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“I apologize,” he says, “for my son’s behavior.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to?—”

“I do. I did. I am.” He finally detaches from the darkness and stalks closer. I could swear he doubles in size with every step, until his gray hair is practically grazing the ceiling tiles. He moves slowly, glacially, a man with infinite patience. “What he did was inappropriate. You’re his employee. He had no right.”

“I know.” I’m still pressed against the window. The glass is cold on my back, like I don’t have enough life in me to warm it up. “I mean, I was going to— Er, I tried to stop it, but?—”

“But he didn’t listen.”

I shake my head shyly. “No.”

He nods. Takes another drag. Blows the smoke sideways, away from my face. It’s almost considerate, in a strange sort of way.

“Kir has always had trouble with boundaries,” he says. “It’s a failing of mine. I didn’t teach him properly.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.

Lukas is close enough now that I can see the fine-grained details of him that were lost in the shadows a minute ago. The texture of his beard, like silver silk. The lines of age stamped around his eyes. His shirt is an ocean of crisp, ludicrously expensive pima cotton, but it’s still straining to reach all the way across his broad chest.

He’s not traditionally handsome the way Kir is. Not nearly as pretty or polished. Whereas every line in Kir is lean, lithe, smooth, beautiful, the elder Lazarev looks like he was chiseled out of an iceberg with a chainsaw. He’s blunt and jagged.

He’s something else entirely.

His eyes move slowly over my face, as unhurried as his steps were. For as cold as his aura is, everywhere he looks burns like hellfire.

I tug my blouse down and try to smooth my hair. Nothing helps.

“How long have you worked here?” he asks. That voice again… When he’s this close, I feel it more than I hear it. A wave of icy air passing over me and leaving goosebumps in its wake.

“Five years altogether, sir. Eighteen months for Kir.”

“Has he done this before?”

“No.” That’s the truth. “Tonight was the first time anything like this happened. I swear.”

He studies me. I can’t tell if he believes me or not.

“You’re very young,” he says finally.

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five. Yes.” His mouth twitches, but if that’s his version of a smile, it’s not like any smile I’ve ever seen before. “Very, very young.”

Twenty-five.It does sound young when he says it. And maybe it is, in some ways. I’ve never been touched like Kir just touched me. I’ve never had a boyfriend that lasted more than three dates. I’ve never done half the things girls my age are supposed to have done by now.

But in other ways, I feelancient.

My parents died when I was nineteen. Car accident. One phone call and suddenly, I was the lone adult in the family. Gideon was fifteen and already starting to spiral, and losing Mom and Dad didn’t do him any favors in that regard, so I stepped up. I dropped out of college after one semester becausesomeonehad to work, to pay the bills.Someonehad to drag my little brother out of whatever dank, poorly-lit basement he’d crawled into that week, and without Mom and Dad around, it fell to me to do it.

I’ve held him while he twitched and shivered and sweated through detox after detox. I’ve lied to countless landlords about rent checks being “in the mail.” I’ve eaten ramen for a month straight so I could afford his first round of rehab.

So, yeah. Twenty-five.

Young enough to be a virgin.

Old enough to feel like I’ve already lived a dozen lives.

I don’t say any of this to Mr. Lazarev. I just stand there and gulp.