Chapter 11 Kir
KIR
TWO HOURS EARLIER
“I’m gonna love you / I’m gonna tear you into your soul / Desire, I’m hungry / I hope you feed me”
— “Desire” by Meg Myers
The latch on Jillian’s window yields far too easily. She really ought to get it fixed.
I slip through from the fire escape, stand in her living room, and breathe.
My knuckles ache. I flex my right hand open and closed, studying the split skin across the second and third knuckle. Both hands are slick with blood. It’s not mine, though.
It’s Elliot Wilkinson’s and it’s fucking everywhere.
Smeared across my palms, caked under my fingernails, drying brown in the creases of my knuckles and the lines of my fingers. It’s on my wrists. On the cuffs of my jacket.
He went down after the second blow, but I didn’t stop at two.
I didn’t stop at five, either. I kept going, burning up inside as I hit and hit and hit.
When he tried to cover his face, I moved to his body.
When he curled up to protect his body, I went back to the face.
I beat him until my hands were soaked through with him, and then I beat him a little more, because the first hit felt too good and every one after it felt better.
Never.
WHAM.
Touch.
WHAM.
What’s.
WHAM.
Mine.
It’s not the violence itself that worries me. Violence is a tool. My father taught me that young, and he was right about that, if nothing else. Sometimes, you need a hammer, or a scalpel, or a blowtorch, or a gun. Sometimes, all you need is your bare fists and a locked bathroom door.
No, what worries me is that I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed the crack of his orbital bone under my knuckle.
I enjoyed the way he crumpled. I enjoyed standing over him while he shrank into himself on that filthy tile floor, bleeding, crying, and I enjoyed leaning down and whispering in his ear exactly what would happen if he ever spoke to Jillian again.
My father enjoys those things, too.
I shake my head, pivot on my heel, and walk to Jillian’s bathroom. When I reach it, I use my unbloodied elbow to flick on the light switch, then I stand and survey the scene for a moment.
Her bathroom is small but clean and well-decorated.
The shower is a clawfoot tub with a white curtain pulled to one side on a curved rod, resting on black and white hexagon tile.
A wooden bath tray sits across the rim of the tub, holding a half-burned candle and a dog-eared paperback.
The vanity, narrow and white, sits beneath an oval mirror framed in brushed gold.
She’s got her products lined up in neat rows on a little marble tray.
Expensive stuff mixed in with drugstore basics.
A bottle of Tom Ford perfume next to a tube of Aquaphor.
Skincare with French labels beside a five-dollar pack of cotton rounds.
A fuzzy pale pink bath mat sits on the floor and two towels hang from a brass hook on the back of the door, both white, both neatly folded over.
It’s clean and warm and it smells like her.
That’s all it takes to make my dick start to harden.
My only complaint is that it’s too white in here. White this, white that, white everything.
It needs a little red.
I look at my hands. Still wet with him. Good. That’ll work.
I step to the shower wall and press two fingers against the tile. The blood goes on thick and tacky, easier to write with than I expected. I drag my finger, almost in a trance, so locked-in that I don’t even realize what I’ve written until I step back and look at my message.
I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO.
Yes. That’ll work.
I stand there looking at it for a long time.
Six words in a dead man’s blood. Well, not dead. Not yet. I left Elliot Wilkinson alive, which is more mercy than he deserved for the unforgivable sin of sitting across from her in that restaurant, smiling at her, making her laugh.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.
That’s the truth of it, plain and ugly. She should be dead by now.
My father gave me an order and I’ve done nothing but make a mess of it.
Instead of killing Jillian Pierce, I’m buying her coffee, beating up her neighbors, and writing love notes on her shower wall in someone else’s blood.
Maybe not love notes, per se. But close. Love in the only language I was ever taught to speak fluently: the language of violence and blood.
The point is, there isn’t a plan. There was once, and it lasted about five fucking minutes. I had one when I climbed through her window the first night, and it evaporated the second she froze under my hands.
Now, I’m just circling her, orbiting getting closer every time, unable to stop, unable to reach out, unable to pull away.
She does something to me that I can’t explain.
She pulls out a version of Kir Lazarev that’s feral and depraved and so fucking possessive it scares even me.
Every man who looks at her instantly becomes my sworn enemy.
