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So I add, “Now.”
That unsticks them. Laptops slam shut and chairs scrape backward. The four suits scramble past me in a blur of terror. Not one of them is brave enough to meet my eyes.
The door snicks shut behind the last one.
Kir hasn’t moved from his seat behind his desk. He’s leaning back, arms crossed, face carefully neutral. But I know my son. I can read him like a fucking book.
“Father,” he says. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
I cross to his desk and hurl the newspaper down in front of him. Jabbing a finger at the byline that drew my eye, I growl, “I gave you one job. Onefuckingjob. Was that too much for you, son?”
Kir doesn’t bother looking at the newspaper. He meets my eye, calm and arrogant. “You mean the murder you delegated to me because you’re too busy fucking my assistant to do it yourself?”
The grind of my teeth resonates in my skull. My hands curl into fists at my sides, knuckles whitening, and I have to consciously force them open before I do something I’ll regret.
Kir notices my struggle. “Go ahead,” he goads. “Hit me again. That’s always been your solution to everything, hasn’t it? Can’t win with your words, so you win with your fists instead.”
“Shut your mouth, boy.”
A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Testy this morning, are we? I never thought I’d see the day. The legendary Lukas Lazarev, losing his composure. Over agirl.” He tilts his head and clucks his tongue. “You know, Father, all these years watching you operate, and I never once saw you rattled. You didn’t even look this upset when Mother died.”
As much as I despise it, he’s right.
Fuck me, he’sright.
For sixty years, my self-control has been the bedrock of everything I’ve built. Ice in my veins, steel in my spine. That’s who I am. That’s who I’vehadto be.
But ever since Rae Everett walked into my orbit, that ice has been cracking. Thawing. Turning into something dangerously close tofeeling.
I don’t like it.
I lower my hand and force myself to breathe. “Watch your mouth,” I repeat through gritted teeth.
“I’ll watch whatever I please.” Kir sneers. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? The trips, the doting? It’s pathetic.You’repathetic.”
“Careful.”
“Or what?” He rises from his chair, matching my height even if he’ll never match my breadth. “You’ll do to me what you did to Mother?”
I’d tell him one more time to shut the fuck up, but I’ve raised the kid all by myself since he was twelve years old: I know when that feverish gleam in his eye means he’s about to say something rash.
“You killed her,” he accuses. “Everyone knows it. The whole fucking city knows it.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about?”
He lunges around his desk to square up with me. “I was twelve years old, Father. Twelve! One day, my mother was there, and the next day, she was gone, and you never shed a single fucking tear. Never explained a goddamn thing. Just told me she was dead and that was that.”
My chest is a furnace and every word he speaks stokes the flames higher. Is this what it’s like to burn up with emotion? I want my ice back.
“Shelovedyou,” Kir continues, relentless. “She loved you more than anything in the world. And you?—”
“Enough.”
“—you buried her somewhere nobody would ever find her, and then you went right back to work like nothing happened. Did you ever even love her? Are you even capable of?—”
My hand shoots out before I can stop it. I grab my son by the throat and hurl him backward. His spine hits the window with enough force to make the glass shudder in its frame. The city sprawls forty floors below us, with only a thin pane separating my son from becoming a smear on the asphalt.
“I could kill you right now,” I warn him.
