Chapter 54 Kir
KIR
“Oh, my life / Is changin’ every day / In every possible way / And oh, my dreams”
— “Dreams” by The Cranberries
The next morning, I wake to the sound of typing.
My bedroom is flooded with limp, gray morning light, barely enough to see.
It must still be early. I look around and see that Jillian is cross-legged on the bed beside me, laptop balanced on her knees, hair piled into a messy knot on top of her head.
She’s still wearing my T-shirt, with lacy lilac panties underneath.
Her fingers are flying fast across the keyboard, her brow furrowed in concentration, and she’s got that look she gets when she’s deep inside something and the rest of the world has been temporarily evicted from her consciousness.
I watch her for a few seconds without moving. She must feel me looking, because her fingers freeze mid-keystroke. She glances down at me, and in one smooth motion, she folds the laptop shut.
“Morning,” she chirps.
“Morning.” My voice is rough with sleep. “What are you working on?”
“Just boring stuff. Fluff pieces.”
“At—” I check the clock on the nightstand. “6:14 in the morning?”
“News doesn’t sleep, Lazarev.” She sets the laptop on the floor on her side of the bed, then scoots over and inserts herself under my arm. “Now, cuddle me; it’s cold as balls in this stupid city.”
I pull her in close. She’s inhumanly cold, her feet like ice against my shins, and she hisses when I flinch.
“Warned you,” she says.
“You didn’t warn me about anything. You just shoved your frozen feet on me.”
“Must’ve said it in my head.”
I wrap both arms around her and tuck her under my chin.
Her hair smells like my shampoo. It’s crazy how feral that makes me, all these little marks of my claim on her.
My shampoo, my shirt, the nips and nicks and bruises that I’ve given her.
Every small domestic act feels enormous, because I’ve never had any of this before. Not once. Not with anyone.
“You’re very warm,” she mumbles into my chest. “It’s unfair. You’re like a furnace.”
“Genetic.”
“They do come in handy from time to time.” She hooks one leg over my hip and presses closer. The grind of her against my crotch wakes me up the rest of the way. “Jillian.”
“Hmf?”
“If you keep doing that, this is going to stop being a cuddle and start being something very different indeed.”
She tilts her face up. Those green eyes are wide and mischievous and completely awake despite the hour. “Who said I wanted a cuddle?”
That’s all the invitation I need. I kiss her. I take my time with it, one hand in her hair, the other sliding down her spine to the small of her back. She arches into me and makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight to my groin.
We take it slow. Slower than we’ve ever been, because there’s nowhere to be and nobody to hide from.
I pull the shirt over her head and she kicks her underwear off under the sheets, and then it’s just skin on skin, warm and unhurried.
She pushes me onto my back and climbs on top.
I let her set the pace, watching her move above me with her eyes closed and her lips parted, her hair falling out of its knot strand by strand.
When we’re done, I carry her into the shower. I’ve always thought this thing was designed too big for one person, but as it turns out, it’s exactly right for two. She stands under the spray with her head tipped back and water running down her freckled shoulders and sighs happily.
We don’t make it out of the shower before I’m inside her again. We leave behind some very interesting marks on the glass.
“Like modern art,” I suggest as I wrap her in a huge, thick towel.
She eyes the smudges from multiple angles. “Are you saying my boobs belong in a museum?”
“Where everyone else can see them? Fuck no.” I bend down and close my teeth lightly around one nipple.
Jillian yelps and smacks me on the back of the head, but her hand keeps my mouth fasted around her breast so I can’t quite let go.
“These,” I declare with a mouthful of boob, “are for my viewing eyes only.”
“That means this is mine, too,” she warns as she palms my already-stiffening cock.
“Yours,” I agree.
For the third time, we decide to fall right onto the shower mat and rut like animals there.
When will enough be enough, I wonder? Will there ever be a time I don’t see her and get hard immediately?
Will this She’s mine fire ever fade, or even cool off a degree or two?
