Chapter 28 - Kir
KIR
“Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire”
— “Fuel” by Metallica
The ribbon-cutting was six hours ago and I can still hear her voice.
Are you trying to distract the public from some less-than-savory elements of your family business?
In the moment, I wanted to laugh. Right there at the podium, in front of the cameras and the sick kids and the hospital administrators who think my family’s money doesn’t have blood crusted under its fingernails.
Not just laugh—I’d wanted to throw my head back and howl, because the woman I’ve been burying myself inside every night just stood up in a room full of journalists and went for my fucking throat.
She’s insane.
She’s magnificent.
She’s going to get us both killed.
I’m sitting in my office with the lights off and the door locked, chair swiveled toward the windows.
The city below is doing what it always does—moving, grinding, eating itself alive—and I’m not seeing any of it.
I’m seeing Jillian in that atrium. Navy blazer, shocking red hair, chin high, chest proud.
My obsession hasn’t eased a bit. I thought it might. Hell, I prayed it might, because this kind of sickness will doom us both.
But it hasn’t.
It’s only gotten worse.
Every hour I’m not with her is an hour I spend thinking about the next time I will be.
It’s pathological. When I close my eyes, there she is.
Her moans, her breaths, her curses, her demands…
all of it sets me on fire. That tiny squeak she makes when I slide into her, this broken, surprised little exhale, like she forgot her body could do that.
As if someone stole it from her a long time ago and she’s still getting used to having it back.
I crave her at all times. My dick stays at half-mast perpetually. Things are crumbling all around me, but this burn for her isn’t going anywhere.
So I do the only thing I can do: I bury myself in work. Work is the one arena where my brain still functions in straight lines.
It helps. Not a lot, but enough. By six o’clock, I’ve clawed back some semblance of focus.
I’m holding a small powwow in my office with four of my division heads—Johnston from real estate, Magana from legal, Collier from finance, and O’Neal from operations—walking through a site acquisition in Newark that’s been a headache for months.
Magana is mid-sentence about zoning variances when the conference room door swings open without a knock.
My father has arrived.
He fills the doorframe the way he always does—all six-foot-four of him, huge in every direction, thick silver beard, dark suit, eyes that give you absolutely nothing. “Out,” Lukas barks.
Nobody moves. They all look to me, because these are my people. My team.
That displeases Lukas. “Now,” he adds.
I give the faintest nod. That’s all they need. Laptops slam shut, chairs scrape, and four grown men flee the room.
When the door clicks shut behind them, Lukas and I are alone.
I lean back in my chair and let the mask settle into place, the one I’ve been perfecting since I was twelve years old. Bored. Untouchable. The son he made me into. “Father,” I drawl. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
He doesn’t seem to share the sentiment. He storms across the room and slaps a copy of The New York Times on my desk. His finger stabs at a byline. I can read it the merest flick of my eyes.
BY JILLIAN PIERCE
“I gave you one job,” he growls. “One fucking job. Was that too much for you, son?”
He came for blood this morning, I see. But I’m so pent-up with a million fucking feelings that I’m ready to give as good as I get.
So, keeping my voice insolent because that will maximize his rage, I say, “Oh, you mean the murder you delegated to me because you’re too busy fucking my assistant to do it yourself? ”
Boom. Direct hit. His teeth grind so hard I can hear them from across the desk.
“Go ahead,” I goad him. “Hit me again. That’s always been your solution to everything, hasn’t it? Can’t win with your words, so you win with your fists instead.”
“Shut your mouth, boy.”
“Testy this morning, are we? I never thought I’d see the day. The legendary Lukas Lazarev, losing his composure. Over a girl.” I shake my head sadly. “You know, Father, all these years watching you operate, and I never once saw you rattled. You didn’t even look this upset when Mother died.”
“Watch your mouth,” he warns again through gritted teeth.
“I’ll watch whatever I please.”
“You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” I push harder. “The trips, the doting? It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic.”
“Careful.”
“Or what?” I stand, matching his height even if I’ll never match his breadth. He’s a wall. He’s always been a wall. But walls can crack if you know where to prod. “You’ll do to me what you did to Mother?”
His face freezes. A mask over a mask.
“You killed her,” I spit. “Everyone knows it. The whole fucking city knows it.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about?”
I round my desk to square up with him. “I was twelve years old, Father. Twelve. One day, my mother was there, and the next day, she was gone, and you never shed a single fucking tear. Never explained a goddamn thing. Just told me she was dead and that was that.”
He’s breathing hard now, chest heaving with the effort.
“She loved you,” I remind him. “She loved you more than anything in the world. And you—”
“Enough.”
“—you buried her somewhere nobody would ever find her, and then you went right back to work like nothing happened. Did you ever even love her? Are you even capable of—”
Lukas’s hand closes around my throat and he shoves back against my office window. His eyes are pure murder. “I could kill you right now,” he says, as if that weren’t abundantly clear.
“But you won’t,” I manage, squeezing the words past the vice of his palm. “Because I’m the only heir you’ve got.”
Snarling, he releases me and turns away. He fixes his cuffs as he calms himself back to his usual ice king mode.
“Kill the reporter by the end of the month,” he growls. “Or I give her everything she needs to destroy you instead of me.”
The windows rattle as Lukas slams the door behind him on the way out.
I turn back to my desk and my eyes land on the Harvard citation plaque hanging on the wall behind my chair.
Kirill A. Lazarev, Master of Business Administration, with distinction.
Framed in heavy black wood and mounted on the wall the day I moved into this office.
I lift it off the nail. The glass catches the city lights and throws a thin bar of reflected gold across the ceiling.
Then I hurl it at the opposite wall as hard as I can.
The frame detonates on impact. Glass sprays across the carpet, the wood splinters at the corner joints, and the diploma itself flutters down in a slow, lazy arc like a fallen leaf.
Fuck, it feels good to break things.
Glass crunches under my shoes as I walk back to my chair and drop into it. I pull out my phone and call Mat.
He answers right away. “What’s up, bro?”
“I need a favor.”
“You needing shit from me is basically the foundation of our whole friendship.” I can hear traffic in the background. He’s walking somewhere. “What kind of favor?”
“The legal kind.”
He sighs in relief. “Those are my favorite. Also my most expensive, but you already know that.” A car horn blares on his end. “Go ahead.”
I look at the shattered frame on the floor and the bare nail jutting out from the wall where it once hung. Things are falling apart even faster than I expected. I need to get out of the danger zone.
And I need to bring Jillian out with me.
“I need you to pull the company bylaws,” I tell Mat. “Specifically the section on votes of no confidence in the chairman of the board. It’s time for my father to take his leave.”