Chapter 61 Kir
KIR
“I’ve become so numb / I can’t feel you there / Become so tired / So much more aware”
— “Numb” by Linkin Park
I read the article at my kitchen counter with my coffee going cold beside me.
Every word is sourced and verified. The Astoria unmarked grave, the toxicology report on my mother’s remains. Elena Lazareva, née Sergeeva, dead at forty-two from a lethal dose of phenobarbital.
My own name is limited to a mention of her surviving son.
Background, she’d promised. She kept that promise, technically.
I don’t appear as a source anywhere. But I can trace the roots of this back to a memory of the two of us at her kitchen table, sipping whiskey, with her recorder sitting between us, switched off.
I want to feel justified. After eighteen years, my mother has been properly avenged. The truth is finally out, printed in black and white for the whole world to read.
Lukas exposed. Balance restored.
But the satisfaction doesn’t come. There is no closure to be found here.
Just pain heaped on top of pain. I can’t stop thinking about how alone Jillian must have felt, bearing her child and giving her away.
Then I get fucking angry all over again, because how fucking dare she?
I had a mother taken from me, and that’s been hell on earth, but she just gave her daughter up?
No. Fuck that. It cannot be forgiven.
I close the laptop in disgust and pick up the remote. White noise. That’s all I need. Something to fill the silence so I stop hearing Jillian’s voice in every corner of this apartment.
The TV pops on to NY1—and my thumb freezes on the button.
It’s a helicopter shot, looking down at a brownstone in Brooklyn I recognize immediately because I spent the first twelve years of my life there. Cop cars line the narrow street, lights spinning red and blue against the brick. Yellow crime scene tape stretches across the front steps.
The chyron reads: brEAKING: LUKAS LAZAREV ARRESTED IN CONNECTION WITH WIFE’S DEATH.
As I watch, two federal agents walk my father down the front steps. His hands are cuffed behind his back. He’s wearing a white dress shirt with no tie, and his silver hair is uncombed, which is how I know they didn’t give him time to prepare.
He doesn’t look at the cameras. Or at anything. His face is perfectly, completely blank.
Fuck. This situation is spiraling. It’s all becoming so much worse than I thought it would be. I expected the article to cause damage, but I pictured lawsuits, board panic, stock drops—things I could control. Not a fucking perp walk on live television.
Then the camera pans left, away from the squad car they’re loading my father into, and finds a woman on the sidewalk.
She’s surrounded by reporters shoving microphones and phones in her face.
She’s trying to push through them, one arm up to shield her eyes from the camera flashes, and she looks absolutely terrified.
It’s Rae.
Goddammit. Not her. Not another innocent person ground up in the gears of this family. She’s been through enough already.
I’m off the couch before I’ve made a conscious decision.
Keys, jacket, door, run. It’s not about Rae.
I mean, it is in part. She worked for me, she’s decent, she doesn’t deserve any of this.
But if I’m being honest with the one person I can never seem to lie to, which is myself, that’s not why I’m running.
I’m running because Jillian would want me to help her. My little fox would kill me if I sat here on my ass and watched her best friend get eaten alive on live television.
So I’m going. Not for Rae. Not for myself or my father.
But for the woman who destroyed me and who I can’t stop loving anyway.
I take the FDR south and cut across the Brooklyn Bridge doing twenty over the limit. The chaos outside of the brownstone is worse in person than it looked on TV. The reporters are everywhere, like the bloodsucking mosquitos they are.
I spot Rae before I’ve even fully stopped the car. She’s backed against a parked delivery truck, arms wrapped around herself, cameras in her face as they all descend on her.
I screech to a stop, spraying angry media members everywhere as they shout curses in my direction. When I’m close enough, I lean across the center console and shove the passenger door open.
“Get in,” I growl. “Now.”
She doesn’t move at first. She looks at me the way a drowning person looks at a piece of driftwood—not sure if it’ll hold, but sorely lacking for better options.
Then she ducks under a reporter’s outstretched arm and sprints for the car. She throws herself into the passenger seat and yanks the door shut. I’m pulling away before it fully latches, tires screaming against the asphalt.
In the rearview mirror, two cameramen chase us for half a block before giving up.
Rae is shaking from head to toe, teeth clacking, skin pale.
I drive. That’s all I know how to do right now. Just drive.
I take Rae to see her brother at a safehouse apartment. I made arrangements earlier in the day, after Richard called to warn me, to extract him from his rehab facility and keep him somewhere safe, away from the worst of the fallout that’s coming.
Then we go to visit my father in his holding cell.
I make Rae sit in the observation room while I go in there and speak to him.
It’s better this way, with me as a shield between them.
I’m so used to the icy blast of his indifference; he can’t hurt me anymore.
But her? She’s vulnerable. Even viewing it through a screen is dangerous enough for her.
When I emerge, I see that she’s learned the lesson she needed to learn: that Lukas Lazarev is incapable of love. She looks ruined by what just happened in there, the things my father said. I hope the scar tissue is enough to keep her safe for the rest of her life, wherever it takes her.
Afterwards, I take her back to her brother. I leave them alone together and retreat to my car. I sit in the dark and think about mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, exes, lovers, futures, pasts.
What does it mean to love someone enough to bring them into this world?
What does it mean to love them enough to carry them out of it?
Can we forgive the people who break us? Or are we all crying endless tears beneath the masks we’re forced to wear?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know anything anymore.