Chapter 44 Lukas
LUKAS
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS EARLIER
NYT STAFF DIRECTORY
Jillian Pierce | Metro / Investigations
Columbia '18. Polk Fellow. Covers crime, corruption, and power in NYC. Recent work includes an ongoing investigation into one of New York's most prominent families.
Contact: jpierce@
Confidential sources protected.
I watch as Rae stalks down the steps of the jet, gets into the waiting car, and disappears. The car becomes nothing but another anonymous black smear lost in the gray sprawl of the city.
She’s gone.
Good.
But not entirely gone, is she? Because I can still smell her on my clothes. Sulfur from the grotto. The cheap vanilla shit she puts in her hair. Her sweat, sweet and fragrant.
My cock stirs. Even now, standing on a private tarmac with my phone vibrating in my pocket and a dozen fires waiting to be put out, my body betrays me.
All it takes is the memory of her grinding against my thigh, those breathy little whines she made, her hand palming me and her eyes going wide when she saw that I hadn’t overestimated by a single fucking inch…
I bite down on the inside of my cheek until the erection dies down. Then I get in my own car.
I have work to do.
My driver hands me the morning edition of the New York Times as I settle into the leather seat. Force of habit makes me flip it open, scan the headlines, and check for anything that might require immediate attention.
But I don’t get past the front page before something hits my like a fucking hatchet to the throat.
Under the main headline is a name that shouldn’t be there:
JILLIAN PIERCE
Front page. Above the fold. It’s a scathing piece about the exploitation of regulatory loopholes in the pharmaceutical industry—nothing to do with me or Elena.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that this woman is still breathing.
I gave Kir one simple task—one—and my fuck-up of a son couldn’t even manage that.
What the fuck is Jillian Pierce still doing alive?
I specifically told him to handle it. The reporter is sniffing too close, asking questions about bones that have been buried for eighteen years. The right questions posed to the wrong people could unravel everything I’ve spent half my life building.
And my son, my heir, my blood—he failed.
My fingers tighten on the newspaper until the pages crumple. The driver glances in the rearview mirror. “Where to, Mr. Lazarev?”
“To the office,” I snarl. “I need to have a word with my son.”
The elevator deposits me on the fortieth floor. My anger grows with every step as I eat the distance to Kir’s corner office.
His receptionist, a waifish blond twenty-something with eager-to-please written all over her face, scrambles up from her desk as I approach. “Mr. Lazarev, sir, he’s in a meeting—”
I don’t break stride.
“Sir, you can’t just—”
My hand is already on the door handle. But I pause, just long enough to pin her with a look. “‘Can’t’?” I repeat softly.
The girl’s face goes the color of fresh snow. “I… I’ll hold his calls,” she whispers.
Smart girl.
Through the glass walls, I can see him holding court. Four hapless cronies in pressed suits are arranged around his desk, hanging on his every word.
Some kind of strategy session, no doubt. My son loves his strategy sessions almost as much as he loves disappointing me.
I don’t bother knocking.
The door slams against the wall hard enough to rattle the framed awards Kir keeps mounted there. Every head swivels in my direction. Four faces go pale in rapid succession.
Five, if you count Kirill’s.
“Out,” I bark.
Nobody moves at first.
So I add, “Now.”
That unsticks them. Laptops slam shut and chairs scrape backward. The four suits scramble past me in a blur of terror. Not one of them is brave enough to meet my eyes.
The door snicks shut behind the last one.
Kir hasn’t moved from his seat behind his desk. He’s leaning back, arms crossed, face carefully neutral. But I know my son. I can read him like a fucking book.
“Father,” he says. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
I cross to his desk and hurl the newspaper down in front of him. Jabbing a finger at the byline that drew my eye, I growl, “I gave you one job. One fucking job. Was that too much for you, son?”
Kir doesn’t bother looking at the newspaper. He meets my eye, calm and arrogant. “You mean the murder you delegated to me because you’re too busy fucking my assistant to do it yourself?”
The grind of my teeth resonates in my skull. My hands curl into fists at my sides, knuckles whitening, and I have to consciously force them open before I do something I’ll regret.
Kir notices my struggle. “Go ahead,” he goads. “Hit me again. That’s always been your solution to everything, hasn’t it? Can’t win with your words, so you win with your fists instead.”
