Page 11 of Boardroom Mask

Every hair on my body stands up. “How sure are you that I didn’t?”

“Very, very sure.”

Something in his confidence makes me believe him. “You were watching me? All day?”

He brushes my cheek with a single knuckle. “All day,” he confirms.

I grit my teeth so hard I’m surprised they don’t crack. “Is this about the Lazarev story?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because you broke into my apartment the same week that my source on a story about a very dangerous family went missing, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“You’re a clever thing, little fox.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It wasn’t meant to be one.”

“Okay.” My fingers are still laced behind my head, but they’re starting to droop as my arms get tired. “Is Giovanni Ochoa alive?”

Quiet.

“Did you do something to him?”

More quiet.

“If you hurt him?—”

“Tell me something,” he interrupts. “Do you sleep with the lights on?”

I freeze. “What?”

“At night, when you’re alone, with nothing between the cool sheets and your bare skin to keep you safe… when you’re naked in your bed and there is no one in the world to protect you from the monsters in the shadows… Do you leave the lights on?”

My whole body goes cold, then hot, then cold again, all in rapid succession, like someone is flipping a switch inside me.

My stomach churns and my throat constricts. I can feel my pulse in my temples and my wrists, in the soft hollow at the base of my throat where his sweet, cinnamon-scented breath keeps pluming. Every nerve ending I have is firing at once, sending contradictory signals—run, stay, scream, be silent, claw his face off, submit—until I’m paralyzed by the sheer, overwhelming volume of it all.

I feel like that girl in the comment section from this morning.i think my fight or flight is malfunctioning.That’s me in a nutshell right now.

Still, I try to fight for some kind of control. “How is that relevant to?—”

He cuts in, “Answer me.”

“No,” I spit, “I don’t sleep with the fucking lights on. I’m a grown woman.”

That provokes another lash of his anger, hot and ready. “Donotlie to me, little fox,” he snarls as he rears back to tower above me.

I turn around and look up before I realize he explicitly told me not to do that.

The apartment is almost completely dark, but notcompletelycompletely dark. A thin seam of streetlight leaks through the gap between my curtains, just enough to carve out vague, ominous shapes from the blackness.

He’s tall as he looms over me, tall enough that I have to crane my neck back to find where his face should be.

But when my eyes reach that height, I see only a mask. It’s black and covers everything from the bridge of his nose down to his jaw. Not a surgical mask, not an N95 like this morning. This one is fitted, tight against his skin, molded to the contours of his face. Above it, his eyes catch the faint streetlight. They’re pale, but I can’t tell what color.

“Fine,” I whisper as I let my eyes fall to the ground, where I see the faint suggestion of rugged black boots standing on my floor. “Yes. I sleep with the lights on. Are you happy?”