Page 134 of Boardroom Mask

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.Snapwent the solid ground beneath me, and I fell and fell and fell. Completely and utterly done for. Obsessed. Fuckingobsessed.

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 Ienjoyedit. 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 aboard. 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.”