I’ve never been like this. Not with anyone.
I don’t know how it will end. All I know is need, scalding my internal organs like blasphemous fucking fire.
Even now, after I’ve already done unspeakable things to her neighbor and to Jillian herself, it’s not even close to enough to sate me.
I’m still scorching. A drop of water on my skin will probably sizzle.
There’s only one thing that’s helped ease the burn since Jillian entered my life. Fuck it—might as well try it again now.
I strip off my jacket and drop it on the bathroom floor. The shirt goes next. I kick off my boots and shove my jeans and boxers down, stepping out of them and leaving the whole pile in a bloody heap on her fuzzy pink bath mat.
I climb into the clawfoot tub and turn the faucet. The water comes out cold first, then warm, then hot. I stand under the spray and watch the last remnants of Elliot Wilkinson’s blood swirl off my hands and down the drain in thin, pink ribbons.
My eyes land on the shelf built into the tile. The label on the body wash reads Byredo. I pick it up, uncap it, and bring it to my nose.
Bergamot. Pine. Jillian.
This is what she smells like when she’s fresh out of the shower. When she’s wet and warm and naked and alone, this is what clings to her skin. I breathe it in again, deeper, filling my lungs with it, and my cock goes fully hard so fast that I go light-headed almost pass out.
I squeeze a thick line of the soap into my palm. It’s slippery and cool and it lathers up nicely the second I wrap my fist around my shaft. I grip myself tight and pull, root to tip, slow, letting the sensation build.
I close my eyes.
She’s on her knees again, here in this shower with me. Those green eyes looking up at me, her red hair dark and heavy with water, her freckled lips parted and waiting.
I feed my cock into her mouth and she takes it. She takes all of it. Her throat opens and I push until her nose presses flat against my stomach and her fingers dig into the backs of my thighs, helpless and trembling.
I stroke faster. The soap is warm now, heated by the water, and the friction is perfect. I brace my free hand against the shower wall, right next to the bloody letters, and fuck into my fist.
She sucks me until I’m ready for more. Then I drag her up by the crook of her elbow and throw her belly-down across the rim of the tub.
Her ass is high in the air, her sex exposed.
I’m on her like a mating wolf. My cock drives in past her folds and fucking hell, how she grips me.
There’s no slow build-up. Not this time.
I’m behind her, on top of her, all around her, slamming into her so hard the water sloshes over the sides and creates new oceans on the tile.
I’ve got a fistful of that red hair wrapped twice around my knuckles and I’m pulling her head back so I can see her face when she staggers and dissolves into a moan.
I squeeze tighter. My hips snap forward, driving into my grip. The soap runs down my wrist and drips off my elbow.
I picture her cunt, pink, swollen, soaked, mine.
I picture pushing into it for the first time.
I picture her crying, not from pain but from relief, from the beautiful, floating joy of submitting fully to someone who greedily demands everything she can give and more.
My orgasm tears through me. I cum hard, teeth bared, snarling into the steam. Thick ropes of cum hit the tile wall and get swallowed by the spray. My legs shake. I keep stroking through it, milking every last pulse, until the sensitivity is too much and finally, I have to let go.
I stand there under the water, panting, forehead pressed against the tile. For a second, I feel at ease.
Then it’s there again: the low, flickering fire.
Growing.
Gorging.
Greedy.
Untamed.
It’s not enough.
It’s never enough.
I dry off with one of Jillian’s neatly folded white towels, get dressed, and leave the way I came—through the window, down the fire escape, and out into the unforgiving night.
Forty minutes later, I’m walking through an unmarked black door on East 4th Street and down a narrow staircase lined with graffitied brick. The bar at the bottom has no sign and cannot be found on any map. You get in only because someone who gets in told you about it.
Inside contains low red lighting and row after row of secluded, shadowed boots lined in maroon crushed velvet. The bartenders here remember your drink, purposefully forget your face, and would never dare to ask your name.
Matvei Satyrin is already in our usual booth in the back corner, nursing one of the two glasses of Clase Azul on the table. He’s wearing a black cashmere sweater pushed up at the sleeves and that easy, self-satisfied grin he never takes off.
“You look like you just crawled of a sewer,” he remarks as I drop into the seat across from him.
I pick up the tequila and drain half of it. “I’ve had a rough night.”