Puddles catch the glow of passing headlights. Kir drops my wrist, shrugs off his coat, and drapes it over my bare shoulders without asking.
He still hasn’t looked at me.
“Kir,” I beg, “talk to me. Please.”
Kir starts walking. I run after him again, asking, “Kir, who was that? How did you know him? He said he was your friend! Kir!”
He refuses to answer any of my questions, so with an angry huff, I stop walking.
He makes it a few more strides before he realizes I’m not beside him anymore. The rain is picking up. It’s cold on my bare legs and it’s ruining my hair, but I don’t care about any of that.
“He said I’m going to get us both killed,” I call after him. My heels are planted on the wet sidewalk and I’m not moving. “That seems worthy of a discussion.”
Kir turns around. His shirt is soaked through and his hair is plastered to his forehead. There’s a wildness in his face that I’ve only seen in brief, terrifying flashes before. I brace myself, because I’m sure he’s about to yell at me, or grab me, or tell me to mind my own goddamn business.
Instead, he exhales. Rain trickles down the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, well, he’s right.”
I pull his coat tighter around my shoulders and close the distance between us, stopping when we’re a foot apart. “Then explain it to me,” I plead.
Kir looks at me for a long time. “My father gave me until the end of the month,” he says, “to kill you. And I decided I’m not going to do it. Because death has already claimed enough of the people I love.”
My breath catches at one particular part of that. Kir sees it and nods. Knowingly, sadly.
“Yeah, I know. Love. That’s the part that fucks everything up. If I just couldn’t do it, if it was just some moral hang-up, I’d figure a way out. But I can’t think straight anymore. All I can do is think about you, and that makes me sloppy. In my world, sloppy gets people buried.”
I reach up and wipe the rain off his cheek with my thumb. He flinches at the tenderness but doesn’t pull away.
“That man in there was right,” Kir says. “If this keeps going, it can only end one way. It’s not happy. So if you’re in this for a happy ending, start fucking running and don’t stop until you can’t see me anymore, little fox.”
I scoff. “If I said okay, would you even let me go?”
Kir frowns. “I mean…”
“You’re a masked stalker,” I remind him. “You’re not exactly the ‘let her go’ type.”
There’s almost a smile there, hidden under the rain and the exhaustion. “No. I’m not.”
“So it’s death for both of us, then.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, it probably is.”
I nod. “Then let’s enjoy this while it lasts. Because I’m not going fucking anywhere.”
A beat.
A pause.
A cold, foggy, lonely, rain-soaked silence.
Then he’s kissing me, and I’m kissing him. We’re grabbing fistfuls of each other because close is not close enough. It’s the heat of our bodies against the chill of an uncaring world, but here in the darkness, we’ve found a place that’s safe.
“Take me home,” I pant between kisses. “I need you.”
He flags a cab down and we fall into it, kissing like teenagers, nestled close, tangled, torn up, tortured, totally lost in one another.
We get out of the cab the same way, and we race up the stairs to my apartment, stumble through the door already half-undressed and find ourselves tumbling into my bed, still trapped in what’s left of our drenched clothing.
We manage to shuck it all off somehow, never separating our mouths for longer than is absolutely necessary. My skin has gone from goosebumps to flushed, and Kir’s is the same, hotter than ever. I’m surprised that the rain isn’t sizzling and boiling off of us.
But when we’re naked and he’s touching me and his hardness rises up as the perfect match for what I need so, so badly, I stop him for a second. I reach into my clutch where it landed beside my bed and pull something out of it.
Kir looks down at what I’m holding, then back up at me.
“Old habits,” I explain with a shy grin.
He takes the white mask he left behind in the alley and pulls it on. As soon as he does, this aching, delicious easing steals through my core. A deadbolt opening. A thrown-wide door beckoning for him to enter.
“Sometimes,” I whisper, “I can’t believe you’re real.”
“Likewise,” he agrees, and then he’s inside me, and we take each other somewhere way beyond where death or threats or rain could ever possibly touch us.
I jolt awake gasping, but the nightmare that woke me is already gone.
The room smells like rain. Petrichor—that’s what that scent is called.
I remember an English literature professor in college telling me how much they loved that word.
I like it, too. Petrichor, cinnamon, and sex.
It soothes me like nothing else in my life ever has.
But what soothes me even more is what happens next.
I reach out…
… and he’s there.
He’s never stayed the night before, but here he is, real and in the flesh.
My fingers graze his chest first, then travel up to his jaw, and I almost laugh, because the idiot fell asleep with the mask still on.
It’s crooked now, twisted to one side, the elastic digging into the skin behind his ear.
He shows no sign of it bothering him in his sleep.
I ease the mask off him as carefully as I can so I don’t wake him up. His face underneath is slack and young, unguarded in a way I’ve never seen it. The ever-present boiling rage is gone.
I press butterfly-light kisses to each of his closed eyelids, then I set the mask on the nightstand and watch him for a while. The bruise under his left eye. The faint scar near his lip. The long lashes fanned out against his cheekbones.
Love.
That’s one hell of a word.