Chapter 53 Kir
KIR
“Will you still be there for me, once I’m yours to obtain? / Once my fruits are for taking and you flow through my veins?”
— “holy terrain” by FKA twigs
We’re driving home. Jillian is asleep against the passenger window with my jacket balled up between her cheek and the glass.
Her breath keeps fogging a small circle on the window, then it fades, then it fogs again.
Her boots are kicked off into the footwell and her socked feet are pulled up onto the seat beneath her.
She fell asleep somewhere around Bath Beach. She was telling me a story, but her sentences got further and further apart until they stopped altogether. I glanced over and she was out. Mouth open. Hair everywhere.
I turned the radio down and haven’t touched it since.
The highway curves along the water. The last of the daylight is a thin orange band on the horizon behind us, already losing to the dark. Manhattan is up ahead. I keep my speed even. No reason to rush. I could live in this moment forever.
This is what it could be. This exact thing.
A car, a highway, a woman sleeping next to me because she trusts me enough to close her eyes.
I could drive her home every night and wake up next to her every morning.
I could learn how she takes her coffee when she’s not at the office and what she watches on TV when she knows she won’t be judged for her choices.
I could find out what she looks like sunburned in August, lounging on a rocky Italian beach, or sick with a cold in February, bundled up on the couch with used tissues piled on the coffee table.
I could fight with her about stupid stuff.
God, the stupid, petty squabbles, and the laughing make-up sex.
I’m still angry. No, you’re not. Okay, fine, I’m not.
Not as long as you— Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Do that again, please.
I fell first. I know that. I’ve known it for a while now. It wasn’t the kitchen floor, or the alley, or any of the dozen times I’ve buried myself inside her and forgotten my own name. Those were merely symptoms. The disease started earlier.
I think it was the playground. Thanksgiving evening, hiding and watching her as she stood at that chain-link fence and cried over something I didn’t understand.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and kept standing there anyway, and I thought, This woman carries something enormous, and she carries it alone, and she has never once asked anyone to help.
How could I not fall for her?
That’s when it happened. Nothing slow or gradual about it. Snap went the solid ground beneath me, and I fell and fell and fell. Completely and utterly done for. Obsessed. Fucking obsessed.
The thing about loving Jillian is that it hasn’t made me softer. I thought it would. Worried it would, really. Lukas always said feeling too much would be my undoing, and I spent thirty years assuming he was right. But Jillian didn’t undo me. Not in that way, at least.
The violence is still there. We both know that. For fuck’s sake, I murdered the assassin viciously and I enjoyed it. That darkness isn’t going anywhere. It’s baked in. Lukas made sure of that.
But before my little fox, the darkness was all there was. In my heart lived rage and duty and the cold harshness of being a Lazarev. Now, there’s something else running alongside it. A river of new heat. Fresh light in a dark, locked room.
She didn’t kill the monster. It’s still alive and well.
She just gave it something worth protecting.
She stirs when I take the exit off the highway. Her head lifts from the window and she blinks, disoriented, rubbing one eye with her palm. “Where are we?” she mumbles.
“Almost home.”
She sits up and stretches, rolling her neck side to side with a wince. The jacket falls from her shoulder. She catches it and holds it in her lap, reluctant to let it go.
“How long was I out?”
“Forty minutes or so.”
“Mm.” She yawns. “I was having the weirdest dream. There was a balloon, but it was shaped like Doug’s head. And it was yelling at me about missing my deadline.”
I almost laugh. But I’ve been thinking for forty minutes in the quiet, turning something over and over while she slept, and the weight of it has settled into my bones.
“Jillian.”
“Yeah?”
“We need to talk about the article.”
She goes still. Not dramatically. Just a small pause, her hand stopping mid-way through raking her hair off her forehead. “What about it?”
“About the fact that we need to kill it.”
She turns to look at me. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t publish it. Pull it, delete it, whatever you need to do. But it can’t go out.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not.”
She’s quiet for a beat. Then: “Explain.”
I signal, merge right, and exhale through my nose.
“The article exposes a company I now run. My name is on the line. Anything that comes out about Lazarev Global doesn’t hit Lukas anymore—it hurts me and me alone.
I just got my hands on the controls. If something derails that, it might make room for him to come back in. ”
“Kir—”
“Hear me out. Beyond the company, there’s the other thing.
The Bratva doesn’t just go away because Lukas got voted off a board.
These people are still out there, and they have both lots of weapons and very long memories.
You publish an article tying Lazarev Global to organized crime, every one of those people is going to want to know who talked.
And they’re going to start looking. At me. At you.”
She doesn’t interrupt this time.
“And then there’s the feds,” I continue. “The second your article hits the front page, every three-letter agency in Washington opens a file. FBI, DOJ, IRS, the whole alphabet soup. They’ll launch investigations aimed at everyone, including and especially the current CEO.”
I pull up to a red light and finally look at her. She’s watching me with her lips pressed together and her arms crossed over her chest.
“We already won,” I tell her. “Lukas is out. The kill order is dead. You’re safe. I’m safe. We can just be happy now. That’s an option, Jillian. That’s actually an option for us. Why would we set fire to it?”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time.
The light turns green. I pull through the intersection and take the left onto my block, and she still hasn’t spoken.
I can hear the heater blowing and the tick of the turn signal and the low murmur of whatever’s on the radio, but none of it fills the space her silence is occupying.
I park in the garage beneath my building and kill the engine.
Then, quietly, without looking at me, she says, “Okay. I’ll kill it.”
Everything in my chest unclenches at once. I didn’t realize how tight I was wound until the tension lets go, and the relief is so total that I have to close my eyes for a second.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She unbuckles her seatbelt and reaches down into the footwell for her boots. “You’re right. It’s not worth the risk. Not after everything we just survived. We can be happy. So let’s be happy.”
She pulls one boot on, then the other. Her face is calm. She looks tired, mostly. Understandable, given everything that’s happened in the last few days.
“Thank you,” I say. I tilt her chin up toward me and kiss her gently. “Let’s go upstairs and be happy.”