Chapter 20 Lukas
LUKAS
// INCOMING_MMS — PRIVATE DEVICE [L. LAZAREV]
MEDIA_TYPE: image/jpeg
My shoes leave red prints on the concrete as I climb. I pull out my phone to see if I’ve missed anything. After swiping through the usual avalanche of texts and calls and a few angry emails from the jilted Natasha, something stops my scrolling.
It’s another text. This is the one I’ve been waiting for.
I pause on the landing. It feels wrong to open it here. My fingertips are tacky with blood, as are the soles of my boots. The rust-and-piss stench of the basement sticks to me.
Even if I were to shower, there’s no scrubbing away what the things I’ve seen and done down here have down to my soul. I’m a man blackened by sin. Too many years of doing the wrong things, the violent things, have stained me in a way that can never be erased.
To open the message here and now would be to drag Rae into this mess. Fuck, she’s exactly the opposite of this place. She’s small and fearful, unblemished. She’s plain white cotton panties and a blush that spreads from her cheeks to her collarbone—and maybe lower.
It’d be a greater sin than any I’ve done before to open her text here.
I do it anyway.
It’s a photo. My heart and my cock throb in unison as the pinwheel revolves until finally, it loads. And…
Fucking hell.
She’s wearing the red dress, the one I chose for her. The garnet fabric drips down the soft swell of her breasts. Her hair is loose and unkempt around her face. Her face is guarded, almost defiant.
She looks like she wants to kill me.
She looks like she wants me to devour her.
I sag against the stairwell wall. The concrete is cold and damp against my shoulder. I can still hear muffled sounds from below, screams and thunks, but nothing has ever felt less important.
I zoom in on her face. Those brown eyes. That stubborn set of her jaw. She’s trying so hard to look unaffected. Like this is nothing.
But I can see the flush on her cheeks, and I see right through her facade.
She felt something when she put that dress on. She felt something when she hit send.
That’s exactly what I wanted.
I look down at my hands. There’s blood under my fingernails, dried brown streaks across my knuckles, and a splatter on my cuff I didn’t notice until now.
These hands have done terrible things tonight.
These hands have done terrible things for decades.
And in a few days, I want to put these hands on her.
I close my eyes. The image of her burns behind my eyelids. Red silk against pale skin. That defiant little chin. How good it would feel to run these fingers in the wet slit of her cunt…
Fuck, I almost spill in my suit pants.
I straighten up and slap myself twice across the face, hard enough to see stars. “What the fuck is wrong with you, man?” I growl at myself. “She’s twenty-five years old. She’s a virgin. She’s your fucking employee.”
She’s everything I shouldn’t want.
And yet I do want her. Oh, for God’s sake, I want her so fucking badly I can taste it.
I shove the phone back in my pocket with a vengeance and mount the rest of the stairs. It’s a miserably cold night. When I push through the rusted door at the rooftop, the chill nearly takes my breath away.
Brighton Beach beckons below, streetlights burning orange over its cracked pavement. A few blocks away, the boardwalk churns with late-night stragglers. I can smell the ocean underneath the haze of garbage and exhaust.
I pull out a cigarette and light it. The first drag burns my throat, but I welcome it. I need something to cut through this brain fog.
This is a fucking problem.
I’m becoming obsessed. Unhealthily so. And yes, obsession is what got me to where I am in life, but obsession with the right things. Not with whatever the fuck you call a girl like Rae.
I came to this country with nothing. I was fourteen years old, spoke not a lick of English, had no family left to care whether I lived or died. I brought only a duffel bag full of stolen cash and a burning need to survive.
The Bratva found me. Or maybe I found them. Either way, I was running errands within a week. Delivering packages, collecting debts, learning which bones break easiest and which tools make scared men scream loudest.
By twenty, I had my own crew. By thirty, I had my own territory. By forty, I had the whole East Coast in the palm of my hand.
The legitimate business came later. Real estate first, then shipping, then tech. Layer after layer of clean money piled on top of the bloodstained foundation.
I did what needed to be done.
I broke what needed to be broken.
And I never let myself desire anything that could be used against me.
Until Elena.
I take another puff. The smoke curls up and disappears into the night sky. Forty years of discipline. Four fucking decades spent keeping my head down and my hands busy.
And now, this doe-eyed girl is threatening to undo all of it.
The rooftop door groans open behind me. From the darkness, Afon steps out, wiping his hands on a rag. The rag is dark and wet. He tosses it aside.
“Done,” he says.
I nod. “The body?”
“It’ll be ash by morning.”
I drop my cigarette butt to the ground and step on it. “Good.”
He comes to stand beside me and we look out over the Brooklyn skyline together. The city bumbles on, blissfully unaware of what just happened in the basement.
“The reporter,” I murmur. “She’s going to be a problem. What do we know about her?”
Afon nods grimly. “Got a name. Got a picture.”
“Show me.”
He pulls out his phone, taps the screen, and holds it up.
I look at the photo. Red hair. Freckles. A sharp, clever face.
“Her name,” says Afon, “ is Jillian Pierce.”