Chapter 50 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I found peace in your violence / Can’t tell me there’s no point in trying / I’m at one and I’ve been quiet for too long”
— “Silence” by Marshmello ft. Khalid
The knob on the bathroom door turns. I rise from where I’ve been sitting on the lip of the tub, one hand planted on the wall for support, the other raised to my mouth so I can nervously chew on my fingernails.
It swings out. I stop breathing.
Kir is standing in the frame. Blood is splashed across the front of his shirt and both hands red to the wrist. His face, though, is completely blank.
“Jillian,” he croaks.
I drop my hands from my mouth. My fingers are numb and the nails are chomped down to the quick.
Before I do anything, I take stock of him.
His mouth is swelling slightly, and the redness on the side of his cheek matches the shape of a fist. A smear of plaster dust speckles his hair like salt-and-pepper grays, giving me a sudden and unexpected glimpse of what he’ll look like thirty years from now. Unsurprisingly, he makes it look good.
Then I look past him, down the hallway.
There’s a dead man on my floor.
He’s facedown. One arm is bent at an angle that arms don’t bend at. A balaclava lies crumpled at his side. The blood underneath him is dark and spreading in a slow, uneven pool that’s already reached the baseboard.
He’s not moving. He’s not going to move ever again.
I haven’t seen a dead body since Rae’s parents’ funerals, and even then, that was a brief glimpse at the casket before I looked away, unable to bear it.
Even though the mortician did a good job restoring their good looks, there was no denying the deadness of them.
Since then, the closest I’ve come is crime scene photos for work, and it’s easy to convince yourself that those aren’t real.
This? This is not that. This is very fucking real. This is three-dimensional and warm and close enough to smell, and it’s on the floor of my apartment, surrounded on all sides by merrily flickering candles.
I wait for the scream to tear out of me, but it doesn’t come. My legs stay strong, the floor doesn’t rush up to meet me, and in no way does my body shut down or fail. Nothing happens at all, actually.
Then I look at Kir.
“Was he here for me?” I ask.
Kir nods once.
“Is that why you made dinner?”
Kir sighs. He looks down at his bloody hands, then back at me. “I knew he was coming,” he explains. “I didn’t know exactly when, though. So I needed you here, in a controlled environment, where I could stash you somewhere safe the second it started.”
Just like that, the whole evening reshuffles in my head. He did this. Cut the lights, lit the candles, hid the gun, cooked the meal. It’s good-bad-good-bad, so whiplashy that I feel sick just thinking about it. I know people contain multitudes and all that, but how can one man contain so many?
He’s a white knight and a cold-blooded killer.
He’s a hero and a horror show. He’s a stalker and a savior, a lover and a lunatic, and the thought of those bloody hands touching me makes me want to squirm and squeal and implode in ways that I’ve never wanted to do before. He’s changing me, little by little.
And I’m letting him.
I’m loving the process of letting him.
What’s most baffling of all is the lack of action in the mental space where the horror should be.
I keep waiting for it to show up and slug me in the gut.
Any second now, surely. Just a few more ticks of the clock and I’ll look at the body on my floor and feel the appropriate amount of revulsion.
I mean, Kir staged a date around a murder, and then gave this intruder not an ounce of mercy.
I would have killed him, he said about my rapist. What is this but proof of just how much he meant that?
“You can’t stay here tonight,” Kir declares.
I look at the hallway behind him. The body. The blood. The candles still going, all five hundred of them, cheerful, warm, and completely incongruous next to the dead man on the floor.
“No,” I agree. “I guess not.”
He holds out his hand.
There’s blood on it. Dried into the creases of his knuckles, caked under his fingernails, smeared across his palm. Another man’s blood. A man who came here to kill me and instead got killed himself.
I take it.
Kir’s fingers close around mine and we step over the body together.
He takes me to his apartment. I step out onto dark hardwood floors and stand there for a second, taking it in.
It goes without saying that it’s enormous. Frameless windows run the entire length of the far wall, and the view is absurd. I can see frothy wave caps on the East River, individual pedestrians on the Queensboro Bridge, the whole glittering skyline laid out like a diorama.
