Page 67 of Boardroom Mask

But I’m not naive. “You’re asking me to let a source dictate the terms of the story. That’s not how journalism works.”

“I’m asking you to be flexible about thewhen, not thewhat,” he corrects. “You publish the truth. All of it. I just need to make sure we’re both out of the blast radius before it detonates.”

“And if I say no?”

He bobs a shoulder. “Then you go back to combing through LLC filings and hoping Ochoa turns up alive, and meanwhile, my father runs out of patience and sends someone who doesn’t have a problem following orders.” He pauses. “Or you say yes, and you get the story of the decade hand-delivered by the one person on earth who has access to all of it.”

Fuck me.

Doesn’t sound like I have much of a choice after all.

Kir stands and crosses the kitchen toward me. He stops close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him. “Seal the deal?” he murmurs.

I look down at the mask still dangling from his fist. Then, in a daze, I reach out and take it from him. The fabric is warm from his grip, soft and worn from all those nights wearing it here to terrorize me.

I lift it with both hands and pull it down over his face. I tuck it under his chin, smooth it across his cheekbones, and adjust it over the bridge of his nose until only those gray eyes are visible above the black fabric.

There he is. My stranger. My nobody.

Except he’s not nobody anymore. He’s Kir fucking Lazarev. But the mask still does something to my brain that I can’t explain. It flips a switch. It makes this okay.

His hands grip my waist. “There she is,” he purrs. “Come here, my little fox. Let me devour you.”

PART III

SKIN IN THE GAME

26

JILLIAN

“You don’t fool me, oh babe, you don’t fool me”

— “You Don’t Fool Me” by UFO

It feels like I blink and wake up at my desk in the office on Tuesday morning. My hair is still damp from a shower I barely remember taking and I’m wearing a horribly wrinkled, mismatched outfit. All highly unlike me.

My external environment is no better. The desk is a disaster zone, with papers piled up everywhere, notes left half-unfinished. The only thing it’s got going for it is that it’s a pretty accurate representation of my mental state.

I sit down and open my laptop and then just look at the screen for a while. My cursor blinks in an empty search bar, but I don’t type anything.

I can still feel him. That’s the problem. Not just the obvious stuff, although yes, that, too—the fingerprints on my inner thigh, the ache between my legs. But also his hands on my face when hepulled the mask off. The fading bruise around his eye that his father gave him.

My father ordered me to kill you.

“Yo!” someone crows from behind me. “If it isn’t my little cup of— Oh my God, Jill, what the hell happened to you?”

I spin around in my chair. Weston is standing there with two coffees, one already extended toward me, but his face has gone from cheerful to concerned.

“Nothing happened to me,” I mumble, taking the coffee and carefully pointing my face away from him. “I’m fine.”

“You arenotfine,” he emphasizes. “You look like you slept in a dumpster. And I mean that with love.”

“You do know how to make a girl feel special.”

God, it’s hard to summon my usual sarcasm today. I am completely unmoored and floundering, and Weston knows it. Unfortunately, he’s not the kind of guy to let me off the hook easily.

He perches on the edge of my desk and studies me. “Seriously, Jill, what’s going on? Talk to me. This is a safe space.”