Page 139 of Boardroom Mask

Doug pulls out Kir’s empty chair and sits down across from me. He sets his coffee and the cheese bag on the table between our plates, folds his hands, and looks at me with the saddest disappointment he’s ever worn.

“Alright,” he commands. “Start talking.”

56

JILLIAN

“I wanna tell you, but I don’t know how / I’m only honest when it rains / An open book with a torn out page / And my ink’s run out / I wanna love you, but I don’t know how”

— “Sleeping At Last” by Neptune

“It’s not what you think,” I try.

He shakes his head. “I told you not to do that.”

“Okay, fine. It’s exactly what you think,” I hurry to say. “But it’s also—it’s so fucking complicated, Doug.”

“Uncomplicate it for me.” He takes the lid off his coffee, blows on it, and takes a sip. “How long?”

I blink at him stupidly. It’s not that I don’t know what he’s asking; it’s just that my brain has been scrambled by sex and surprise and little girls letting red balloons fly off into the air. “How long what?”

His nose wrinkles up and I know immediately that I said the wrong thing. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Jillian. How longhave you been sleeping with the CEO of the company you’re supposed to be investigating?”

Sleeping with.That’s such a bizarrely banal word for what’s been happening. So chaste and cute. It belongs in a PG-13 rom-com, not the dark, depraved, fucked-up mess I’ve been mired in.

“A few weeks,” I say helplessly. “Give or take.”

“I see.” He sets his coffee down, lips pursed. “And during these few weeks, ‘give or take,’ were you also actively building a story about his family?”

“I… Er… Well, yes.”

“And you don’t see the problem here?”

I lean across the table, feeling the desperate lies using my mouth like a puppet but completely unable to stop it. “Doug, he’s a source. This is access! Direct, unprecedented access to the inner workings of?—”

“Again, I beg you to stop.” The flat of his hand raised up to me stings every bit as bad as if he’d slapped me right across the face with it. “Is that what you’re telling yourself? Jillian… do you really think you have the upper hand here?”

“I know what I’m doing,” I whimper.

“Do you?” Doug looks skeptical, to say the least. “From where I’m sitting, it looks like a thirty-year-old billionaire with a legal team the size of a small country has gotten his hooks into my best reporter, and she’s sitting here in his T-shirt telling me it’s just aboutaccess.”

My face goes hot. I glance down at the shirt. It was such a nice thing to put it on this morning and feel swaddled in him. Now,I wish I’d burned it and flung the ashes into the East River instead.

“Men like Kir Lazarev have tools, Jillian. Not just money and muscle. I’m talking stuff that’s way, way more intrusive than that macho man shit.” Doug’s voice is sad, not angry, and there isn’t a thesaurus or dictionary alive that contains enough words to explain how low that makes me feel. “Charm. Exclusivity. The illusion of intimacy. I bet he made you feel like you’re the only person who reallygetshim, yeah?” He doesn’t need me to nod, but I do anyway. “It’s a playbook, Pierce. Old as me. As dirt. I always thought you were too smart to fall for something like that.”

He pauses.

“Now, though, I gotta ask… Was I wrong?”

I don’t answer him. I can’t.

Because he isn’t wrong at all.

The seconds expand into an endless pit of centuries as I trace the whole ugly timeline backward. A few weeks ago, I was a reporter with a story, a source, and a deadline. What have I become since then? It’s like I blinked and suddenly, I’m now a woman who let a man climb through her window and put a gun to her spine and then ended up on her kitchen floor underneath him. The rules I made got broken as fast as I could make them. Hidden cameras and sweaty confessional booths, alleys, photo darkrooms—the list of sins goes on and on.

Maybe that would’ve been okay, if there’d been at leastoneline in the sand that I refused to cross. But as of this morning, even that is gone.

Because when Kir asked me to kill the story, I folded right away.Okay. Consider it done. It’s as buried as your mother was.I didn’t even have the guts to feel guilty for longer than a few seconds, because I wanted to be happy so badly that I let it all go.