The furniture is as expected, too. No shortage of clean lines and dark, gleaming leather.
There’s a marble coffee table with a crack running down the center.
It’s not quite artistic enough to be intentional, which makes me think he broke it, which makes me wonder how and why he felt the urge to ruin his own furniture, which makes me remember the violence he carries inside him, which makes me flush and shiver all over.
I turn my back on it and walk past. The kitchen is as spotless as the rest of the place, carved out of black marble with such seamless handiwork that it looks like the whole room is one single, flowing piece of rock.
That being said, I’d bet my next three paychecks that nobody has ever cooked in it.
I wander through the living room while Kir locks up behind me. A built-in shelf looms against the far wall, but there’s nothing on it, not a single book or knickknack. No photos anywhere. Not one. And no art on the walls. I wouldn’t be surprised if he told me he just moved in yesterday.
“It’s cold in here,” I say. I don’t mean the temperature.
Kir is now leaning against the kitchen island with his arms crossed, watching me explore. “I know.”
“Do you actually live here? Or do you just store yourself here like an out-of-use vacuum cleaner between public appearances?”
He thinks about that. “Didn’t see the point in decorating. It’s just where I sleep.”
I run my hand along the back of the leather couch. It’s cold and smooth, perfect and sad. This whole place is sad. Ten million dollars’ worth of sad, if I had to guess.
“I’m going to go shower,” he tells me. “Try not to get yourself killed while I’m gone.”
I roll my eyes. “That’s really not funny, all things considered.”
That doesn’t stop him from chuckling dryly as he turns and strides down the darkened hallway. Shortly afterward, I hear the gush of water starting to run.
I go sit on the couch, but that only lasts for about thirty seconds before I find myself leaping up again. Sitting alone in this museum of a living room feels wrong.
I drift down the hall, following in Kir’s footsteps, toward the sound of the shower. His bedroom door is wide open, but the en-suite bathroom door is closed almost all the way, just enough to let a thin sliver of light shine through.
I go sit on the edge of his bed. It’s as predictably huge as everything else, and every bit as lifeless.
The sheets are gray and pulled so tight they almost look hard to the touch.
Guiltily, I bend down and inhale them. No trace of Kir’s cinnamon, though.
Nothing but laundry detergent and silk. Disappointing.
I still feel as fidgety as I did in the living room, for some reason. Steam curls through the gap in the bathroom door and winds around my feet like a kitten. I can hear the water cracking against tile, and every now and then, the softer sound of it hitting skin.
It occurs to me that I could go in there.
I could stand up, pull my sweater over my head, step out of my jeans and underwear, then push that door open and climb into whatever ridiculous rainfall shower a man with this much money undoubtedly has.
I could press my forehead against his chest and let the hot water run over both of us.
He could put his arms around me and hold on and tell me that everything is going to be okay.
That the body on my hallway floor doesn’t change anything.
What I told him at dinner doesn’t change anything.
That we’re going to figure this out, together, because that’s what people do when they—
When they what, exactly?
I pull my knees up onto the mattress and wrap my arms around them, suddenly cold.
That’s the fantasy, isn’t it? The real one.
Not the kinky ones—this one doesn’t need masks or belts or hard, bruising welts to make me crave what it offers.
Those things are easy, because that’s the point of them.
They take me out of my head and let me occupy a body that decided a long time ago what it craves from Kir Lazarev.
But the fantasy I’m imagining, the fantasy of being seen and held and loved…
That’s much, much harder. That one requires all of me. Not just body, but heart and mind, too.
I don’t think I’m ready to bare those to him just yet.
So I stay where I am. Knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, perched on the edge of his bed in my jeans and sweater while the shower runs and the steam keeps curling under the door.
Soon, the water cuts off. Not long after, the bathroom door opens and Kir steps out with a towel knotted low around his hips, still dripping.
His hair is dark and slicked back, water trailing down his neck and across his collarbones in thin rivulets that glow in the light from behind him.
I let myself look, because why pretend I’m not going to?
