Page 66 of Boardroom Mask

“So I came back for more of it. Not just to your apartment, although yes, of course, I came here. But also to your coffee shop. To your date with your neighbor. I stood outside in the cold for an hour and watched you eat dinner with another man,and I felt rage like I’ve never known before. Ibeat him half to death in a bathroom because he sat across from you andsmiledat you, and the worst part—the worst fucking part, Jillian—is that Ilikedit. I liked the sound his face made against the tile. I liked the way he looked at me when he understood that you were not his to smileat. I’m a sick fucking bastard and you made me like this, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Do you hear me? You’remine,little fox.”

His voice has dropped to a feral snarl as he advances closer and closer. My breath is trapped in my chest.

“I am not a good person, Jillian. Make no mistake about that. Everything I just told you should make you run for the fucking hills. If you were smart, you’d send that email, call the police, and never let me within five hundred yards of you ever again. Because this sickness, this obsession… It isn’t going away. There is no version of this where I walk away. No universe where I don’t come through that window… again, and again, and again.”

His bare hand reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “So if you can’t live with that… then I suggest you scream.”

Heartbeat.

Breath.

Strangled, thudding pulse.

I write for a living and yet I still don’t know the words for what’s happening here. I might be the first person in human history to be feeling this exact mix of emotions: fear and arousal, terrorand lust, and also, this kind of… appreciation? That can’t be the right term, but I don’t know what else to call it.

I’mseen.That’s what it is. Those gray eyes have watched me from behind the mask and seen so, so much. Parts of me I didn’t know were visible anymore.

Right on cue, those eyes fix on mine. “But my father doesn’t know any of this. As far as he’s aware, you’ll be dead any day now. I’ve been telling him it’ll be over soon. Lying, essentially. Buying time.”

“Buying time forwhat?”

“I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

I almost laugh out of deliriousness. “Incredible plan.”

“All I know is that, if you send that email and my father finds out I lied to him, then it won’t be me who comes to clean up the mess. He’ll send someone who will not hesitate. If that happens, we’re both dead. Do you understand that?”

Idounderstand. That’s the problem. Because I’ve spent the last week telling myself that the man in the mask was the worst-case scenario, but as it turns out, rock bottom is a whole lot deeper still.

Kir is not the threat. He never was.

He’s thebuffer.

And if that buffer disappears, what comes next is something I have no leverage over. I think about Elliot’s face in that hospital bed. One eye swollen shut, blood crusted in the creases of his ear. Kir did that because Elliotsmiledat me. And Kir is supposedly the merciful one in this equation.

So whoever Lukas would send instead…

I don’t want to picture it.

“But there’s a better way,” Kir says. “I want my father gone, too.”

I look up in alarm. But his jaw is tight, his eyes flat and steady. He means it.

“I’ve wanted him gone for a long time,” he continues. “Eighteen years, to be exact. But I can’t do it from inside, not without blowing up everything and taking myself down with it. I need someone on the outside. Someone with a platform and a byline and enough stubbornness to see it through.”

“You need me,” I conclude.

“Yes.” He nods. “I need you.”

I fold my arms across my chest. “So what exactly are you proposing?”

Kir pulls out one of the kitchen chairs and sits. “You write the article,” he says. “But at my pace and on my terms. I’ll give you everything you need. Interviews, documents, financials, internal communications—shit no other reporter will ever get their hands on. Stuff that’ll make your editor cream his khakis.”

“And in exchange?”

“In exchange,” he says, “I control the timeline. I decide when things come out and in what order. Because if you publish too soon or too much, my father will know it came from me, and then neither of us will be alive to see Christmas.”

I chew on this. It’s not nothing. In fact, it’s the kind of deal reporters dream about: an insider at the highest level, handingyou the keys to the kingdom on a silver platter. Like Kir said, Doug’s khakis would indeed need a dry cleaner.