Page 73 of Boardroom Mask

That settles that. We talk for a little while longer, but when we both yawn, I forcibly drag her to bed. She convinces me to stay the night, so I borrow a toothbrush and some pajamas and snuggle in next to her.

“Hey, Rae?” I whisper into the dark.

“Yeah?”

“Just be careful, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”

“I’ll be careful,” she promises.

She won’t. I know she won’t. And I know I won’t, either—because the thing I’m chasing is getting bigger and darker the closer I get.

And I can feel it starting to chase me back.

Rae passes out quickly, but now that I don’t have her to fuss over, my own problems are hissing in my ear and keeping me wide awake. The hypocrisy of what I’m doing isn’t lost on me. I’m on my high horse, telling Rae to be careful around a Lazarev, while I’m literallysleepingwith one. It’s the same blood on veryclosely related hands. If Rae knew the full extent of what I’d done or let him do to me, she’d kill me. She’d be right to.

I glance over at her. She’s out cold, mouth open, one arm flung across the pillow above her head. She always falls asleep fast. I’ve never understood how she does that—just decides to stop being conscious and thenboom, does it, like flipping a light switch.

I’m not so lucky. I lie on my back and look at the ceiling and think about the fact that it’s almost midnight. Kir is probably sitting at my kitchen table right now, Mask on, legs crossed, frowning while he waits for me.

He’s going to find an empty room tonight.

Good. Let him wait.

28

KIR

“Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire”

— “Fuel” by Metallica

The ribbon-cutting was six hours ago and I can still hear her voice.

Are you trying to distract the public from some less-than-savory elements of your family business?

In the moment, I wanted to laugh. Right there at the podium, in front of the cameras and the sick kids and the hospital administrators who think my family’s money doesn’t have blood crusted under its fingernails. Not just laugh—I’d wanted to throw my head back and howl, because the woman I’ve been burying myself inside every night just stood up in a room full of journalists and went for my fucking throat.

She’s insane.

She’s magnificent.

She’s going to get us both killed.

I’m sitting in my office with the lights off and the door locked, chair swiveled toward the windows. The city below is doing what it always does—moving, grinding, eating itself alive—and I’m not seeing any of it. I’m seeing Jillian in that atrium. Navy blazer, shocking red hair, chin high, chest proud.

My obsession hasn’t eased a bit. I thought it might. Hell, Iprayedit might, because this kind of sickness will doom us both.

But it hasn’t.

It’s only gotten worse.

Every hour I’m not with her is an hour I spend thinking about the next time I will be. It’s pathological. When I close my eyes, there she is. Her moans, her breaths, her curses, her demands… all of it sets me on fire. That tiny squeak she makes when I slide into her, this broken, surprised little exhale, like she forgot her body could do that. As if someone stole it from her a long time ago and she’s still getting used to having it back.

I crave her at all times. My dick stays at half-mast perpetually. Things are crumbling all around me, but this burn for her isn’t going anywhere.

So I do the only thing I can do: I bury myself in work. Work is the one arena where my brain still functions in straight lines.

It helps. Not a lot, but enough. By six o’clock, I’ve clawed back some semblance of focus. I’m holding a small powwow in my office with four of my division heads—Johnston from real estate, Magana from legal, Collier from finance, and O’Neal from operations—walking through a site acquisition in Newark that’s been a headache for months. Magana is mid-sentence about zoning variances when the conference room door swings open without a knock.