Page 35 of Boardroom Mask

I look at the chair. I look at him.

Then, with a sigh, I sit.

13

JILLIAN

“Everybody’s looking for something / Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you”

— “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (Alt. Version)” by Marilyn Manson

Sometimes, in my job, I meet people who have very different ideas than me of what we’re meeting about. I’ve sat across from politicians who think they’re getting a puff piece when, in reality, I’m prepping a brutal takedown. Or sources—like Giovanni Ochoa, come to think of it—who believe they have the upper hand and can squeeze me for payout cash while lying blatantly to my face.

But this might be the most “not on the same page” meeting of my whole life.

For starters, we’re onmyhome turf—literally—but Kir couldn’t look more at ease. He’s comfortable in the chair, huge and lean, sprawled in every direction at once. I, on the other hand, feel like Pinocchio, chiseled from wood and puppeted by some stranger with a cold hand in my innards.

He waits patiently behind the mask. I focus on it so I can dissociate from the man who’s wearing it. It’s a black fabric ski mask, fitted tight from the bridge of his nose to his jaw. It hides everything that might make him a recognizable person. All I get are the eyes. Gray, pale, steady. Without a human face to go with them, they look ghostly and haunted.

I’ve thought a lot about masks over the past two days. Not just his, but the world’s. Everybody wears them. I wear one every day at the office: the brash, fearless reporter who sleeps around without attachment, laughs loudly and freely, and never, ever flinches. Rae has never seen what’s underneath it. Weston hasn’t. Doug hasn’t. Nobody has, because the thing underneath is a nineteen-year-old girl on a twin mattress watching a crack in the ceiling or a gray sock on the floor, and that girl doesn’t get to exist in public.

So I understand masks, and the reasons why people put them on and why they can’t take them off. I understand the gap between who you show the world and who you actually are when the lights go out and there’s no one left to perform for.

The difference between me and the man sitting across from me is that my mask is invisible.

His is very, very real.

“Are you going to talk or not?” I snap.

“I was giving you time to settle in,” he says reasonably. That faint, chuckling amusement is lurking on the edge of his voice. It makes my hackles rise up.

I roll my eyes. “If it weren’t for the stalking, the assault and battery, or the writing of messages in blood on my bathroomwall, I’d almost call you courteous,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can muster.

“You saw the bathroom, then?”

“It was kinda hard to miss.”

“And?”

“Andwhat? You want a review?” I gawk at him in disbelief. “Four stars. Very menacing, but your handwriting is shit.”

He exhales through the mask. It might be a laugh. “I’ll do better next time.”

“I’d really rather you didn’t. One REDRUM message is enough to sustain me the rest of my life.”

“Funny.”

I put a hand on my chest. “Me? Yeah, I’m hilarious. It’s just a coping mechanism, though. You’d know all about those, I imagine.”

“You have no idea,” he says in a way that makes me shiver. He uncrosses his legs and recrosses them the other way. “How’s Mr. Wilkinson?”

“Beaten to within half an inch of his life,” I snap angrily. “They’re keeping him overnight for observation because he couldn’t remember where he was.”

The Masked Man shows no sign of giving a fuck.

“He’s a nice person, you know,” I continue. “He’s never done a single thing to deserve what you did to him.”

A flare of rage rises up in those soulless gray eyes. “He thought he had a chance with you.”