Page 227
That’ll work.
The brownstone feels different when we step inside.
The air is still stale and the furniture still wears its white sheets. But something else feels more open. Maybe it’s the ghosts making way.
Lukas moves through the front hall. He shrugs out of his suit jacket and tosses it over the back of a covered chair. I follow him into the kitchen, drag out a stool, and sit, as he reaches for the whiskey bottle on the shelf above the sink.
“What happens next?” I ask. “With the charges, and Kir, and—well, with everything, I guess?”
Lukas’s broad shoulders tense. He braces both hands against the counter, his silver head bowed. The quiet goes on long enough that I start to wonder if he heard me. Or if maybe he’s already regretting what he said at that podium.
Then he speaks.
“Assisted suicide is still illegal in New York,” he explains without looking up. “My lawyers think they can argue compassionate circumstances, that Elena was terminal and suffering, I was acting out of love rather than malice, all of that.”
He turns to face me. The shadows under his eyes look even darker in the brownstone’s dim kitchen light than they did at the precinct.
“But there will be a trial. It will be public.” He pours two fingers of whiskey, but doesn’t drink it yet. “Every detail of our lives will be picked apart and displayed for the world to judge.”
“Ourlives,” I repeat. “Meaning yours and Elena’s.”
“Meaning yours and mine, too.” He meets my gaze. “You know that, right? You and I, what we are to each other—it’s already out there. The auction. The gala. The kiss. None of that goes away.”
I knew that. But hearing him say it makes it real in a way that my own anxious spiraling hasn’t yet managed to do.
“They’ll come after you,” he continues. “They’ll want to know everything. How we met, when it started, whether I—” He stops and swallows. “Whether I coerced you.”
“You didn’t,” I protest immediately.
“The truth won’t matter to them.” He sets the glass down on the counter without taking a sip. “What matters is the story they can sell. ‘Billionaire twice her age. Boss seduces his employee. Hisvirginemployee.’” The last bit lands between us with a cringey thud. “The optics are not in our favor.”
“Since when do you care about optics?”
“Since they could be used to hurt you, Rae.”
I swallow and pull my feet up onto the stool’s bottom rung. The floor is freezing against my bare soles.
“What about Kir?” I ask.
Lukas’s jaw works. He picks up the whiskey and, this time, takes a long pull.
“Kirill just learned that the thing he’s hated me for his entire adult life was a lie. Or not a lie, exactly. A… misunderstanding. One that I could have corrected at any time but chose not to.”
“Because Elena asked you not to.”
“Yes, but I agreed. I did what I thought I had to.” He puts the glass down hard. “But, fuck, maybe I went too far. It just… It seemed like that rage immediately became so load-bearing for him. He was a sensitive boy up until then—that’s why Elena made me promise what she did. She thought the grief of abandonment would crush him in a way that was unfixable. I agreed, or else I wouldn’t have done it. Hating me was easier than losing her.”
“So you honored your dying wife’s wishes and did what you thought was best for your son,” I summarize. “He’ll understand that, won’t he?”
But Lukas shakes his head. “Elena asked me to protect him. She didn’t ask me to destroy him.”
He crosses the kitchen and cups my face with both hands.
“You can still walk away, Rae. No one would blame you. Hell, most people would applaud you for having the good sense to run from a man like me.”
He thinks he’s being self-sacrificing again. But I can see the real engine behind his words. It’s the fear that I’ll finally see what he’s convinced himself he is—a monster—and leave him standing alone in this empty kitchen, in this house full of ghosts,with nothing but a half-empty whiskey glass and eighteen years of grief for company.
I think about how easy it would be. Slip out the front door, hail a cab, go home to my cramped apartment with its peeling linoleum and drafty windows. Put on sweatpants, eat ramen over the sink, rebuild the quiet life I had before any of this happened.
