Chapter 26 Lukas
LUKAS
NYC DEMOLITION PERMIT
Structure to be Demolished: Father/Son Bond
Location: The Plaza Hotel
Date: November 22, 2025
Method: Public humiliation
Rebuild Possible: No
The taillights disappear around the corner. I stand there for a long time afterward, in the bitter-cold dark, watching nothing.
My cock aches. Not the good kind—the kind that means I’m in trouble.
The red dress was a mistake. I knew it when I chose it. I knew it when I saw the photo. And I knew it for damn fucking sure tonight, when Rae walked into that ballroom and every head turned.
Elena wore red the night we met. It didn’t fit her right, but that didn’t matter. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Rae isn’t Elena. I know that. The resemblance is passing at best. Hair color, yes, and eye color, too. The delicate bones of their faces share a certain shape.
Okay, fine, they’re virtually fucking identical.
But when she stood on that stage tonight, trembling and defiant, I felt a familiar place crack open inside me. Something I thought I’d sealed shut and buried deep for good—literally—eighteen years ago.
I pull out my pack of cigarettes and light one. The smoke sears my lungs from the inside out. I’m finding myself needing these more and more lately. Whenever I think of Rae, I smoke. That’s how I’ve gone through half a carton in a week.
Blyat’. This is a fucking disaster, and I just made it a very public one.
I paid five million dollars for a woman half my age. A virgin who works for me.
I’m a sick, sick man.
I turn back toward the building. The cigarette hangs from my lips, half-finished. But it seems my night of mistakes isn’t over…
because Kir is waiting for me at the side entrance.
He’s slouching against the doorframe, arms crossed. His tuxedo is rumpled now and his hair has fallen out of its careful styling, like he’s been running his hands through it obsessively.
“Father.” No son alive has ever said that word with more disdain.
I take another drag as I resume my saunter toward the door he’s blocking. “Move, son.”
He doesn’t. “We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.”
“You just paid five million dollars to buy my employee out from under me.” An air of reckless danger simmers underneath his tone. “I think that warrants a fucking conversation.”
“She’s not your employee anymore.” I drop the cigarette and crush it under my heel. “She’s mine.”
“She’s a human fucking being.”
“Since when do you care about that?”
The tendons in his neck stand out in sharp relief as he glares at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I watched you corner her in your office two weeks ago, and she looked a lot more like ‘prey’ than ‘human being’ to you then.” I step closer, but he doesn’t back down. “Don’t pretend you give a damn about her well-being.”
He thrusts his chin proudly in the air. “I apologized for that.”
I snort. “How noble of you.”
“It was a mistake. I was drunk, and fucked up in the head, and I didn’t—” He stops himself and draws a shaky breath. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“The point is you’re obsessed with her.” He jabs a finger at my chest. “I’ve seen the way you look at her. Like she’s—”
“Careful, son.”
“Like she’s—”
“I’m warning you—”
“Like she’s Mom.”
I feel rage different than most men. Every story I’ve ever read describes rage as a white-hot flame that rips through you and burns everything it touches. Maybe that’s why I’ve always smoked: to try to feel some of that for myself.
Because the rage I’ve always experienced is much, much different.
Outwardly, my face goes blank and every inch of my body remains perfectly still.
But beneath the surface, it’s like winter.
Cold, so fucking cold. Not a preserving cold or a pleasant cold, but the nastiest cold there ever was, a violent cold one degree away from annihilating all the life in its path.
It’s a cold that snuffs out soul and breath. It’s a death cold.
It’s strange, then, that the boy who shares my DNA is pure fire. I can see it in his eyes. Twin flames.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Kir’s glare is bright and furious now. “Blonde hair, brown eyes, same build. She’s even right about the same age Mom was when you met her.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Kirill.”
“I know you’ve been alone for eighteen years. You haven’t looked at another woman since she died.” His hands ball up at his sides. “And now, suddenly, you’re buying dresses and sending cars and paying ridiculous money for some girl who happens to be a dead fucking ringer—”
“Enough!”
