LAZAREV GLOBAL INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

TO: All Executive Staff

FROM: Office of the Chairman

RE: Immediate Personnel Transfer

Effective immediately, Ms. Rae Everett will report directly to the Office of the Chairman.

Kir’s hand yanks away from me.

He steps back so fast he nearly trips over my chair. His face has gone white, like someone just drained all the blood out of him with a straw.

I’ve worked for Kir Lazarev for eighteen months. In that time, I’ve seen him eviscerate board members and watched him reduce a senior VP to tears over a typo. I’ve witnessed him hang up on a Fortune 500 CEO mid-sentence because “I don’t have time for this level of stupidity.”

I’ve never seen him scared.

Until now.

“Father.” That’s something else I’ve never heard before: Kir’s voice cracking. “I didn’t know you were in New York.”

Lukas Lazarev doesn’t respond. He just stands there. Filling the hallway. Filling the whole damn floor, it feels like.

He’s bigger than I imagined. The photos don’t do him justice. In pictures, he looks intimidating. In person, he looks like a giant that could crush you without noticing.

He reaches into his jacket pocket and withdraws something. I can’t make out what it is until he sticks one in his mouth, cups his hands over it, and strikes a lighter. A cigarette, I see. The flames dance over the rough planes of his cheeks.

While his hands work, his eyes sweep across the scene. I can only imagine how it looks from his perspective. Me, the lowly assistant, pressed against the window with my blouse untucked and my lipstick smeared halfway up my cheek. Kir, three feet away by now and retreating further, hands shoved in his pockets like he doesn’t know what else to do with them.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what was happening.

“I flew in this evening,” Lukas says. He speaks in a baritone that vibrates me from head to toe. “I thought I’d stop by. See how things were running.”

“Everything’s fine.” Kir sounds like he’s choking. “We were just⁠—”

“I can see what you were just.”

What’s the right play for me here? Move, probably. I should fix my clothes, grab my bag, make some excuse, and book it for the exit. Come to think of it, that sounds pretty nice. But my legs won’t cooperate. I’m stuck against the glass like a bug pinned to a board.

Lukas’s gaze lands on me and skewers me in place. Any thought I might’ve had of moving vanishes in a puff of the smoke from his cigarette.

“And you are?” He takes another drag. The light dances over his hand. His thick fingers are mottled with scars and adorned with silver rings.

“Rae Everett.” It comes out as the meekest whisper anyone’s ever emitted. I clear my throat and try to sound less like a frightened mouse. “I’m, um… I work here. As a, uh, assistant. Executive assistant.”

“To my son.”

“Yes.”

He looks at Kir, then back at me. Something moves behind his eyes. Whatever it is, it frightens me. It’s like seeing the shadow of a shark swim below the surface of water you’re really, really not supposed to be swimming in.

Lazarev Global has been around for forty years. According to company legend, Lukas built it from nothing. He started in shipping, expanded into real estate, then tech, then about a dozen other industries I still don’t really understand. Whatever he does, he’s apparently very good at it, because the whole shebang is worth billions now. Maybe tens of billions, I don’t actually know. The numbers get awfully fuzzy at that level.

I got hired five years ago. It was an entry-level position, nothing special. I answered phones and fetched coffee and tried not to screw up. Then Kir took over as CEO eighteen months back. He plucked me from the assistant pool for reasons I never understood.

Until now, I guess.

When Kir took the reins, Lukas stepped back to chairman of the board. Technically speaking, he’s no longer involved in the day-to-day operations. But his name still echoes through the halls, always with a whisper of ten parts fear and one part awe.

People talk about him like he’s a ghost.

Or a god.

Or something worse than both.

I’ve never met him before tonight. I’ve never even laid eyes on him in person. Now, he’s ten feet away, smoking a cigarette in a building where smoking hasn’t been allowed for decades.

And he’s looking at me like he’s deciding if he should pick up where Kir left off.

Kir clears his throat. “Father, I⁠—”

“Leave.”

One word. That’s all it takes. Kir doesn’t even attempt to argue. Nor does he look at me. He simply hurries away, shoulders hunched, footsteps quick and quiet, like a dog that’s been kicked too many times.

The elevator dings. The doors close.

And then it’s just me and Lukas Lazarev.

He takes another drag of his cigarette. The smoke curls up toward the ceiling. I watch it drift, because I can’t look at him. I’m starting to fear that if I meet those eyes again, I’ll be sucked into them and I’ll never, ever get out.

“Ms. Everett.”

I flinch. “Yes?”

“You can relax. I’m not going to bite.”

I let out a shaky breath, but the rest of me continues to tremble, my hands most of all. I tuck them behind my back so he won’t see.

“I apologize,” he says, “for my son’s behavior.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to⁠—”

“I do. I did. I am.” He finally detaches from the darkness and stalks closer. I could swear he doubles in size with every step, until his gray hair is practically grazing the ceiling tiles. He moves slowly, glacially, a man with infinite patience. “What he did was inappropriate. You’re his employee. He had no right.”

“I know.” I’m still pressed against the window. The glass is cold on my back, like I don’t have enough life in me to warm it up. “I mean, I was going to— Er, I tried to stop it, but⁠—”

“But he didn’t listen.”

