Chapter 34 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Smile like you mean it / Oh, no, oh, no, no, no”
— “Smile Like You Mean It” by The Killers
Two mornings later, I’m at my desk pretending to read a zoning filing from the Newark site and retaining absolutely none of it. My phone sits next to my keyboard, silent as Elena Lazareva’s grave.
I keep waiting, but nothing comes in. I’m not sure what I expected. Text? Call? Signal message? If not that, then what about a cryptic emoji, a threatening endearment, a handwritten Hello, little fox appearing on my bedside table?
But I’ve gotten none of that. Ever since whatever we’re agreeing to call (or better yet, not call) the impromptu web-cam show I performed on Wednesday night, it’s been dead air and radio silence.
Did I do something wrong? Did I misunderstand the rules of the game? I feel red-faced and nervous. It was dumb, what I did. Maybe he didn’t watch after all. I’ve just gotten a big head, and embarrassment is what I deserve for stepping over such a stupid and obvious line.
Or maybe he watched every second of it and laughed the whole time.
He probably thinks I’m pathetic, like when you see a little kid wearing Mommy’s high heels and pretending she’s the woman of the house now.
In his eyes, I was just a desperate girl putting on a mortifying show for a man who couldn’t care less.
God, that’s so much worse than him not watching at all.
I flip my phone over. No notifications. I flip it back down and swear to myself that I won’t check again until after lunch.
The thing that’s eating me alive isn’t the silence itself; it’s what the silence is doing to my brain.
What a turnaround from Wednesday night. Less than forty-eight hours ago, I felt free and wild and uncaged and in charge.
Cut to now, when I’m sitting at my desk, spiraling about whether my masked stalker liked my little striptease enough to text me about it.
“Get it together, Pierce,” I mutter.
Weston glances over the cubicle wall. “You say something?”
“Nope.”
I drag my eyes back to the zoning filing. The words continue to together. I read the same paragraph for the fourth, fourteenth, and fortieth time, but I still couldn’t tell you what it says.
Then, with no warning at all, the energy on the floor changes.
I don’t know how else to describe it. One second, it’s the usual hum of keyboards, low conversation, and someone’s Spotify leaking from shoddy earbuds. Then heads start turning. People sit up straighter and peer over the edges of their cubicles.
I follow the gazes—and my stomach drops through the floor.
Because Kir Lazarev is walking through the newsroom.
He’s in a tan suit with a sky-blue tie, clean-shaven and beautiful.
In the corner of my eye, I can see half the women in the office start primping their hair and tugging their outfits into place.
Worse yet, Kir is strolling alongside Richard Thornton.
As in the Richard Thornton. As in the editor-in-chief of the whole goddamn paper.
My boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. The name at the top of the masthead.
Big Kahuna. If we ever crossed paths, I’d be obliged to call him Mr. Thornton and keep my eyes rooted firmly on the floor.
Kir, though, seems perfectly at ease to clap him on the shoulder and say, “Rick, if anyone knew your jokes were half as filthy as they are, you’d be run out of polite society with torches and pitchforks.” Then they both guffaw like old frat bros.
It’s official: I’m spiraling.
The reasons are plenty, each more valid than the last. The subject of my investigation is twenty feet from my desk, a stone’s throw away from the corkboard in the conference room where I’ve pinned a printed photo of Elena Lazareva’s dental chart with a red circle around it.
Hell, there’s a notebook sitting open next to my keyboard with his father’s name written in block letters across the top of the page.
But not only is he here, he always appears to be welcome here.
Kir and Thornton make a slow loop through the floor, pausing at desks, shaking hands.
Thornton is doing the introducing—“This is Kir Lazarev, CEO of Lazarev Global, one of our most valued advertising partners”—and Kir is doing everything else.
He remembers names after hearing them once.
He asks follow-up questions. When Thornton introduces him to Cheryl from the culture desk, Kir somehow already knows she wrote a piece on the Met’s new contemporary wing last month.
“I read it twice,” he tells her with a solemn look of gratitude.
“You made me care about Brutalist architecture, which I didn’t think was possible.