“—for the wife you fucking murdered.”
Fueled by frozen rage, my hand moves all on its own. The sound of the slap ricochets off the stone walls.
Kir’s head snaps to the side. A red mark blooms across his cheek where I struck him.
He doesn’t touch it. He just turns back to face me. His eyes are hard now. For once, they look like mine.
“Feel better?” he asks sarcastically.
I don’t answer. My palm stings.
“You know what the difference is between us, Father?” He straightens his jacket and smooths back his hair, reassembling himself little by little.
“I know I’m broken. I know I’m fucked up.
I don’t pretend otherwise. But you?” He shakes his head.
“You really believe you’re in control. You still think all this—the money, the power, the fear you put in people—you think it makes you strong. ”
He steps aside, finally clearing the doorway.
“You’re every bit as broken as I am,” he concludes. “You’re just better at hiding it.”
With that, Kir turns to leave.
I don’t let him.
Again, my hand shoots out of its own accord. This time, it catches him by the collar. One shove and he’s pinned against the stone wall, my forearm pressed to his throat. The impact knocks the breath out of him.
“You don’t get to walk away from me,” I snarl. “I am your fucking father.”
The red mark on his cheek is already darkening into a bruise. But he doesn’t look away. His eyes bore into mine, taunting.
“What are you going to do?” he spits. “Slap me again? Go ahead. It won’t change anything.”
“You think you know what happened with your mother, but you don’t know a goddamn thing.”
“I was twelve, not blind.” He’s vibrating with fury. “I saw the bruises on her arms, Father. I saw how she flinched when you walked into a room. She stopped eating. She stopped talking.”
My grip tightens on his collar. “I—”
“How long until Rae disappears, too? Is that how it’ll go? She’ll wither away until one day, boom, she’s gone?”
Something in me screams as it’s forcefully pried open. Not guilt—never guilt. But something. A fissure in the ice that’s kept me functional for almost two decades.
I release him and step back. My hands are trembling, though I’ll die before I let him see that.
“You don’t understand what it means to protect what’s yours,” I say. My voice sounds all wrong. Too hoarse. Too human. “In our world, protection looks different. It has to.”
“Your world,” Kir corrects. “Not mine.”
“It’s the same world, boy! Everything I built—the company, the Bratva, the empire—all of it exists so that what’s mine can never be taken. One permanent thing in this life.” I meet his eyes. “That’s what you’ll inherit.”
Kir laughs in my face. “You think I want any of this? The blood money? The secrets? The bodies buried in fucking basements?”
I go still.
“I don’t want what you have. I’m trying to build something that doesn’t require murder to maintain.”
The cold in my chest returns, deeper and more aching than before. “You don’t get to choose which parts you inherit, Kirill. You take it all, or you walk away with nothing.”
“Then fuck it. Maybe I’ll walk.”
“If you’d ever even consider that, you have no business running Lazarev Global.
” I fix my cuffs and school my expression back into stone.
“And you certainly have no business anywhere near Rae Everett.” I step closer.
“So stay away from her. Stop trying to play hero. You cannot save her from me. Fucking hell, boy—you can’t even save her from yourself. ”
Kir’s mouth opens to fire back something scathing. I can see the words forming, the venom gathering.
I don’t give him the chance.
“You want to make yourself useful?” I interrupt. “Prove your worth? Fine. I have a job for you.”
He hesitates. Suspicion passes across his face.
“There’s a journalist named Jillian Pierce,” I continue. “I want you to kill her.”
Kir is rendered speechless.
I meet his eyes. “This is what inheritance looks like, son. This is the price of the empire you claim to despise.”
He stares at me. The mark on his cheek is deepening to purple.
“You want me to prove I’m not like you,” he summarizes slowly, dumbfounded. “By becoming exactly like you.”
“I want you to prove you understand what’s at stake.” I knock him aside and go toward the door. “The Pierce woman is a problem. Problems get solved. If you can’t handle that… then you’re no son of mine.”
With that, I leave him behind me and go back inside.