Page 110 of Boardroom Mask

I’m seeing Jillian’s apartment. The breaker cut. The phone jammed. Her spine against the wall and my hand over her mouth and her body going somewhere I couldn’t follow.

Kill the reporter by the end of the month…

… Or I’ll send someone who will.

On the bed, the dead actor lies perfectly still. The killer’s hands hang at his sides. He turns in a slow circle, surveying the ring of masked faces as if searching for one that will absolve him.

His gaze passes over me. Hesitates. Shakes his head. Moves on.

Jillian must think I’m enthralled. She has no idea that the temperature of my blood just plummeted, because the scene on that stage is not a metaphor. It’s a fucking fortune telling session. It’s exactly what my father has been asking me to do for weeks, and the only difference between Macbeth and me is that Macbeth actually went through with it.

Well, that’s the only differencefor now.

Who knows what the future will hold?

Jillian turns to whisper something. But before she can even get the first syllable past her lips, she sees something in my eyes, and the sentence dies faster than Duncan did.

I don’t know exactly what she sees there. I only know what I feel, which is the cold, marrow-deep certainty that the universe just held up a mirror and I looked directly into it. What’s that thing Nietzsche says?Stare long enough into the abyss and the abyss will stare back at you?This is what that looks like. The abyss has seen me and it has deemed me unworthy.

As for how that looks on the architecture of my face, I don’t know. It’s bad enough that I can see what happens to hers. The light in her eyes is immediately snuffed out, cold, dead. Her lily-white grin collapses. Her lips quiver and her fingers tighten in concern around mine as she whispers, “Kir…? Are you?—”

I rip my hand away.

Her fingers grasp at empty air for a fraction of a second before dropping to her side, and I see the confusion register across the exposed lower half of her face. She rocks backwards on her heels, almost like I shoved her from me.

“Stay here,” I growl. “I need air.”

“Kir, what’s wr?—”

I don’t stay to hear the end of her question or answer it. Instead, I slip between two masked audience members and rush into the corridor beyond the ballroom. The dreary fog eddies and curls in my wake like it’s clinging to me.

The hallway is narrow, dimly lit, lined with peeling wallpaper and eerie portraits. A woman in a filthy wedding dress rounds the corner ahead of me and reaches out toward my throat with pale fingers. I shudder, then sidestep her without breaking stride and keep charging on.

I need air. Fuck, I need air. I can’t breathe in this goddamn place. This graveyard chill is seeping into my lungs and sealing them up like cement.

I find a stairwell and take it down, two steps at a time, past a landing decorated with taxidermied birds suspended from the ceiling on invisible wire. Their glass eyes track me as I pass. Like the actor who played the killer Macbeth, they see me for what I am and they do not approve.

At the bottom is a fire exit. I slam the push bar and stumble out into a service alley behind the building. It’s the city in December, which means it’s brutally cold. I’m thankful for that. Cold is the only thing that can clear this shit out of me. I rip the mask off and gulp oxygen until my lungs start reluctantly pumping again.

My back finds a brick wall. I slide down it until I’m sitting on dirty asphalt with my knees drawn up and the white mask dangling from one hand, staring up at the thin, measly strip of starless black sky visible between the buildings.

Above me somewhere, Jillian is standing alone, wondering what the fuck just happened.

I wish I knew how to tell her:

I’m falling in love with you, little fox.

I have to kill you before that happens.

44

JILLIAN

“How unfair, it’s just our love / Found something real that’s out of touch / But if you’d search the whole wide world / Would you dare to let it go?”

— “Not About Angels” by Birdy

There’s a Kir-shaped hole in the fog. He was there a second ago, and now, he’s gone, and there’s an empty outline in my heart to match the one he left behind.