Page 61 of Boardroom Mask

JILLIAN

“I see your true colors / Shining through”

— “True Colors (feat. Faux Fix)” by Richie Kohan

I take the 1 train to Fiftieth Street and walk three blocks east to Lazarev Global’s headquarters. It’s a glass-and-steel behemoth on Sixth Avenue, fifty-something floors of corporate greed stacked on top of a marble lobby the size of a basketball court. I’ve walked past it a dozen times but never gone inside because it just never really seemed like something I needed to care much about. Kinda unsettling how a building can look completely different when you know what’s buried beneath the name on the door.

I push through the revolving entrance and take in the lobby. Like the exterior, it’s glass and steel as far as the eye can see. Chandeliers made of fancy corrugated steel in contorted, futuristic shapes revolve from chains set into the ceiling far overhead. Security guards in dark suits stand at two checkpoints, flanking a bank of turnstiles that separate the entrance from the elevator bank. There’s a long reception deskto the left, curved and white, with the Lazarev Global logo mounted on the wall behind it in brushed silver letters. A pair of receptionists sit behind it, both blonde, both in black. They look interchangeable.

The floor is polished to a mirror finish. When I glance down, I can see my own reflection as I walk toward the desk.

I approach the receptionist on the left. Her blonde hair is pulled back so tight that I consider for a moment informing her about the risks of traction alopecia. If nothing else, I should offer her some Advil from my purse, because she has got to have a wicked migraine.

“Hi!” I say, slapping on my best non-threatening smile. “My name is Jillian Pierce. I’m a reporter with theNew York Times.I was hoping to speak with someone from the CEO’s office regarding a story I’m working on.”

Her face ices over. She looks at me the way you’d look at someone who wandered into the wrong building. “Do you have an appointment?”

“I don’t,” I reply apologetically. “I was hoping to set something up in person. Or, if someone from the press team is available today, I’m happy to wait.”

“One moment.” She picks up a phone and dials a four-digit extension. I can hear it ring twice before someone picks up. She turns away from me and speaks quietly, one hand cupped around the mouthpiece. I catch fragments.“Reporter … New York Times … CEO’s office.”Then a longer pause where she’s listening.

She hangs up and turns back to me. “Someone from the communications team will be down shortly. You’re welcome tohave a seat.” She gestures toward a cluster of low leather chairs near the windows.

“Great. Thank you.”

I retreat to a corner and sit. The chair is exactly as uncomfortable as it looks. I guess that’s all you can expect from hard leather stretched over some kind of frame that was designed by someone who was clearly unfamiliar with basic human anatomy. I cross my legs, uncross them, cross them again, but nothing makes me feel any less cramped.

It’s a busy building, but quiet as the grave. Self-important worker bees in expensive clothes moving with purpose toward the turnstiles, badges out, not looking at each other. Nobody talks. The only sound is the low hum of climate control and the occasional beep of a security badge clearing the gate.

Rae’s up there somewhere. I thought about texting her and checking in, but I didn’t want to risk someone catching us talking and assuming she was snitching on her bosses to theTimes.She’s got enough going on without me bringing more grief down upon her head.

I look up. On the far wall of the atrium, opposite the elevators, there’s a portrait. It’s massive. Must be eight feet tall and framed in a handsome dark wood, mounted above a marble ledge with a single orchid on it. The painting shows Lukas and Kir Lazarev, side by side.

Lukas is on the left. Silver hair, silver beard, built broad enough to fill most of the frame on his own. His suit is dark. His hands are folded in front of him. He looks like a man who has never once been told no.

Kir stands to his right. He’s younger, leaner, dark-haired. Handsome in a way that even a shitty corporate portrait can’t hide.

Father and son. Chairman and CEO. And, if I’m right about any of this, something much worse.

That’s why I’m here.

More specifically, I’m here for three reasons.

The first one is simple: It’s my job. Doug gave me a firm end-of-the-year deadline and Bartlett is circling to pick up the scraps should I fail. If I don’t start making moves, I’m going to lose the biggest story of my career to a guy who once misspelled “indictment” in a headline. I worked too hard for this. For fuck’s sake, I paid my own way through journalism school and clawed my way into theTimesnewsroom through sheer talent and willpower. I’ve spent weeks buried in shell companies and corporate filings and dead-end phone calls, and I’m not about to hand all of that to Mason fucking Bleached Blonde Bartlett because I was too scared to ask tough questions to a scary corporate guy.

The second reason is bigger. Somewhere underneath all the marble and glass and brushed silver lettering, a woman is dead and nobody has answered for it. Elena Lazareva had a life. She had ason. She had whatever dreams and plans people have before someone takes all of that away. And if Giovanni Ochoa was right and those bones in Astoria are hers, then she’s been waiting eighteen years for someone to say her name out loud in a room full of people who’d much rather she stay buried. I can be that someone.

And then there’s the third reason, which is the one I don’t want to examine too closely but which is probably the most honest of the three:

I need to work. I have to bedoingsomething, because the rest of my life right now does not make any fucking sense at all. The rest of my life involves a masked man climbing through my window and putting me on my kitchen floor, and then my hallway wall, and then my bed, and melettinghim, and mewantinghim to, and me lying awake afterward wondering what’s wrong with me that I can’t stop.

Work is the antidote to that. It’s the last thing left I’m still in control of.

So I sit in this terrible chair in the lobby of Lazarev Global with my notebook open and my pen ready, and I wait for someone to come downstairs and talk to me.

I don’t have to wait too long before a woman in a gray pantsuit appears from behind the turnstiles. She has a fashionably sharp bob and no jewelry except for a thin gold watch around her dainty wrist. She walks toward me with a practiced smile that says,I deal with people like you for a living and I’m very good at making them go away.

“Ms. Pierce? I’m Vera Sorokina, communications director for Lazarev Global.”