Chapter 71 Rae
RAE
Subject: Lazarev, Lukas A. (counsel waived)
Visitor: Lazarev, Kirill L.
Delete this footage?
YES | NO
Gideon promises me he’ll be okay staying here. We leave him in the apartment and return to the car downstairs. Kir helps me into the vehicle, then steers us out.
We emerge from the underground parking garage and flow through the city. It seems like every other car pulls aside and every light goes green, as if the world is urging us on our way toward wherever we’re going.
Which, as it turns out, is the 20th Precinct.
He takes us down a back alley. It’s blocked by a tall gate topped with barbed wire, but a masked patrol officer is waiting out in the cold to open it for us. We’re expected, it seems. We pull through and the gate locks behind us.
I climb out of the car and look around. A bitterly cold wind rips down the throat of the alleyway.
I’m wearing only jeans and a t-shirt with a light jacket, so it freezes me to the bone.
Kir notices and raises an arm like he wants to drape it around me for warmth, then thinks better of it and tucks it away.
“C’mon.”
I trudge after him down the alley. Halfway down, we stop a nondescript metal door. Kir knocks once, pauses, then knocks again. He steps back just in time for the door to crack open.
Another cop looks out at us. This one is a detective, judging by the crinkled polyester suit and the bags under his eyes. He peers up and down the alley, then holds the door open wider. “In you go,” he grunts.
Kir nods as we pass and hands the man a thick envelope with new dollar bills peeking out of the flap, which he quickly tucks inside his jacket pocket.
We slip inside. The door clangs shut behind us, sealing out the cold and the night.
The precinct’s back corridors are a maze of flickering fluorescents and scuffed linoleum. We pass a break room where a couple of uniforms nurse coffee cups. They look up at us curiously—until they see Kir, at which point they avert their eyes back down in a hurry.
Nobody stops us. Whatever Kir slipped the detective, it was enough to buy us free passage through the belly of the NYPD.
The detective leads us down a narrow hallway and stops at a door marked Interview Observation #7. He unlocks it with a key from a crowded ring, then steps aside.
“You’ve got twenty minutes,” he says to Kir. “After that, I can’t guarantee anything.”
“That’s all we need.”
The detective nods once, then disappears back down the corridor, leaving us alone.
Kir opens the door and shows me inside. It’s a cramped little office, not much bigger than a closet, really. On the metal desk shoved into one corner is an outdated computer monitor, and on that monitor…
… is Lukas.
It’s the same feed that Kir showed me in the safe house apartment where he was hiding Gideon. Lukas still hasn’t moved. He’s seated on that bench, spine erect and proud, like a king in exile.
Badly rendered pixels can’t dim his shine. Nothing can, really. It’s like the first time I ever saw him all over again—my breath gets sucked away, because it’s just so clear to me that he is what a man is supposed to be.
Strong in the face of adversity.
Brave in the heat of battle.
Present and capable, fierce and defiant, beautiful, rugged, untouchable.
I love him. Stupid as it may be, I still love him, even after everything. He’s my North Star.
But.
But.
Kir warned me something is coming. You wouldn’t believe me if I tried.
How many times has the world tried to tell me that Lukas Lazarev is a bad idea? Kir, Jillian, Lukas himself—again and again, I’ve be told that he isn’t just as bad as the stories say he is; he’s worse. A killer. A tyrant. A bloodthirsty beast.
I read that article myself, didn’t I? I know Jillian would never lie. She takes her job too seriously. Those are facts. His wife did die by poisoning. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
I believed there was more to the story then, and I still do now. I believed him then, and I still do now.
But believing something doesn’t make it true. And loving someone doesn’t make them innocent.
“What are you going to do?” I ask Kir in a weak voice.
He points at the metal folding chair set up in front of the computer monitor. “Take a seat and watch. You’ll see soon enough.” Then he steps out of the room and tugs the door shut behind him.
I perch on the chair, turning my eyes onto the screen. I wonder for a moment if the feed has stalled out, because Lukas hasn’t moved a muscle. He doesn’t even seem to be breathing.
Then the door to the interrogation room swings open, and Kir slips inside.
On screen, I watch his tall, lean frame enter the shot. He closes the door behind him, then turns to face his father. He stands there for a moment and the two men look at each other. Neither one’s face gives anything away.
Then Kir sighs, steps forward, pulls out the chair across from Lukas, and sits. Father and son, mirror images of each other, separated by decades and circumstance but cut from the exact same cloth.
“I always wondered what it would feel like,” Kir begins, “seeing you on that side of the table.”
Lukas nods. “Does it live up to expectations?”
“Not really.” Kir scrubs a hand over his jaw. “But it’s a start.”
Lukas’s head tilts to one side. “A start to what, though, I wonder?”
Kir’s eyes narrow. “Making things right.”
“That’s a noble mission statement for a man who just stole my company.”
