Page 137 of Boardroom Mask

I keep my eyes on the freckle. “I assume they’ll be unhappy about it.”

“Kir.”

“What?”

“Look at me.”

I do. Her green eyes are focused and unblinking and she has that reporter face on, the one that means she’s not going to let me slide past the hard part with charm or deflection or sex.

“You’ve made it very clear what kind of people they are,” she says sternly. “I don’t think they’re just going to shrug and update their LinkedIn to ‘looking for new work,’ you know?”

She’s not wrong. Afon has been my father’s right hand for longer than I’ve been alive. The man has spent a lifetime building a set of skills that are useful to exactly one type of organization, and I’m about to dismantle that organization from the inside. He will be less than pleased. And there are dozens of others just like him.

“With Lukas neutralized, the structure collapses,” I tell her. “The Bratva is a top-down hierarchy, and the top just got lopped off. If there’s nopakhanissuing orders and no corporate apparatus moving money, the lieutenants have nothing to organize around. They’ll scatter.”

“You sound very confident about that.”

“I grew up in this world and I know how it works. These guys are cold-blooded mercenaries, Jillian. They follow power and money. When both dry up, they find a new source or they disappear. That’s how it’s always been.”

She chews on her bottom lip, then her nails, then her lip again. The gears grinding in her head are almost audible.

“Hey.” I reach over and tuck a strand of red hair behind her ear. “I’ve spent my entire life preparing for this. I know where every dollar goes, I know where every body is buried—some of them literally—and I know who’s loyal and who’s just been too scared of Lukas to step out of line. The scared ones will come around. The loyal ones will leave. And the ones who want to fight about it will find out very quickly that I’m not the soft target they think I am.”

She looks at me. Her eyes are still worried, but there’s trust there, too. Not blind trust; Jillian doesn’t do blind anything. This trust isearned.

“I love you,” I tell her. “And I will keep you safe.”

She holds my gaze for a long beat. Then: “You love me?”

“Yeah,” I say calmly. “I fucking love you.”

She nods. Then she scoots forward, tucks herself against my chest, and presses her somehow-still-cold nose into the hollow of my throat. “I love you, too,” she mumbles against the skin there. “Glad we got that settled.”

We lie there for a while, her frozen toes slowly thawing against my calves, and I realize I have no idea what comes next. Not in the big, existential sense, but in a very literal one. I’ve never had a day with nothing hanging over it.

“What do you want to do today?” I ask.

She thinks about it for maybe two seconds. Then she smiles. “I want to go outside,” she declares. “Together. Just us. Can we do that?”

I look down at her and grin. “I’d love nothing more.”

55

JILLIAN

“This could be the end of everything / So why don’t we go somewhere only we know?”

— “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane

We end up at a tiny Italian place on Bleecker Street with a half-dozen bistro tables crammed onto the sidewalk. It’s too cold for outdoor seating by any reasonable standard, but the sun is out and there are heat lamps and I am with a walking, talking furnace who seems intent on keeping his arm looped around my shoulders, so I don’t mind the chill in the air so much. The hostess gives us a wobbly two-top wedged between a potted boxwood and the building’s brick facade. Kir holds my chair out and kisses me on the top of the head once I’m seated.

We order cappuccinos and pastries, then sit and talk for a while with the sun on our faces. “You have foam on your chin,” I tell him. “No, your other chin. No, yourotherother— Look, just…” I lick my thumb, lean forward, and wipe it off for him.

“I feel like a puppy being tongue-bathed,” he complains.

“Don’t act like you don’t like it.”

He catches my wrist before I can pull it back and sinks his teeth gently into the meat of my palm. When I yelp in surprise, he grins and kisses the spot he just bit. His eyes stay fixed on mine the entire time.