Page 30 of Boardroom Mask

I picture her cunt, pink, swollen, soaked, mine.

I picture pushing into it for the first time.

I picture her crying, not from pain but from relief, from the beautiful, floating joy of submitting fully to someone who greedily demands everything she can give and more.

My orgasm tears through me. I cum hard, teeth bared, snarling into the steam. Thick ropes of cum hit the tile wall and get swallowed by the spray. My legs shake. I keep stroking through it, milking every last pulse, until the sensitivity is too much and finally, I have to let go.

I stand there under the water, panting, forehead pressed against the tile. For a second, I feel at ease.

Then it’s there again: the low, flickering fire.

Growing.

Gorging.

Greedy.

Untamed.

It’s not enough.

It’sneverenough.

I dry off with one of Jillian’s neatly folded white towels, get dressed, and leave the way I came—through the window, down the fire escape, and out into the unforgiving night.

Forty minutes later, I’m walking through an unmarked black door on East 4th Street and down a narrow staircase lined with graffitied brick. The bar at the bottom has no sign and cannot be found on any map. You get in only because someone who gets in told you about it.

Inside contains low red lighting and row after row of secluded, shadowed boots lined in maroon crushed velvet. The bartendershere remember your drink, purposefully forget your face, and would never dare to ask your name.

Matvei Satyrin is already in our usual booth in the back corner, nursing one of the two glasses of Clase Azul on the table. He’s wearing a black cashmere sweater pushed up at the sleeves and that easy, self-satisfied grin he never takes off.

“You look like you just crawled of a sewer,” he remarks as I drop into the seat across from him.

I pick up the tequila and drain half of it. “I’ve had a rough night.”

Mat watches me over the rim of his glass. “A roughKirnight, or roughLukasnight? Because those are two very different conversations and I need to know which one to prepare for.”

I swirl the tequila in my glass. “Little bit of both.”

“Ah. A double feature.” Mat takes a sip of his own drink, relaxed, unhurried. “Well, start wherever you want. I’ve got nowhere to be.”

I don’t start anywhere. I just sit there, rolling the glass between my palms, thinking about blood on white tile and the way Jillian’s body wash smelled in the billowing steam.

Mat tilts his head. “You gonna talk, or did you drag me out here to watch you brood? I’ve had a lifetime supply of the latter already.”

“Can you shut the fuck up, for once in your life?”

He chuckles. “One: Have you met me? Two: I’m a lawyer; talking a lot is a professional hazard. Three: You’re ducking the question.” He sets his glass down. “What happened, bro?”

I scowl. Unfortunately for my current need for silence, Ihavemet him. Matvei Satyrin and I have been friends since we were thirteen years old. He showed up in my life the year after my mother died, when my father shipped me off to an elite boarding school in Connecticut that catered to the sons of men who needed their children educated far from public scrutiny. Mat was the kid in the next dorm room over. Skinny, dark-haired, too smart for his own good, with a mouth that got him into trouble on a daily basis.

His father, Grigori, was mid-level Bratva. Not my father’s crew, though. He belonged to a smaller outfit operating out of Brighton Beach. Grigori ran protection rackets and laundered money through a chain of dry cleaners, which Mat always thought was hilarious for some reason. “Cleaning money through cleaners? He’s the biggest fuckin’ cliché I’ve ever met!”

Mat wanted out from the jump. He watched his father get arrested twice before he turned ten and decided early on that he’d go a different route. So he became a lawyer. A damn good one, too. Georgetown undergrad, Columbia Law, top of his class. He clerked for a federal judge and then went into private practice at a white-shoe firm in Midtown.

On paper, he’s completely clean.

In practice, he’s the person I call when things get complicated, because Mat understands both worlds and moves between them without breaking a sweat.