Page 57 of Boardroom Mask

Behind her, on the wall, she’s got a corkboard. I’ve seen it before on the feed, but it was mostly bare. Not anymore. Now, it’s covered. Index cards, printed-out documents, sticky notes with arrows drawn between them. Red string connects some of them, which is so on-the-nose for a journalist that I’d laugh if it weren’t taking the shape of a smoking gun aimed directly at my family.

She stands up and walks to the board. She’s holding a red marker. She circles something in the upper right corner, thensteps back and looks at the whole board with her arms folded, head tilted.

I try to zoom in. The phone camera is good, but the pinhole lens in her vent wasn’t designed for this kind of resolution at that distance. I can make out shapes and colors but not text. Whatever she circled, I can’t read it.

I try zooming more. Useless. The pixels turn to mush.

She’s getting closer to something. That much is obvious from the sheer volume of material on that board and the way she keeps going back to it, connecting pieces, reorganizing. She’s building a case. That’s what reporters do, and Jillian is a very good reporter.

What’s incredibly fucked-up is that part of mewantsher to find it all. I want her to blow the lid off everything Lukas has built and burn it all to the ground with him standing in the middle of it.

But there’s another part of me that remembers I’m still his son. The empire she’s trying to dismantle has my name on it, too. And, problematically, hating Lukas and wanting to protect him from Jillian aren’t opposites. They’re the opposite of opposites; they’re the same twisted thing, braided together so tight I can’t find where one ends and the other begins.

Nobody else gets to destroy my father. That’s my job. Mine and mine alone.

As for how I’m going to solve any of this shit…

… that remains to be seen.

21

JILLIAN

“Show me where it hurts / Let me be the cure / Sometimes life can be a curse / So just show me where it hurts / And I’ll take away the pain”

— “Show Me Where It Hurts” by Skylar Grey

That night, he’s on me before I can get the door closed.

He kicks the door shut behind me and shoves me face-first into the hallway wall so hard a framed photo rattles off its nail and hits the floor. Glass breaks and crunches underfoot as his hands yank my sweatpants down to my knees.

He’s already hard against my ass, grinding, one hand fisted in my hair, the other clamped around my throat from behind.

Something is different tonight. He’s always been rough, but this isn’t rough; this ismean. There’s a fury in his body that has nothing to do with me. He’s here to destroy something, and I just happen to be the nearest available thing.

That’s fine. I can work with that.

He spins me around and lifts me. My back touches the wall and I wrap my legs around his waist. He fumbles with his zipper one-handed, the other arm hooked under my thigh, holding me up. I hear the buckle, the zip, and then he shoves into me with no warning.

I cry out, but he doesn’t stop. He buries his face in my neck and bites down on the tendon above my collarbone. Not a love bite, anactualbite, teeth sinking in until I yelp and shove at his chest. He doesn’t let up. He bites harder.

So I rake my nails down the back of his neck.

I’m intentionally trying to cause him pain, just like he’s doing to me. I curl my fingers and drag them down from his hairline to the collar of his jacket, feeling skin split and give under my nails. He jerks his head up and makes a choked, guttural groan. His hips stutter and then slam forward so hard my skull bounces off the wall.

“Again,” he pants.

I do it again. Harder this time. Both hands. I shove his jacket collar down and claw from his shoulders to the middle of his back, dragging raised welts through the fabric of his shirt. I feel one nail catch and tear through cotton and then into skin. Something warm and wet coats my fingertip.

Blood.

The Masked Man goes absolutely feral. He pins both my wrists above my head with one hand and fucks me so hard the drywall cracks behind me. His breathing is ragged through the mask. His free hand grips my jaw and forces my head to the side, exposing my throat, and he licks a hot path from my collarbone to my ear.

“Harder,” I tell him. “I can take it.”

He gives it to me.

When it’s over, for the first time, he doesn’t leave right away.