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“Get what?”
“He’s going to ruin you, Rae.” His eyes cast out over the gray, snow-clad cityscape before us. “Whether he means to or not, he will. That’s just what happens to people he puts his hands on.”
The wind picks up. I shiver.
“You’re drunk,” I say.
“Not nearly drunk enough for what’s coming.”
We sit in silence for a minute. Manhattan chugs along below us.
“This has happened before?” I ask with caution.
Kir goes very still. Then, almost reluctantly, almost imperceptibly, he nods. “My mother,” he croaks.
I shouldn’t have asked. But it’s too late to turn back now.
“What… what happened to her?”
He laughs again. That same hollow, rasping, irretrievably shattered sound.
“She wanted to leave him.” He turns his bleary gaze on me. “Look where it got her.”
My stomach flips. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s dead, Rae.” He turns to look at me. His gray eyes are so much like his father’s. But where Lukas’s are cold, Kir’s are justempty. “Eighteen years in the ground. And my father’s the one who put her there.”
I shrink away from him. The deadness in his face makes me feel colder than the air ever could. It’s an all-consuming gray haze, reaching out with frigid fingers to drag me down into it.
Every rational cell in my body is screaming at me to get up, get out, get as far away from the Lazarev family as humanly possible. Buy a bus ticket to somewhere warm. Change my name. Cut my hair. Start over.
“Kir…” I whisper. “Are you sure?”
He finishes the bottle, then throws it carelessly over his shoulder. It bursts into a million shards on the rooftop behind us. He doesn’t even bother to look at it.
Instead, he locks his eyes on me. I couldn’t look away even if I wanted to. All I see are the gray eyes of a Lazarev man, haunted by things I can hardly even begin to fathom.
He rises shakily, batting aside my offer to help. I stand with him, biting my lip and wondering what the hell is happening to this man.
“No one leaves my father, Rae,” he says. “Not my mother. Not you.” And as he totters drunkenly away from me, I hear him add under his breath, “Not even me.”
28
RAE
IT OVERRIDE REQUEST
Submitted by: L. Lazarev (ADMIN)
Target device: WKSTN-50F-EVERETT
Authorization: None required
> Lock all applications
> Disable input devices
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