This thing of ours has been shameless and carnal from the start. This is one of the perks.
He’s lean everywhere, but the leanness is deceptive, because he’s also ripped. His shoulders and arms are corded with muscle. His stomach is flat and hard and there’s a trail of dark hair below his navel that I have to forcibly drag my attention away from.
He sees me on the bed and stops in the doorframe, venturing no closer. One hand grips the doorjamb above his head, while the other hangs at his side. He stays right there, ten feet away. It’s like he drew a line on the floor and won’t let himself cross it.
“I have guys on their way to your apartment,” he informs me in a husky voice, looking at a space somewhere above my head. “It’ll take them a few hours, but when they’re done, you can—”
I stand up.
Kir goes quiet. His hand tightens on the doorjamb as I close the distance between us, and I can see the exact moment he registers what I’m doing, because his whole body locks up.
I stop right in front of him. Close enough to feel the warmth still radiating off his shower-damp skin, to smell his soap and, underneath it, always, that faint cinnamon.
I reach for his right hand where it hangs by his side.
He lets me take it, though his fingers stay stiff, like he’s not sure what I’m going to do with it.
I raise it to my eyes and examine. His knuckles are wrecked.
The skin is split across the first two, and the third is already turning a deep, angry purple.
I look him in the eye, then I lift his hand to my mouth and press my lips against the torn skin, one knuckle at a time.
It’s intensely intimate. I could lock eyes with him while giving him a blowjob and I don’t think it would be quite like this. Neither of us blink nor breathe. There’s only the soft press of my kiss on his ruined hand and the plinks of the last droplets of water falling from the showerhead.
Kiss.
Plink.
Kiss.
Plink.
Kiss.
Then I let his hand go and drop my gaze to his torso. There’s a bruise blooming across his left side, just below the ribcage. It’s fresh and livid, red fading to purple at the edges, ugly.
I sink slowly onto my knees. My pulse is borderline painful where it throbs in my throat.
Then, with my hands on his torso, I put my mouth on it.
Gently. My lips against the hot, swollen skin, holding there, breathing against him.
His stomach contracts under my cheek and his hand comes up to hover near the back of my head without quite touching, as if he’s afraid that the weight of his palm might break something fragile.
I straighten up and look at him. “I’m not afraid of you anymore,” I tell him.
Shockingly, it both feels and sounds true. I’m not afraid of Kir Lazarev. I haven’t been for a while now, if I’m honest.
Kir’s hand finally settles properly on the back of my head. “You shouldn’t have been afraid of me in the first place,” he growls. “I’m not a danger to you, Jillian. I never will be.” His thumb traces a slow path behind my ear. “But anyone who tries to hurt you? Them, I’m very fucking dangerous to.”
He bends down and cups my chin in his huge hand. Tilting my face up toward his, he kisses me delicately. Then he pulls me to my feet with one hand and undoes the knot in his towel with the other.
I’m naked shortly after, though I don’t fully realize it until my bare back lands on his cool-to-the-touch bedsheets. He’s crawling over me, limbs endless in every direction, his erection hard but patient between my thighs.
“I’m going to go slow with you tonight,” he whispers in my ear as I trail my fingernails along the old, familiar grooves in his spine. “For once, we have all the time in the world.”
I nod eagerly. He does as he promised. First, fingers, then tongue, then, when I’m finally ready to take him, the scary plunge of him inside me. I groan and stretch my legs as wide as they’ll go so he can settle in.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Yeah. I’m perfect.”
In the half-dark, we move together, slow at first, then faster and faster.
His shower-damp skin and hair leach onto mine, so that by the time we’re both almost there, we’re each as wet, hot, and soap-scented as the other.
He’s an urgent mass on top of me and I’m a writhing mess beneath him.
I’m moaning, he’s grunting, and then it all swallows us up so beautifully that everything that’s not this ceases to matter.
When it’s all finally finished, I close my eyes.
For the first time in five years, I fall asleep in a man’s arms. There isn’t a sock on the floor or a crack in the ceiling. I’m safe here.
I know I’m safe here.