“Shut your mouth, boy.”
A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“Testy this morning, are we? I never thought I’d see the day.
The legendary Lukas Lazarev, losing his composure.
Over a girl.” He tilts his head and clucks his tongue.
“You know, Father, all these years watching you operate, and I never once saw you rattled. You didn’t even look this upset when Mother died. ”
As much as I despise it, he’s right.
Fuck me, he’s right.
For sixty years, my self-control has been the bedrock of everything I’ve built. Ice in my veins, steel in my spine. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ve had to be.
But ever since Rae Everett walked into my orbit, that ice has been cracking. Thawing. Turning into something dangerously close to feeling.
I don’t like it.
I lower my hand and force myself to breathe. “Watch your mouth,” I repeat through gritted teeth.
“I’ll watch whatever I please.” Kir sneers. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? The trips, the doting? It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic.”
“Careful.”
“Or what?” He rises from his chair, matching my height even if he’ll never match my breadth. “You’ll do to me what you did to Mother?”
I’d tell him one more time to shut the fuck up, but I’ve raised the kid all by myself since he was twelve years old: I know when that feverish gleam in his eye means he’s about to say something rash.
“You killed her,” he accuses. “Everyone knows it. The whole fucking city knows it.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about?”
He lunges around his desk to square up with me. “I was twelve years old, Father. Twelve! One day, my mother was there, and the next day, she was gone, and you never shed a single fucking tear. Never explained a goddamn thing. Just told me she was dead and that was that.”
My chest is a furnace and every word he speaks stokes the flames higher. Is this what it’s like to burn up with emotion? I want my ice back.
“She loved you,” Kir continues, relentless. “She loved you more than anything in the world. And you—”
“Enough.”
“—you buried her somewhere nobody would ever find her, and then you went right back to work like nothing happened. Did you ever even love her? Are you even capable of—”
My hand shoots out before I can stop it. I grab my son by the throat and hurl him backward. His spine hits the window with enough force to make the glass shudder in its frame. The city sprawls forty floors below us, with only a thin pane separating my son from becoming a smear on the asphalt.
“I could kill you right now,” I warn him.
“But you won’t,” he rasps, squeezing the words past the pressure of my palm. A laugh bubbles up from somewhere in his chest, wet and choking. “Because I’m the only heir you’ve got.”
Again, he’s right.
If all the bodies I’ve left in my wake, all the blood and sweat and tears, add up to this, and upon my death, it all unravels, what was the point?
I’m fucked either way. Either it wastes into nothingness, or I hand it over to this steely-eyed upstart.
What a cosmic joke. This is what I have to show for my life’s struggle: a son who hates me, a legacy built on buried bones, and a woman half my age I have no business wanting.
Sneering in disgust, I release him.
I step back, putting distance between us before the animal in me does something the man will regret. My cuffs have ridden up during our little altercation; I tug them straight, one then the other.
“Kill the reporter by the end of the month,” I say. The ice is returning, thank God. “Or I give her everything she needs to destroy you instead of me.”
Kir rubs his throat where my fingers left their mark. His eyes blaze with hatred so pure it’s almost beautiful. The kid inherited that from me, at least.
“And Rae?” he asks.
“Rae is mine. Touch her again, and I’ll forget you’re my son.”
We both know I mean it.
We both know that’s the problem.
I turn and I leave and I don’t look back.
The door hasn’t even finished closing behind me when I hear the sharp crack of glass shattering, followed by the dull thud of something expensive meeting its end against a wall.
I welcome it. Let the boy rage. He’ll throw his tantrum like the petulant child he’s always been, despite the designer suits and corner office that I gave him. In the end, he’s only hurting his own cause.
Because angry men make mistakes. They act without thinking, move without calculating, and expose their soft underbellies to anyone patient enough to wait.
And I am nothing if not patient.
All my years in this game have taught me that much. You don’t build an empire by losing your temper. You build it by channeling that fuel into something useful—into leverage, or pressure, or above all, the slow, inexorable squeeze that makes your enemies destroy themselves.
Kir thinks he hates me now? He has no fucking idea.
All I have to do is push a little more. Apply the right pressure to the right cracks. And my son—my disappointing, defiant, predictable son—will crumble.
The elevator arrives with a soft chime. I step inside, straightening my cuffs one more time.
Behind me, something else breaks.