Page 18 of Boardroom Mask

This is personal.

I set it back down on the table without opening it just yet. There’s a specific pleasure in making myself wait. I’ve always been this way—the anticipation is half the reward. When I was a boy, I’d unwrap birthday presents slowly, peeling each strip of tape while my father watched with open irritation. He wanted me to tear into things. Devour them. That was his way. Take what you want, fast and brutal.

But I’m not my fucking father.

So I edge myself with the waiting. I get up and walk to the bar cart by the window, pour three fingers of Beluga Noble into a glass, neat, and take a slow sip. The vodka sears like hellfire.

I carry the glass to the balcony and look out over the city. It’s a hell of a view, not that I give a fuck about appreciating it.

Manhattan kneels at my feet, just like Jillian did, and almost as pretty. The Empire State Building is lit up white tonight, a fat needle jabbing into low cloud cover a few miles south. To theleft, the Queensboro Bridge stretches across the river. Roosevelt Island sits dark and narrow in the water underneath.

A helicopter buzzes over the river at low altitude and sweeps the dark waters beneath it with a spotlight. I wonder if they’re looking for any of my family’s victims. On any given day, more are added to the kill total. There could be corpses dispatched by my father’s hand floating along the river bed right there.

I turn around to survey the place I call home. It strikes me, not for the first time, how much I fucking loathe it.

That’s not to say it isn’t nice. It is. This penthouse cost eleven million dollars. The vodka in my hand runs four hundred a bottle. The Patek Philippe on my wrist was a gift from my father on my twenty-eighth birthday, the same night he told me he’d be making me CEO of our family’s conglomerate, Lazarev Global… Coincidentally, that was also the same night he told me he’d had a man drowned in the Gowanus Canal for skimming from a shipment.

That’s my life. Marble countertops and murder. Bespoke suits and shallow graves.

My father wants it like that. He’s made that much clear since the day I could walk. Handle thingshisway. Cold. Stone-faced. No emotion, no hesitation, no second thoughts. Lukas Lazarev hasn’t felt a goddamn thing since my mother died eighteen years ago, and he considers that a feature, not a bug.

But I’m not him. I’ve never been him.

Where he’s ice, I’m fire. Where he goes quiet, I get loud. He buries things; I burn them. “You feel too much, Kirill,”he said to me once, years ago. “It will be your undoing.”

Maybe he’s right. Tonight is a pretty good case study.

Because I was sent by him to Jillian Pierce’s apartment to end her life, and instead, I left her breathing.

Even with all the fire in my belly, I haven’t feltneedlike that in years. This was a fucking dangerous blend of ravenous desire. She knelt at my feet, so pretty, so submissive, and I had to remind myself that I came here to kill her, not to part those lips and plunge my cock into her throat.

But it wasn’t the mission that stopped me. It wasn’t my father’s orders rattling around in my skull or the practical reality of what I’d been sent to do.

It was the way she froze when I pinned her to the wall.

Anyone would freeze when a masked stranger grabs them, but this wasn’t that. Her body left the room before I even said a word. I felt it happen in real time. One second, she was fighting me, biting, kicking, alive as hell, and the next, she just...vacated the premises. Gone. Checked out. Her muscles went slack and her breathing nearly ceased, and I knew that wherever she’d gone, I wasn’t the one who’d sent her there.

Someoneelsedid that to her.

Someone before me.

That knowledge rearranged things inside my chest that I didn’t know could be rearranged. I came to kill her—that was the job. But in that moment, I wanted to kill whoever hurt her even more.

Alright. No more edging. Time for the grand reveal.

I’m returning to my seat on the couch to open the final envelope when I realize my phone is vibrating in my pocket.

I pull it out and wince when I see the name glowing on the screen. There’s no avoiding it, but I let it ring a few times before I answer.

“Is it done?”

Lukas Lazarev has never been much of one for hellos. Nohow are you, son. Nogood evening. He cuts right to the brutal, bleeding point.

I look down at the aqua envelope I took from Jillian’s apartment and grit my teeth. “No.”

There’s a long exhale on the other end. It’s like a dangerous pressure release, the sound a boiler makes right before it blows.

“Explain yourself,” he orders.