” Cheryl turns the color of a ripe tomato and laughs so hard she sneezes.
He does this with everyone. Deborah from copy gets a compliment on her coffee mug, which has a picture of a grumpy cat and the words I SURVIVED ANOTHER MEETING THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL.
“I need one of those,” Kir chuckles. “I’ll buy a hundred and distribute them to my entire team.
” Deborah nearly falls out of her chair.
The interns practically combust. Priyanka, who’s twenty-two and fresh out of Columbia J-school, fumbles her pen so badly it clatters across the floor and rolls under Kir’s shoe.
He bends down, picks it up, and hands it back to her with a grin that could sell toothpaste.
“Careful,” he warns. “The pen is mightier than the sword. You don’t want to lose your best weapon.
” Priyanka takes it from him and then just nods a bunch of times, like a broken bobblehead.
Weston pops up over the cubicle wall again and quirks a thumb at the show taking place behind us. “Who the hell is that?”
“Kir Lazarev,” I say without looking up from the zoning filing I’m definitely not reading. “CEO of Lazarev Global.”
“That’s the Lazarev guy? The one you’ve been—” He gestures vaguely at my disaster of a desk.
“Yep.”
“He’s handsome.”
“Is he? I hadn’t noticed.”
Weston gives me a look that says he doesn’t believe me even a little. “He’s shaking hands and kissing babies out there. Like a politician running for office.”
That’s actually a pretty decent description.
Kir moves through the newsroom like he belongs there, like the space was waiting for him to fill it.
He touches elbows, holds eye contact easily, and laughs at weak, nervous jokes as if they’re the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
The women respond to it most visibly. Every single hair-do gets touched up repeatedly, and I swear a few blouse buttons get popped, too.
But the men fall for it just as hard. I watch Doug emerge from his office with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, shake Kir’s hand, and break into a smile I’ve seen maybe three times ever.
Meanwhile, I sink lower in my chair.
Doug catches my eye as he’s heading back toward his office. His smile withers into a frown. Then he changes course and stomps over to my cubicle, reading glasses still perched on his forehead.
“You look green,” he says bluntly. “You eat something bad?”
I shake my head. “I’m fine.”
He frowns. He opens his mouth to say something else, but then Thornton’s booming baritone cuts across the floor. “Doug! Bring your best and brightest over here. Kir wants to meet the investigative team.”
Doug shoots me a look. I shoot one right back.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “Please don’t.”
“Pierce, get up.”
“Doug, I really don’t think—”
“Get. Up.”
I stand on shaky legs. I tug the hem of my blouse down, run my tongue over my teeth, and follow Doug to my doom, across the floor toward where Kir and Thornton are standing near the glass-walled conference room.
Kir sees me coming from fifteen feet away. His face doesn’t change. Not a flicker, not a twitch. He’s good. He’s really, really, really freaking good.
Thornton beams. “Kir, this is Jillian Pierce, one of our sharpest investigative reporters.”
Kir extends his hand. “Ms. Pierce. A pleasure.”
I take his hand. His grip is firm and warm and his fingers curl around mine for exactly the right amount of time.
Not too long. Not too short. A perfectly calibrated handshake from a man who has shaken ten thousand hands and made every single person on the other end feel like they were the only one in the room.
Except for me.
He makes me feel like nobody at all.
“Ms. Pierce,” he says. “I believe you cover my family’s company.”
“I do,” I manage.
“Well, I hope we’ve been giving you plenty to write about.” He smiles easily, pleasantly, and above all, indifferently. Zero heat. He could be meeting me for the first time and you’d never know the difference.
Thornton claps a hand on Kir’s shoulder. “Come on, let me show you the corner office. We just renovated.”
Kir holds my eyes for one more beat. Then he nods and peels himself away. “Lead the way, Rick.”
They turn and head toward the glass-walled office at the far end of the floor. I stand there with my hand still half-extended, watching them go.
Just before they round the corner, Kir glances back over his shoulder.
He winks.
Then he’s gone, striding after Thornton with his hands in his pockets and not a care in the world.