Page 19 of Boardroom Mask

I grit my teeth. “There were complications. A neighbor knocked on the door while I was inside. I had to wait him out. By the time he left, the window had closed.”

“‘The window had closed,’” he repeats. My father does this thing where he echoes your words back at you, stripped of all context and inflection, so they sound stupid hanging in the air. It’s effective. “You are telling me that my son, who I trained personally, a grown man with a gun and a knife, could not dispatch one twenty-five-year-old girl because aneighbor knocked on her door?”

I pinch my nose. The migraine is biting me hard and fast, and the vodka I drank has only sharpened its fangs. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Then you are either lying to me or you are incompetent. Which is it, Kirill?”

I grip the phone tighter. “Neither.”

“It must be one.”

“There will be other opportunities,” I fire back. “She’s not going anywhere.”

“She is a reporter digging into our family’s affairs,” he snarls, as if I need the reminder. “Every day she breathes is a day she gets closer to something we cannot afford to have printed. I made this clear to you two nights ago. Did I not make this clear?”

Two nights ago was the gala. I stood in a ballroom wearing a twelve-thousand-dollar tuxedo and watched my father buy my assistant like livestock at auction. That’s a whole fucking mess in its own regard. Rae Everett, whom I hired myself, whom I promoted to my personal EA when I took over as CEO, whom I mentored, protected, and considered one of the few truly good people in my orbit, became—like my mother—another victim I could not save. She stood on that stage in a dress my father chose for her, smiling that brave, tight-lipped smile of hers, even as her skin went pale and clammy with terror.

I bid five hundred thousand dollars for her. I thought that would be enough. Then my father raised his paddle and said five million without even looking at me.

Five million dollars. For a fuckingdate.

He didn’t want the date. She wasn’t the point;Iwas. He wanted me to know that anything I reach for, he can take. Anything I build, he can flatten. Any person I care about, he can claim with a simple flick of his wrist.

It’s that simple and that sick.

After the gala, I cornered him and told him I knew why he wanted her. It all boiled down to the fact that Rae Everett, with her dirty blonde hair and her brown eyes and her delicate build, looks exactly like my dead mother. Lukas didn’t deny it. Hell, he didn’t even blink.

What he did was give me Jillian Pierce’s name and an order to kill her myself. More games. A yank of the leash that he’s had fastened around my neck since the day he carried my mother’s corpse out of our house.

Your little tantrum is noted, Kirill.

Now, go prove you’re still useful to me.

“I heard you, Father,” I say now. “And I told you I would handle it.”

“Handling it means the girl is dead. The girl is not dead. Therefore, you have not handled it. Either the reporter dies soon,” my father growls, “or I’ll send Afon to do what you cannot.”

My grip on the glass tightens. I’m surprised it doesn’t crack.

Afon Satyrin, my father’s right-hand man, is the animal he keeps chained up until he needs ugly business done with a vengeance.

Afon doesn’t do clean. He doesn’t do quick. He does whatever he wants for as long as he wants, and it hurts his victims the whole fucking time.

I see Jillian in my mind. I smell her. Then I picture Afon’s hands on her, and something goes white-hot behind my eyes.

“If you send Afon anywhere near her, I will fucking end him and you alike. Do you hear me, Father? Do you fucking hear me? Do you…?”

I pull the phone from my ear and look at the screen.Call Ended.

The rage ignites all at once. I grab the edge of the marble coffee table and flip it. The thing weighs at least five hundred pounds but it goes over like flimsy cardboard. Jillian’s mail scatters across the hardwood and the vodka glass shatters against the floor. I glimpse a flash of aqua in the corner of my eye as the final envelope, the one I was saving, tumbles end over end and disappears under the couch.

I’ll get that later. I’m in no mood for it now.

I stand in the wreckage, chest heaving, knuckles white, and make myself a promise: If Afon or my father touch so much as one freckle on Jillian’s skin, I will carve them both open with my bare hands and feed the pieces to the river.

There won’t be a helicopter on this unholy Earth that can find them.

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