It’s as all-consuming as it was from the start.
More so now, even, after all that we’ve been through and all that I’ve learned about her.
Jillian Pierce has both surprised me and also confirmed everything I ever suspected about her, and she somehow did it at the same fucking time.
She’s a wonder. A goddamn wonder. There’s no other word for her.
Or, wait, yes there is.
Mine.
That’s the best word of all.
After a second, highly necessary shower, we end up back in bed. Jillian is sprawled on her stomach with the sheets bunched around her waist, chin propped on her folded arms, and I’m lying next to her, tracing abstract shapes on the soft skin between her shoulder blades.
“I decided something,” I tell her.
“When you were going down on me?” she asks with a lifted brow.
“Shortly before,” I say, chuckling. “I’m going to start restructuring the company.”
She turns her head on her arms to look at me. “Restructuring how?”
“Severing the financial pipelines. All of them. The Bratva has been this, like, parasite leeching on the ass of Lazarev Global. So I’m going to pluck it off and crush it.” I press my thumb against a freckle on her spine. “We’re going legitimate. It’s time.”
Jillian is quiet as she contemplates what I just said. “What does that mean for your safety?” she asks at last.
That’s a question I haven’t considered. “What do you mean?”
She rolls onto her side, facing me, and props her head up on one hand. “You’re about to cut off a lot of very dangerous people from a lot of money. What happens when they notice?”
I keep my eyes on the freckle. “I assume they’ll be unhappy about it.”
“Kir.”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
I do. Her green eyes are focused and unblinking and she has that reporter face on, the one that means she’s not going to let me slide past the hard part with charm or deflection or sex.
“You’ve made it very clear what kind of people they are,” she says sternly. “I don’t think they’re just going to shrug and update their LinkedIn to ‘looking for new work,’ you know?”
She’s not wrong. Afon has been my father’s right hand for longer than I’ve been alive.
The man has spent a lifetime building a set of skills that are useful to exactly one type of organization, and I’m about to dismantle that organization from the inside.
He will be less than pleased. And there are dozens of others just like him.
“With Lukas neutralized, the structure collapses,” I tell her. “The Bratva is a top-down hierarchy, and the top just got lopped off. If there’s no pakhan issuing orders and no corporate apparatus moving money, the lieutenants have nothing to organize around. They’ll scatter.”
“You sound very confident about that.”
“I grew up in this world and I know how it works. These guys are cold-blooded mercenaries, Jillian. They follow power and money. When both dry up, they find a new source or they disappear. That’s how it’s always been.”
She chews on her bottom lip, then her nails, then her lip again. The gears grinding in her head are almost audible.
“Hey.” I reach over and tuck a strand of red hair behind her ear.
“I’ve spent my entire life preparing for this.
I know where every dollar goes, I know where every body is buried—some of them literally—and I know who’s loyal and who’s just been too scared of Lukas to step out of line.
The scared ones will come around. The loyal ones will leave.
And the ones who want to fight about it will find out very quickly that I’m not the soft target they think I am. ”
She looks at me. Her eyes are still worried, but there’s trust there, too. Not blind trust; Jillian doesn’t do blind anything. This trust is earned.
“I love you,” I tell her. “And I will keep you safe.”
She holds my gaze for a long beat. Then: “You love me?”
“Yeah,” I say calmly. “I fucking love you.”
She nods. Then she scoots forward, tucks herself against my chest, and presses her somehow-still-cold nose into the hollow of my throat. “I love you, too,” she mumbles against the skin there. “Glad we got that settled.”
We lie there for a while, her frozen toes slowly thawing against my calves, and I realize I have no idea what comes next. Not in the big, existential sense, but in a very literal one. I’ve never had a day with nothing hanging over it.
“What do you want to do today?” I ask.
She thinks about it for maybe two seconds. Then she smiles. “I want to go outside,” she declares. “Together. Just us. Can we do that?”
I look down at her and grin. “I’d love nothing more.”