Chapter 7 Kir
KIR
“See the animal in his cage that you built / Are you sure what side you’re on? / Better not look him too close in the eye”
— “Right Where It Belongs” by Nine Inch Nails
I pull the mask off the second my penthouse door closes behind me. The leather gloves come next. I drop both on the counter and stand there for a minute, breathing.
My apartment is dark and quiet. Perks of life on the thirty-second floor. The only illumination comes glinting through the windows off of ships passing down the East River, but that’s enough for me. I don’t turn on the lights.
I sit down on the couch and spread Jillian’s mail out on the marble coffee table in front of me.
They paint a picture of her life. I know much of this already, but something about touching these things that were meant to be touched by her feels depraved and deliciously intimate.
It’s like slicing her open and sticking a finger in her bloodstream. I feel her through them in a vital way.
I can still smell her. Black cherry and almond, dark and sweet, clinging to the fabric of my gloves. I pick one up and inhale it, and my dick stiffens immediately. When I ran my tongue along her jugular, she tasted every bit as good as she smelled.
I close my eyes and let the memory unspool.
It wasn’t fear that made her tremble. I know fear, I’ve seen fear in dozens of faces, and fear alone doesn’t make a woman tilt her hips forward like she did. She was shaking with the effort of fighting what her body wanted. All the signs were there and obvious for those who know where to look.
In her finger tension.
Her plump, parted lips.
In her soft, strangled moan.
Fuck, I want to hear that sound again. I’m a mad fucking scientist when it comes to Jillian Pierce; I want to take her apart and study every frequency of her. I want to put my mouth between her legs and make her scream without ever knowing my name or face.
I wrench my attention back to the mail. If I keep ruminating on my little fox, I’m going to fucking rupture every vein in my cock. I need a distraction.
The first envelope is ConEd. I chuckle at the thought of her demanding a bill credit for tonight’s little power outage.
Second is a credit card statement from Chase.
Third is junk. So’s the fourth. The fifth is a flyer from a yoga studio on Columbus.
Grand opening, first class free. I try to picture Jillian in yoga pants, folded into some pose, red hair spilling over a mat—then I picture taking a serrated knife and sawing up the seam of those yoga pants to expose a glistening pink pussy, raised high in the air for me, and I almost cum in my pants.
Fifth is a letter from NYU’s alumni association asking for donations. She went there for undergrad. I already knew that. Journalism degree, graduated with honors, took a year off in the middle for reasons nobody seems willing or able to explain.
The sixth envelope gives me pause.
It’s larger than the others and aqua-colored. Jillian’s name is handwritten on the front in neat, looping cursive. The return address is somewhere in New Jersey—Montclair, specifically—with a name I don’t recognize.
This is personal.
I set it back down on the table without opening it just yet.
There’s a specific pleasure in making myself wait.
I’ve always been this way—the anticipation is half the reward.
When I was a boy, I’d unwrap birthday presents slowly, peeling each strip of tape while my father watched with open irritation.
He wanted me to tear into things. Devour them.
That was his way. Take what you want, fast and brutal.
But I’m not my fucking father.
So I edge myself with the waiting. I get up and walk to the bar cart by the window, pour three fingers of Beluga Noble into a glass, neat, and take a slow sip. The vodka sears like hellfire.
I carry the glass to the balcony and look out over the city. It’s a hell of a view, not that I give a fuck about appreciating it.
Manhattan kneels at my feet, just like Jillian did, and almost as pretty.
The Empire State Building is lit up white tonight, a fat needle jabbing into low cloud cover a few miles south.
To the left, the Queensboro Bridge stretches across the river.
Roosevelt Island sits dark and narrow in the water underneath.
A helicopter buzzes over the river at low altitude and sweeps the dark waters beneath it with a spotlight.
I wonder if they’re looking for any of my family’s victims. On any given day, more are added to the kill total.
There could be corpses dispatched by my father’s hand floating along the river bed right there.
I turn around to survey the place I call home. It strikes me, not for the first time, how much I fucking loathe it.
That’s not to say it isn’t nice. It is. This penthouse cost eleven million dollars.
The vodka in my hand runs four hundred a bottle.
The Patek Philippe on my wrist was a gift from my father on my twenty-eighth birthday, the same night he told me he’d be making me CEO of our family’s conglomerate, Lazarev Global…
Coincidentally, that was also the same night he told me he’d had a man drowned in the Gowanus Canal for skimming from a shipment.
That’s my life. Marble countertops and murder. Bespoke suits and shallow graves.
My father wants it like that. He’s made that much clear since the day I could walk. Handle things his way. Cold. Stone-faced. No emotion, no hesitation, no second thoughts. Lukas Lazarev hasn’t felt a goddamn thing since my mother died eighteen years ago, and he considers that a feature, not a bug.
But I’m not him. I’ve never been him.
Where he’s ice, I’m fire. Where he goes quiet, I get loud. He buries things; I burn them. “You feel too much, Kirill,” he said to me once, years ago. “It will be your undoing.”
Maybe he’s right. Tonight is a pretty good case study.
Because I was sent by him to Jillian Pierce’s apartment to end her life, and instead, I left her breathing.
Even with all the fire in my belly, I haven’t felt need like that in years. This was a fucking dangerous blend of ravenous desire. She knelt at my feet, so pretty, so submissive, and I had to remind myself that I came here to kill her, not to part those lips and plunge my cock into her throat.
