Page 126 of Boardroom Mask

The knob on the bathroom door turns. I rise from where I’ve been sitting on the lip of the tub, one hand planted on the wall for support, the other raised to my mouth so I can nervously chew on my fingernails.

It swings out. I stop breathing.

Kir is standing in the frame. Blood is splashed across the front of his shirt and both hands red to the wrist. His face, though, is completely blank.

“Jillian,” he croaks.

I drop my hands from my mouth. My fingers are numb and the nails are chomped down to the quick.

Before I do anything, I take stock of him. His mouth is swelling slightly, and the redness on the side of his cheek matches theshape of a fist. A smear of plaster dust speckles his hair like salt-and-pepper grays, giving me a sudden and unexpected glimpse of what he’ll look like thirty years from now. Unsurprisingly, he makes it look good.

Then I look past him, down the hallway.

There’s a dead man on my floor.

He’s facedown. One arm is bent at an angle that arms don’t bend at. A balaclava lies crumpled at his side. The blood underneath him is dark and spreading in a slow, uneven pool that’s already reached the baseboard.

He’s not moving. He’s not going to move ever again.

I haven’t seen a dead body since Rae’s parents’ funerals, and even then, that was a brief glimpse at the casket before I looked away, unable to bear it. Even though the mortician did a good job restoring their good looks, there was no denying the deadness of them. Since then, the closest I’ve come is crime scene photos for work, and it’s easy to convince yourself that those aren’t real.

This? This is not that. This isveryfucking real. This is three-dimensional and warm and close enough to smell, and it’s on the floor of my apartment, surrounded on all sides by merrily flickering candles.

I wait for the scream to tear out of me, but it doesn’t come. My legs stay strong, the floor doesn’t rush up to meet me, and in no way does my body shut down or fail. Nothing happens at all, actually.

Then I look at Kir.

“Was he here for me?” I ask.

Kir nods once.

“Is that why you made dinner?”

Kir sighs. He looks down at his bloody hands, then back at me. “I knew he was coming,” he explains. “I didn’t know exactly when, though. So I needed you here, in a controlled environment, where I could stash you somewhere safe the second it started.”

Just like that, the whole evening reshuffles in my head.Hedid this. Cut the lights, lit the candles, hid the gun, cooked the meal. It’s good-bad-good-bad, so whiplashy that I feel sick just thinking about it. I know people contain multitudes and all that, but how can one man contain somany?

He’s a white knight and a cold-blooded killer. He’s a hero and a horror show. He’s a stalker and a savior, a lover and a lunatic, and the thought of those bloody hands touching me makes me want to squirm and squeal and implode in ways that I’ve never wanted to do before. He’s changing me, little by little.

And I’mlettinghim.

I’m loving the process of letting him.

What’s most baffling of all is the lack of action in the mental space where the horror should be. I keep waiting for it to show up and slug me in the gut. Any second now, surely. Just a few more ticks of the clock and I’ll look at the body on my floor and feel the appropriate amount of revulsion. I mean, Kir staged a date around a murder, and then gave this intruder not an ounce of mercy.

I would have killed him,he said about my rapist. What is this but proof of just how much he meant that?

“You can’t stay here tonight,” Kir declares.

I look at the hallway behind him. The body. The blood. The candles still going, all five hundred of them, cheerful, warm, and completely incongruous next to the dead man on the floor.

“No,” I agree. “I guess not.”

He holds out his hand.

There’s blood on it. Dried into the creases of his knuckles, caked under his fingernails, smeared across his palm. Another man’s blood. A man who came here to kill me and instead got killed himself.

I take it.