Page 102 of Boardroom Mask

I whisper, “This is so fucked.”

He sighs. “Then leave.”

I should. But I don’t.

“I hurt someone tonight,” he confesses. “A man I didn’t know. He didn’t matter.” His breathing is taut and labored. “But I didn’t hesitate and I didn’t feel anything while I did it. I just put a bullet in his fucking skull.”

My fingernails dig into the denim on my thighs.

“The barrier keeping me from doing the same to you,” he continues, barely above a whisper, “is about as thin as this lattice between us.”

I stare at the carved wooden screen. As I watch, Kir’s fingertips appear through one of the gaps. Four of them, pale against the dark wood, smeared with an ash gray substance that can only be gunpowder.

I lift my hand off my thigh and press my fingertips to his. Skin to skin. Warm and alive and trembling. My clean hands to his stained ones.

We stay like that for a long moment. His fingertips and mine, pressed together through the lattice, four points of contact no bigger than communion wafers. I can feel his pulse through the pads of his fingers, or maybe that’s mine—it’s impossible to separate the two when they’re beating this fast.

And then something comes to life.

It starts in the pit of my stomach, a fire that has no business being here. Not in a confessional. But the lattice is doing something to me, something I recognize with a sick, swooping clarity—because it’s doing what the mask used to do. It’s a barrier. A veil. It reduces him to a voice and a shadow, and the separation ispermission. The blessing to feel what I feel without having to look it in the face.

My breathing changes. I press my fingers harder against his through the screen and the heat in my stomach drops lower, spreading between my hips, pooling and igniting there with an insistence that makes me squeeze my thighs together on the bench.

This is a church. I am sitting in a confessional in a cathedral on Mulberry Street at five-something in the morning, and I am getting wet for a man who just told me he murdered someone tonight. There is no version of this that doesn’t land me in a very specific circle of Hell.

Then Kir’s fingers withdraw.

I hear him stand. The wooden bench on his side creaks with the sudden absence of weight, and then his door opens, the hinges groaning softly, and clicks shut.

Footsteps. One, two?—

My door opens.

Kir fills the frame. He’s still in the dark sweater from earlier, his hair disheveled, his jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle working beneath the skin. His gray eyes finding mine in the candlelit gloom and they shine with an unholy light.

“I don’t want a wall between us anymore,” he growls. “Or a mask, or an excuse. I want you, Jillian Pierce. And I’ll drag you down to hell with me if that’s what it takes to have you.”

He steps in, ducking his head beneath the low frame, and pulls the door shut behind him, and this confessional becomes a coffin built for two.

The space collapses to nothing. His knees press against mine. His hands find the wall on either side of my head, bracketingme in, and the smell of him—cinnamon, cordite, cold night air—fills every cubic inch of the booth until there’s no oxygen left that doesn’t taste like him.

“This is a church,” I whisper.

“I know.”

“There’s an old woman out there. And a priest.”

“I know, Jillian. Not one of them can stop me. Neither can God or the Devil. The only one who can is you. Will you stop me, little fox?”

I look up at him. His face is inches from mine, close enough that I can count the flecks of silver in his gray irises and the vein pulsing at his temple. He’s waiting for my answer, which is absurd, because how can he not see it?

I know what I want. I’ve known for a long time now.

I reach up and wrap my fingers around his wrist, then pull his hand off the wall and press his palm flat against my chest, right over my heart, so he can feel it beating for him.

“No,” I whisper. “I won’t.”

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