Chapter 48 Jillian
JILLIAN
“When the violence causes silence / We must be mistaken”
— “Zombie” by The Cranberries
I was so sure he’d text me. All the way home from Westgate, while Rae drove and I pretended to nap in the passenger seat, I kept my phone in my hand under Kir’s coat, waiting for the buzz. But it never came.
Rae dropped me off outside my building with a hug and a worried look, then drove off to return the rental car. I trudged upstairs, changed, went to the gym, worked out, came back home, showered, made dinner, and… still nothing.
Now, it’s Sunday morning, and I’m starting to get concerned. I can’t get rid of the man for weeks, but now that I want to know what’s going on, he’s suddenly nowhere to be found. That’s the opposite of a good sign.
I keep going over and over the interaction in my head. It’s frustratingly sparse. Highly dangerous roads out here. What the hell kind of message is that? I’m about to start counting letters and doing Biblical numerology on what he said to find hidden meanings.
And then there’s the other thing. The L-word thing. We haven’t discussed that and there are no signs that any such discussion is in our future. He just casually dropped that bombshell in the pouring, frigid rain and then left it to explode in my head.
Love. That’s the part that fucks everything up.
Understatement of the damn year. That fucks up everything. If this was all some sort of insane but theoretically defensible form of sex exposure therapy, it’d be easy to say, Nice, mission accomplished, and then never have to see Kir again. Dr. Masked Stalker pronounces the patient cured.
But it’s so much more than that.
How much more? That remains to be seen.
I’ve given up pretending I’m going to have a normal Sunday. I shower, dress, and take the R train to the office. The only alternative to weekend work is sitting in my apartment refreshing a text thread that refuses to update, and I have no interest in that particular torture. Ergo, work it is.
The newsroom is unsurprisingly dull. It’s just a handful of weekend desk editors and one guy from Sports asleep at his keyboard. I slide into my cubicle, open my laptop, and pull up every document I have on Lazarev Global.
If Kir won’t talk to me, fine. I’ll work.
The forensic tech’s lab report is still in my bag.
I spread it on the desk next to my notes from Kir’s background interview.
There’s the autopsy report on Elena Lazareva, positively identified by dental records, and the new document confirming traces of phenobarbital in the bone marrow.
I’ve got it all in front of me, laid bare and obvious.
The bottom line: A woman wanted to leave her tyrannical billionaire husband and ended up under a construction site in Astoria for eighteen years.
L-word or not, maybe running is the right move after all. There’s a very good argument to be made that the smartest thing I can do is finish this article, hand it to Doug, and cut myself loose from every thread connecting me to the Lazarev family.
Get the story out. Then get myself out. Clean, irreversible break.
But how can I do that, when it means leaving Kir behind?
I type for hours without stopping. By the time I’m done, it’s almost dark out. I save the draft, lock my laptop, and grab my coat. I’m the last one left. Even the Sports guy woke up and left at some point. I take the elevator down alone and step out into a cold Manhattan evening.
I decide to walk home despite the cold, mostly to keep my mind occupied.
I regret the choice almost immediately, but Mama Pierce didn’t raise a quitter, so I grit my teeth and force myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
By the time I get to my building, I’m chilled to the bone.
I start mounting the stairs, eagerly awaiting a hot shower and a thick, fuzzy blanket.
Which, of course, is when the power in the building predictably takes a shit.
I’m halfway to my floor when the lights go out. All of them, every single one. The stairwell goes pitch black.
Goddammit. Not again.
The last time the power went out in this building, a man in a mask was waiting for me in my apartment with a gun.
My hand finds the railing and I stop moving. My heart is rampaging in my chest. I stand there for maybe ten seconds, breathing through my nose, listening hard. But I hear nothing. No footsteps, no breathing. No sound at all except the distant hum of the city outside.
Then, scared, I climb the rest of the stairs by feel, one hand on the railing, the other holding my fist out in front of me with my keys sticking through the gaps between my fingers. I reach my floor, but oddly, not even the emergency lights are on.
I find my door by counting steps from the stairwell, slot the key into the deadbolt, and turn.
It swings open… and I stop breathing.
The first thing I see in my unit is candles.
Everywhere. On the kitchen counter, on the windowsill, on the coffee table, on the bookshelves, on the floor along the baseboards.
Tea lights, pillars, tapers stuck into coffee mugs and old wine bottles.
There have to be five hundred of them, maybe more.
The whole apartment is glowing warm and gold, and there’s a smell in the air that is not candle wax.
It’s garlic and butter, something roasted and herby, and underneath all of that is… cinnamon.
I should’ve known.
My kitchen table is set for two. Wine is already poured into two glasses. There’s a bowl of salad, a dish of roasted chicken with vegetables, and bread on a cutting board.
Kir is standing at the counter with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There’s a dish towel slung over his shoulder. His hair is pushed back from his forehead and he looks focused and domestic.
I open my mouth to tell him that, if he’s trying to get into my pants tonight, this is very effective, but also a whole lot of effort. He knows I’m not that hard to convince when it comes to getting horizontal with him these days.
He raises a finger without looking at me, still sawing the bread into pieces. “Don’t ask questions tonight,” he interrupts. “Just sit down.”
I look at the table. I look at the candles. I look at this man who broke into my apartment to kill me five weeks ago and is now serving me roasted chicken with a side salad.
Then, smiling, I sit down.
“Where did you learn to cook?” I ask, stealing a piece of bread from his cutting board.
“YouTube,” Kir admits as he joins me. “About four hours ago.”
I almost choke on my wine. “You learned to make this today?”
