Page 95 of Boardroom Mask

37

JILLIAN

“I can feel the soil falling over my head”

— “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths

I take out my voice recorder from my purse, turn it on, and set it next to Kir’s whiskey glass. Kir looks at it, then looks at me, then reaches over and clicks it off.

“No,” he says simply.

“Kir—”

“Everything I say tonight is on background. No names and no faces, remember? Those are my terms.”

I wrap both hands around my glass. “Background is better than nothing, but only barely. I can’t build a solid story on?—”

He cuts me off. “You can use what I tell you to know where to look and what to look for, and then you find your own proof through channels that don’t trace back to me.” He nudges therecorder toward my side of the table. “That’s how this works, or it doesn’t work at all.”

Every instinct I have as a reporter is screaming at me to stand my ground here. If I can just get him to stand by what he tells me, this will blow the doors off readers across the country.

But I also know that if I press too hard, he’ll climb back out that window and vanish like the ghost he is, and I’ll be sitting here alone, drinking for two.

“Fine,” I concede at last. “Background. But it better bevery fucking good background.”

He nods once. Then he picks up his glass, takes a long drink, and sets it down. “When I was twelve,” he begins, “I saw my father kill my mother.”

My jaw drops.

Kir’s face remains steady. On the surface, at least. But there’s something underneath all that steadiness that I recognize, because I’ve spent five years building the exact same scaffolding around a very similar kind of wound. You hold yourself very still so nobody can see what’s moving inside you.

I slide my hand across the table and put it on top of his.

He looks down at my fingers covering his knuckles. He doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t squeeze back, either. He just lets it happen, and I get the feeling that nobody has done this for him in a very long time. Maybe ever.

“You don’t have to tell me all of this tonight,” I hurry to say. My old J-school professors are all kicking me mentally, aghast at my betrayal of our profession.How could you?!they’re bellowing.Demand he tells you every last detail!!

But I don’t.

Because I’m not sitting across from Kir Lazarev as a reporter right now.

I’m sitting across from him as someone whocares.

“Yes, actually, I do.” He turns his hand over under mine so our palms are pressed together. “Because if I don’t do it now, I’ll talk myself out of it by morning.”

I swallow and nod. “Okay. Then I’m listening.”

Kir takes another drink and starts talking. “Her name was Elena,” he continues. “Elena Sergeeva Lazareva. When I was eleven, she got sick. My parents didn’t tell me much; I guess they didn’t want me to worry. So even now, I don’t know how sick she actually was. But her and my father took a lot of trips, were gone a lot, that sort of thing. I figured it was all related.” He looks down into the depths of his drink. “A year or so after the diagnosis, I was supposed to be spending the night at a friend’s house, but it got canceled, so I came home early. I was going to surprise my mom. To prank her, or whatever. But when I snuck in, I saw my dad in the kitchen.”

Something about the way he says that makes me frown. “Doing what?”

“Crushing pills. He ground them up and stirred them into a cup of applesauce.” Kir pauses, then raises his eyes to me. “That was the only thing she could keep down by then.”

A slow, thudding dread starts to creep through me. “What did you do?”

“Nothing. I just knew it didn’t feel right. So I sat in the closet and watched through the crack in the doors. He carried theapplesauce down the hall to her room. Then I heard them talking, but I couldn’t make out the words. Then it got quiet.”

“For how long?”