I shake my head shyly. “No.”

He nods. Takes another drag. Blows the smoke sideways, away from my face. It’s almost considerate, in a strange sort of way.

“Kir has always had trouble with boundaries,” he says. “It’s a failing of mine. I didn’t teach him properly.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.

Lukas is close enough now that I can see the fine-grained details of him that were lost in the shadows a minute ago. The texture of his beard, like silver silk. The lines of age stamped around his eyes. His shirt is an ocean of crisp, ludicrously expensive pima cotton, but it’s still straining to reach all the way across his broad chest.

He’s not traditionally handsome the way Kir is. Not nearly as pretty or polished. Whereas every line in Kir is lean, lithe, smooth, beautiful, the elder Lazarev looks like he was chiseled out of an iceberg with a chainsaw. He’s blunt and jagged.

He’s something else entirely.

His eyes move slowly over my face, as unhurried as his steps were. For as cold as his aura is, everywhere he looks burns like hellfire.

I tug my blouse down and try to smooth my hair. Nothing helps.

“How long have you worked here?” he asks. That voice again… When he’s this close, I feel it more than I hear it. A wave of icy air passing over me and leaving goosebumps in its wake.

“Five years altogether, sir. Eighteen months for Kir.”

“Has he done this before?”

“No.” That’s the truth. “Tonight was the first time anything like this happened. I swear.”

He studies me. I can’t tell if he believes me or not.

“You’re very young,” he says finally.

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five. Yes.” His mouth twitches, but if that’s his version of a smile, it’s not like any smile I’ve ever seen before. “Very, very young.”

Twenty-five. It does sound young when he says it. And maybe it is, in some ways. I’ve never been touched like Kir just touched me. I’ve never had a boyfriend that lasted more than three dates. I’ve never done half the things girls my age are supposed to have done by now.

But in other ways, I feel ancient.

My parents died when I was nineteen. Car accident. One phone call and suddenly, I was the lone adult in the family. Gideon was fifteen and already starting to spiral, and losing Mom and Dad didn’t do him any favors in that regard, so I stepped up. I dropped out of college after one semester because someone had to work, to pay the bills. Someone had to drag my little brother out of whatever dank, poorly-lit basement he’d crawled into that week, and without Mom and Dad around, it fell to me to do it.

I’ve held him while he twitched and shivered and sweated through detox after detox. I’ve lied to countless landlords about rent checks being “in the mail.” I’ve eaten ramen for a month straight so I could afford his first round of rehab.

So, yeah. Twenty-five.

Young enough to be a virgin.

Old enough to feel like I’ve already lived a dozen lives.

I don’t say any of this to Mr. Lazarev. I just stand there and gulp.

“I have a proposition for you,” he says abruptly.

I blink. Add that to the list of words I don’t have the capacity to process right now, like “Stop,” “No,” and “Please don’t.” Proposition. What’s that?

I decide to ask that exact question. “A proposition?”

“A special project.” He taps ash from his cigarette onto the floor. No one’s going to tell him he can’t. I sure as hell am not. “You would report directly to me.”

My brain continues to stutter. “To you? But I work for⁠—”

“Kir.” He says his son’s name like it tastes sour. “Yes. I’m aware. This would be different.”

“Different how?”

“You’d be transferred to my office. Better title, better compensation.” He pauses, looks around, and adds, “Better hours, presumably.”

I almost laugh. Then I almost cry. Fortunately, I don’t do either one. I get the feeling Mr. Lazarev wouldn’t appreciate something as mushy as female feelings. “And what would I be doing, exactly?”

His eyes don’t leave mine. “Nothing you can’t handle.”

It sounds like a promotion.

It also sounds like something I should probably run very far away from.

“Can I think about it?” I ask.

“No.”

“That’s not really⁠—”

“Fair?” There’s that twitch again. It’s no closer to a smile than it was the first time around. “No. You’re right. It isn’t.”

He waits. The cigarette burns down between his fingers.

I realize, with a sinking feeling, that this isn’t actually a question at all.

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“Everyone has choices, Ms. Everett.” He drops the cigarette on the floor and grinds it out with the toe of his shoe. “Some are just less pleasant than others.”

He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a card. It’s plain white, heavy stock, with nothing on it but a phone number in raised black ink.

“Monday morning,” he says. “Eight o’clock. Fiftieth floor.”

I take the card. My fingers brush his. His skin is warm. Warmer than I expected. Almost scalding, actually. That’s surprising: I would’ve expected the man who looked like winter incarnate to be as cold as winter, too.

“And if I don’t show up?” I ask, shocked even as the words leave my lips.

I wish I could take them back. Am I insane? Why am I rebelling against a man who (a) just saved my life and (b) could crush my skull between his fingers like a grape?”

Lukas is already turning away and walking toward the elevator. But when he hears me speak, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder. And for the first time, his lips curve into something that’s tantalizingly close to a smirk.

“I think you know better than that.”

The elevator doors open. He steps inside. Turns to face me.

“Oh, and Ms. Everett?”

I can’t move. “Yes?”

“Happy birthday.”

Then the doors close.

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