“I had motivation.” He takes a sip from his own glass. “Also, I burned the first attempt. And the second. Your smoke detector battery is dead, by the way. You should fix that.”
“I’ll add it to the list. Right under change the window locks and stop sleeping with men who break into my apartment.”
He gives me an amused look. Then we eat.
It’s strange, how normal this feels. The candlelight, the wine.
Forks scraping quietly against plates. If I squint and ignore a few minor details, we could be any couple in any apartment on any Sunday night in New York.
He refills my glass without me asking and passes the bread before I reach for it.
He eats with his left hand, which I’ve never noticed before.
I file it away with all the other small, useless, precious details I’ve been collecting about him.
“I hope you don’t mind that I’m maskless tonight,” Kir says, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “It would be difficult to eat with it on.”
I laugh. But the joke opens a door I wasn’t expecting, and the laughter fades quicker than it should. I push a piece of chicken around my plate with my fork.
“It matters to me,” I say. “The mask. I should probably explain why.”
Kir sets his fork down and waits patiently for me to go on in my own time.
I take a long drink of wine. Then I put the glass down and wrap both hands around the base of it because I need something to hold.
“When I was nineteen,” I start, “I was in my sophomore year at college. I went to a party. Drank too much. I went back to my dorm room with a guy because he seemed nice and I was drunk and stupid.” I swallow. “He wasn’t nice. He wasn’t nice at all.”
The candlelight flickers across Kir’s face. He’s looking at me steadfastly. But I don’t dare meet his eyes.
“I don’t remember all of it. Just bits and pieces. The ceiling had a crack in it. There was a sock by the door I’d been looking for all week. It’s funny that that’s what I remember, but it’s like my brain just left and went somewhere else. Somewhere safer than my own body.”
I realize I’m clutching the wine glass hard enough that the stem could snap. I force myself to loosen my grip, one finger at a time.
“I didn’t tell anyone. I went back to my dorm and took a shower and went to class the next morning and just… kept going. That’s what you do, I thought. If you reported it, that meant that you… that he… like, won.”
I stop and breathe.
“I haven’t been with anyone since then. For five years, not one person. Until you.”
Finally, I risk looking at him. Kir is completely still.
His hands are flat on the table on either side of his plate, his food long forgotten.
He is looking at me with the most careful, controlled attention I have ever seen from him, and I realize he is holding himself very, very still on purpose, because whatever he’s feeling right now, he doesn’t want it to spill out and make this about him.
“Which brings me to the mask,” I continue. “When you had the mask on, you weren’t… you weren’t a person. You weren’t a man with a face and a name and a history. You were just something in the dark. And something in the dark couldn’t hurt me, because it wasn’t real. Does that make sense?”
He nods, but doesn’t speak.
“It gave me permission to want something again. I found myself able to let someone touch me without every brain cell screaming at me to run. And that was enough to let me stay in my body for the first time in five years.”
I’m done. There’s more—there’s so much more, a whole chapter I skipped over, a hospital room and a baby’s scream and a bracelet on a tiny wrist—but that part stays locked. That part stays mine. What I gave him is enough for now. It’s the most I’ve ever given anyone.
The hundreds of candles basking us in heat waver as Kir reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I would have killed him if I’d known you then,” he says succinctly.
A normal person might have offered up an I’m sorry that happened to you. Maybe a Have you thought about therapy?
Kir Lazarev offers up cold-blooded murder.
And you know what’s funny? Not just that I believe him, because God knows that I do. It’s funny that I feel strangely reassured by the offer.
What does it mean that the thought of vengeance heals something in me?
How fucked-up have I become? Was I always this way?
Or did Kir make me this? Did my rapist? Am I happier in the darkness than I am in the light?
Is a murderous masked stalker the only man I could ever love and let love me in return? Is love even a word that works for us?
All I have are questions, questions, questions. There’s an obvious reporter joke in there somewhere, but if we’re being real, I wouldn’t mind some actual answers at some point.
For now, though, all I get is this: hot gray eyes on mine, fingers intertwined, candles all around us as we burn up together. Somehow, the fire makes the darkness seem darker.
I kinda think I like it that way.
Then there’s a sound.
Something between a scrape and a shuffle, right outside my front door.
Kir’s hand releases mine. His spine straightens.
His chin drops. His eyes go flat and cold, absolutely empty of anything I recognize.
He reaches under the table with his left hand and pulls out a gun.
He doesn’t look surprised in the least, and I’m realizing suddenly that that’s because he isn’t surprised at all.
Whatever this is, he was expecting it.
“Go to the bathroom,” Kir orders in a calm, level voice. “Lock the door. Don’t come out until you hear me say your name.”
I don’t move right away. My hands are still wrapped around the wine glass. The candles are still flickering. The bread is still on the cutting board. Everything looks the same as it did ten seconds ago, but none of it makes sense anymore.
“Jillian.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the front door. “Go. Now.”
I go.
I don’t think about it. My body just obeys, legs carrying me down the short hallway to the bathroom before my brain has time to form an opinion.
I step inside, shut the door, and twist the flimsy little push-button lock on the knob.
It’s nothing. It would hold for about half a second against anyone who actually wanted in. But it’s all I have, so I make do.
Then I press my back against the door and put both hands over my mouth.
I hear Kir’s footsteps cross the apartment. The creak of the front door easing open.
Then an eruption of noise. Grunt, crash, slam, shatter.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Then something I will never un-hear.
It’s wet. That’s the only word for it. Wet, dense, and final, and I hear it a second time before it all goes as silent as the grave.
After that, there’s nothing.