Page 83 of Boardroom Mask

There’s only one photo in it: A hospital bracelet on a tiny, pink, chubby wrist. In the background, the edge of a white cotton blanket.

I stare at it for a while. Then I close the album and lock the phone. I pull the covers up to my chin and lie there in the quiet, waiting for a sound at the window that doesn’t come.

Unfortunately for me, sleep doesn’t come, either. I force myself to wait a full hour before I throw the covers off and pad into the kitchen.

The camera is right where I left it, buried at the bottom of my purse. I fish it out and carry it back to the bedroom, then sit on the edge of the bed and turn it over in my fingers. It’s so small. Barely weighs anything. The red LED is off because the battery pack got jostled loose during my angry purse-stuffing earlier.

I could flush it down the toilet. I could smash it with a hammer. I could drop it in the trash compactor in the basement and never think about it again.

But instead of doing any of those things, I click the battery pack back into place.

The red light blinks on.

I carry it to my dresser and prop it against the jewelry box, angling the lens toward the bed. Then I step back and look at it. The tiny red dot pulses in the dim room.

He’s watching. I don’t have proof of that. I just know it the way I know my own name, the way I know the layout of this apartment in the dark. Kir Lazarev is on the other end of this little blinking light, and he’s watching me right now.

What I’m doing isn’t normal. I know that. I’m no longer just allowing these things to happen to me; I’m actively opting into them. I’mchoosingthe darkness and the masks it wears. Like Elvis, normal has long since left the building, if it was ever even here in the first place.

What does that say about me? I’m broken; I know that, too. But maybe I’m broken in a very specific way that Kir Lazarev slotsinto perfectly. Somewhere in the wreckage of what happened to me five years ago, my psychological wiring got crossed up so badly that danger and safety swapped places in my head. A gentle man like Elliot makes my skin crawl. A man who broke into my apartment with a gun makes me feel seen.

That’s insane.

… And yet.

I pull my knees up and rest my chin on them, still facing the lens. For a while, that’s all I do. Nine becomes 9:30, and I still haven’t moved.

But things are happening inside of me. A strange, reckless flush, like someone struck a match and lit something low in my belly, is rising up and making my head swim. I have jittery energy in the tips of my fingers and my nipples are oddly strained and peaked. They know something I don’t.

The flush keeps going. It is a wave of heat and it keeps finding new nooks and crannies in my body to suffuse with fire. My breath is coming shorter now and I haven’t even moved. I’m just sitting here on my own bed, knees drawn up, facing a camera the size of a thumb drive, and my entire body is screaming at me.

Because I want him to see me.

Not in the abstract, not in the safe little fantasy I can fold up and tuck away when it’s done. I want himright now, in this room,with his hands on me and his weight pressing me into this mattress. I want the mask and the cinnamon and the low timbre in which he says my name when he’s about to lose control. I want his fingers digging bruises into my hips. I want to hear him tell me I’mhis.

My skin feels too tight. Every nerve ending is awake and demanding attention.

The red light blinks. He’s there. Eyes peeled. Waiting to see what I do next.

That only makes the heat worse.

So it’s no surprise, really, that I do what I do next.

That my fingers reach for the hem of my shirt.

That my knees fall wide to either side.

That I pull the shirt up, exposing a strip of stomach, then nervously tug it back down.

“This is crazy. I can’t be… You shouldn’t… This is just crazy, okay?” I announce to the empty room.

But my fingers once again start to tease the shirt up my trembling belly.

“I’m only doing this because I want to,” I tell the camera sternly. “Not because you asked. BecauseIwant to.”

Saying that part out loud helps in some weird way. Putting it into words—I want to; I, me, Jillian Pierce, choose this—takes the shaky, guilty knot in my chest and loosens it. Not all the way, but enough.

Because it’s true. Nobody’s making me do this. There’s no gloved hand on my wrist, no body blocking the door. Kir isn’t here. He can’t touch me. He can’t direct me. All he can do is watch‚ if I choose to let him.