“I didn’t steal a fucking—!” Realizing he’s shouting and rising out of his chair, Kir stops and settles back down.
He takes a moment to compose himself. Fixes his tie knot, smooths back his hair, adjusts the clasp of his watch.
When he’s ready, he looks back up at his father.
“I didn’t steal anything,” he says again, calmer this time, though his voice is still scratchy through the audio feed. “I offered you a choice.”
“I chose her,” says Lukas.
“Yes,” Kir replies. “You did. And look where that’s gotten you.”
Lukas doesn’t take that bait. But he doesn’t look away from his son, not even for a second. He watches calmly, hands folded in his lap, posture as tall as ever.
It’s a miracle that the police even have cells that fit him, I think to myself. He’s so much larger than life that I can’t help but wonder if he could simply rip that door off its hinges and walk right out if he wanted to.
“I’m not here to gloat, you know,” Kir says after a frosty minute of silence has passed. “Contrary to what you might think, I don’t actually want to see you rot in prison.”
“How magnanimous.”
“I’m serious.” Kir leans forward, elbows on the table. “I can make this go away. You know I can.”
“What I know,” Lukas says, “is that you didn’t arrange all this just so you could wipe it all away and curry a favor from me, son. You’re smarter than that. You did it for a reason.”
Slowly, Kir nods. “I did.”
Lukas smiles sardonically. Playing along, he says, “Well? We’re all ears.”
I could swear Kir’s gaze darts up to the camera for just a second. Then, crossing one knee over the other, he says, “I want you to ask me for help. Just this once, I want you to say those fucking words, Father.”
It’s quiet. I wonder again if the feed has cut out, because both men are as still as statues. Then Lukas leans forward and props up his elbows on his knees.
“You want me to beg.”
“Beg, ask, what’s the fucking difference?” spits Kir. “Just admit, for once in your fucking life, that you need someone. You can’t do everything alone. Even the great Lukas Lazarev makes mistakes.”
“I won’t make this one,” Lukas replies softly.
Kir’s frustration is more than obvious. His hands keep flexing and unflexing in his lap, and one knee has begun to piston up and down. “How many lives are you going to ruin before you swallow your fucking pride, huh? Mom’s? Mine? Now, Rae’s, too?”
A muscle ticks in Lukas’s jaw. The first crack in his composure. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says at last.
“Who knows better than me?” Kir laughs. “I’ve spent my entire life watching you do this. You find something beautiful, something pure, and you convince yourself you can have it without ruining it.” He shakes his head slowly. “You can’t. You never could. Mom proved that.”
A beat passes. Then Lukas says, “No.”
Kir’s brow furrows like he’s misheard. “What?”
“No,” Lukas repeats.
“No to what?”
“I don’t want your assistance, son. I’ll stay here. It’s time.”
“You don’t—” Kir stops. He’s confused, a man who was so sure he had the winning hand until he found out he was playing a different game entirely. “What the hell do you mean, you don’t want out? I’m offering you a way out of this, you stubborn old bastard. I’m giving you exactly what you need!”
Lukas doesn’t flinch or reply. His hands are still calmly laced in his lap.
“Is this pride?” Kir demands. “Is that what this is? Some kind of—some kind of damn martyr complex? You’d rather rot in here than admit you need my help?”
“It’s not pride.”
“Then what? Stubbornness? Spite? Pick your fucking word, Dad!”
Lukas exhales slowly. “I’m done running from her memory, Kirill.”
Kir surges to his feet, sending his chair screeching backward across the concrete floor. “Don’t feed me that bullshit! You never loved Mom,” he rasps. “And you never loved me.” He braces his hands on the table and leans in close. “What about her, though, hm? Do you love Rae?”
The silence that follows is the longest of my life. I’m not breathing. I don’t think my heart is beating. Everything has narrowed down to that grainy screen, to the silver-haired man sitting so still in that squalid little room.
Lukas rises to his feet. “No.”
I reel back in my seat as if he’d reached through the screen and slapped me across the face.
No? But… but he told me he loved me. We just spent a week doing nothing but loving each other.
I… I reached back into my past and relived the worst night of my life for him, I gave up everything for him, and he… he…
“She was a distraction,” he says. “Nothing more.”
I can’t feel my hands. I can’t feel anything. The room has gone gray at the edges, sound muffled like I’m underwater.
Kir’s head lifts slowly. His eyes find the camera lens and look right through it at me.
He doesn’t have to say anything for me to understand. The message is crystal clear: Whatever I thought we had, whatever I felt in that brownstone, in that bed, in his arms—it was a fever dream.
Lukas Lazarev is incapable of love.
On screen, Kir gives his father one last unreadable look. Then he pushes back from the table, straightens his jacket, and walks out of frame. The interrogation room door swings shut behind him with a dull metallic thud.
A second later, the feed cuts to black.