Page 76 of Boardroom Mask

I pull an envelope from my bag containing five grand in twenties and hold it out. “For your trouble.”

He takes the envelope, thumbs through it, and nods grimly. Then he hands me the folder.

Inside is a single-page lab summary. I skim through and my eyeballs almost fall out of my head. The remains recovered from the Astoria dig site have been positively identified through dental records as Elena Sergeeva Lazareva—Lukas Lazarev’s deceased wife. And there, halfway down the page, is a line that makes my pulse kick into a gallop:

Toxicology analysis of preserved bone marrow indicates the presence of barbiturate compounds consistent with phenobarbital.

In plain English, that means they found lethal levels of sleeping pills in the bones of a woman whose family claimed she died of an illness.

It doesn’t sayMURDERquite that explicitly, but it might as well.

Holy.

Fucking.

Shit.

“Jesus,” I breathe.

“Yeah,” F.T. says. “That’s about what I said, too.” He drains his coffee, crushes the cup, and tosses it into the dumpster behind him. “That’s all I got. I see anything else, I’ll let you know. Don’t text me.”

“Wait—can I ask you about?—”

“No.” He rounds the corner and disappears.

I stand in the alley holding the manila folder against my chest, breathing hard, brain firing on every cylinder it’s got. I lean against the brick wall and let myself take stock of where things stand.

Giovanni Ochoa, my original source, is still missing. That’s bad. But what I’m holding in my hands right now is better than anything Ochoa could have given me. I’ve got a positive ID on the Astoria remains. I’ve got a toxicology report showing barbiturates in her bone marrow. That all adds up to the rough outline of a very clear and highly damning story: One of New York’s most infamous and powerful billionaires possibly, maybe, but definitelyplausiblymurdered his wife and dumped her body in an unmarked grave.

What I don’t have yet is someone willing to say any of this on the record.

Or wait a second…

Do I?!

After all, Kir offered me a deal, didn’t he? He’s going to participate. He wants Lukas gone, said so himself, and there was nothing in his face or his words that said he was lying.

If Kir would confirm even half of what’s in this folder, I’d have the whole thing.

But asking Kir means seeing Kir. And seeing Kir means confronting the mask and the window and his hands and his mouth and the way my brain turns to white noise the second he touches me.

I press the folder tighter against my chest. This is the problem. Everything is knotted together now. The story, the sex, the danger, the need. I can’t pull on one thread without dragging the rest with it. Kir is my sourceandmy subjectandtoo many other things to name.

Whatever he is or isn’t, I can’t think about him without my professional judgment getting clouded the second he lays a finger on me.

That complicates things.

I take the train back to my apartment as thoughts buzz around in my head. I hit the elevator button in my lobby and ride up, thinking of how and when to report this to Doug. Should I solidify everything first, or let him know I’ve got a huge breakthrough in my hands? At what point do I tell him about Kir? Not by name, of course, but just “a key internal source close to the family” that will confirm lots of this stuff.

It takes me a second to realize that the sound I hear when the doors slide open to let me out on my floor is a muffled male scream?—

—and it’s directed atme.

Elliot is in the hallway, waiting to ride down. As soon as our eyes lock, every drop of color drains from his face. The stitches above his left eye are still fresh, the bruising around his orbital bone faded to a sickly green-yellow. His good eye goes wide and his mouth flops open and shut like a goldfish.

“I’ll—I’ll take the next one,” he stammers. He turns and flees down the stairs before I can even muster up a response.

It takes me another second to gather my thoughts on that one. I still feel awful about what happened to Elliot. He didn’t deserve that, and Kir is positively psychotic for staking his claim so violently.