But it wasn’t the mission that stopped me. It wasn’t my father’s orders rattling around in my skull or the practical reality of what I’d been sent to do.
It was the way she froze when I pinned her to the wall.
Anyone would freeze when a masked stranger grabs them, but this wasn’t that.
Her body left the room before I even said a word.
I felt it happen in real time. One second, she was fighting me, biting, kicking, alive as hell, and the next, she just..
. vacated the premises. Gone. Checked out.
Her muscles went slack and her breathing nearly ceased, and I knew that wherever she’d gone, I wasn’t the one who’d sent her there.
Someone else did that to her.
Someone before me.
That knowledge rearranged things inside my chest that I didn’t know could be rearranged. I came to kill her—that was the job. But in that moment, I wanted to kill whoever hurt her even more.
Alright. No more edging. Time for the grand reveal.
I’m returning to my seat on the couch to open the final envelope when I realize my phone is vibrating in my pocket.
I pull it out and wince when I see the name glowing on the screen. There’s no avoiding it, but I let it ring a few times before I answer.
“Is it done?”
Lukas Lazarev has never been much of one for hellos. No how are you, son. No good evening. He cuts right to the brutal, bleeding point.
I look down at the aqua envelope I took from Jillian’s apartment and grit my teeth. “No.”
There’s a long exhale on the other end. It’s like a dangerous pressure release, the sound a boiler makes right before it blows.
“Explain yourself,” he orders.
I grit my teeth. “There were complications. A neighbor knocked on the door while I was inside. I had to wait him out. By the time he left, the window had closed.”
“‘The window had closed,’” he repeats. My father does this thing where he echoes your words back at you, stripped of all context and inflection, so they sound stupid hanging in the air.
It’s effective. “You are telling me that my son, who I trained personally, a grown man with a gun and a knife, could not dispatch one twenty-five-year-old girl because a neighbor knocked on her door?”
I pinch my nose. The migraine is biting me hard and fast, and the vodka I drank has only sharpened its fangs. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Then you are either lying to me or you are incompetent. Which is it, Kirill?”
I grip the phone tighter. “Neither.”
“It must be one.”
“There will be other opportunities,” I fire back. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“She is a reporter digging into our family’s affairs,” he snarls, as if I need the reminder. “Every day she breathes is a day she gets closer to something we cannot afford to have printed. I made this clear to you two nights ago. Did I not make this clear?”
Two nights ago was the gala. I stood in a ballroom wearing a twelve-thousand-dollar tuxedo and watched my father buy my assistant like livestock at auction.
That’s a whole fucking mess in its own regard.
Rae Everett, whom I hired myself, whom I promoted to my personal EA when I took over as CEO, whom I mentored, protected, and considered one of the few truly good people in my orbit, became—like my mother—another victim I could not save.
She stood on that stage in a dress my father chose for her, smiling that brave, tight-lipped smile of hers, even as her skin went pale and clammy with terror.
I bid five hundred thousand dollars for her. I thought that would be enough. Then my father raised his paddle and said five million without even looking at me.
Five million dollars. For a fucking date.
He didn’t want the date. She wasn’t the point; I was. He wanted me to know that anything I reach for, he can take. Anything I build, he can flatten. Any person I care about, he can claim with a simple flick of his wrist.
It’s that simple and that sick.
After the gala, I cornered him and told him I knew why he wanted her. It all boiled down to the fact that Rae Everett, with her dirty blonde hair and her brown eyes and her delicate build, looks exactly like my dead mother. Lukas didn’t deny it. Hell, he didn’t even blink.
What he did was give me Jillian Pierce’s name and an order to kill her myself. More games. A yank of the leash that he’s had fastened around my neck since the day he carried my mother’s corpse out of our house.
Your little tantrum is noted, Kirill.
Now, go prove you’re still useful to me.
“I heard you, Father,” I say now. “And I told you I would handle it.”
“Handling it means the girl is dead. The girl is not dead. Therefore, you have not handled it. Either the reporter dies soon,” my father growls, “or I’ll send Afon to do what you cannot.”
My grip on the glass tightens. I’m surprised it doesn’t crack.
Afon Satyrin, my father’s right-hand man, is the animal he keeps chained up until he needs ugly business done with a vengeance.
Afon doesn’t do clean. He doesn’t do quick. He does whatever he wants for as long as he wants, and it hurts his victims the whole fucking time.
I see Jillian in my mind. I smell her. Then I picture Afon’s hands on her, and something goes white-hot behind my eyes.
“If you send Afon anywhere near her, I will fucking end him and you alike. Do you hear me, Father? Do you fucking hear me? Do you…?”
I pull the phone from my ear and look at the screen. Call Ended.
The rage ignites all at once. I grab the edge of the marble coffee table and flip it.
The thing weighs at least five hundred pounds but it goes over like flimsy cardboard.
Jillian’s mail scatters across the hardwood and the vodka glass shatters against the floor.
I glimpse a flash of aqua in the corner of my eye as the final envelope, the one I was saving, tumbles end over end and disappears under the couch.
I’ll get that later. I’m in no mood for it now.
I stand in the wreckage, chest heaving, knuckles white, and make myself a promise: If Afon or my father touch so much as one freckle on Jillian’s skin, I will carve them both open with my bare hands and feed the pieces to the river.
There won’t be a helicopter on this unholy Earth that can find them.