Chapter 13 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Everybody’s looking for something / Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you”
— “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (Alt. Version)” by Marilyn Manson
Sometimes, in my job, I meet people who have very different ideas than me of what we’re meeting about.
I’ve sat across from politicians who think they’re getting a puff piece when, in reality, I’m prepping a brutal takedown.
Or sources—like Giovanni Ochoa, come to think of it—who believe they have the upper hand and can squeeze me for payout cash while lying blatantly to my face.
But this might be the most “not on the same page” meeting of my whole life.
For starters, we’re on my home turf—literally—but Kir couldn’t look more at ease. He’s comfortable in the chair, huge and lean, sprawled in every direction at once. I, on the other hand, feel like Pinocchio, chiseled from wood and puppeted by some stranger with a cold hand in my innards.
He waits patiently behind the mask. I focus on it so I can dissociate from the man who’s wearing it.
It’s a black fabric ski mask, fitted tight from the bridge of his nose to his jaw.
It hides everything that might make him a recognizable person.
All I get are the eyes. Gray, pale, steady.
Without a human face to go with them, they look ghostly and haunted.
I’ve thought a lot about masks over the past two days.
Not just his, but the world’s. Everybody wears them.
I wear one every day at the office: the brash, fearless reporter who sleeps around without attachment, laughs loudly and freely, and never, ever flinches.
Rae has never seen what’s underneath it.
Weston hasn’t. Doug hasn’t. Nobody has, because the thing underneath is a nineteen-year-old girl on a twin mattress watching a crack in the ceiling or a gray sock on the floor, and that girl doesn’t get to exist in public.
So I understand masks, and the reasons why people put them on and why they can’t take them off. I understand the gap between who you show the world and who you actually are when the lights go out and there’s no one left to perform for.
The difference between me and the man sitting across from me is that my mask is invisible.
His is very, very real.
“Are you going to talk or not?” I snap.
“I was giving you time to settle in,” he says reasonably. That faint, chuckling amusement is lurking on the edge of his voice. It makes my hackles rise up.
I roll my eyes. “If it weren’t for the stalking, the assault and battery, or the writing of messages in blood on my bathroom wall, I’d almost call you courteous,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can muster.
“You saw the bathroom, then?”
“It was kinda hard to miss.”
“And?”
“And what? You want a review?” I gawk at him in disbelief. “Four stars. Very menacing, but your handwriting is shit.”
He exhales through the mask. It might be a laugh. “I’ll do better next time.”
“I’d really rather you didn’t. One REDRUM message is enough to sustain me the rest of my life.”
“Funny.”
I put a hand on my chest. “Me? Yeah, I’m hilarious. It’s just a coping mechanism, though. You’d know all about those, I imagine.”
“You have no idea,” he says in a way that makes me shiver. He uncrosses his legs and recrosses them the other way. “How’s Mr. Wilkinson?”
“Beaten to within half an inch of his life,” I snap angrily. “They’re keeping him overnight for observation because he couldn’t remember where he was.”
The Masked Man shows no sign of giving a fuck.
“He’s a nice person, you know,” I continue. “He’s never done a single thing to deserve what you did to him.”
A flare of rage rises up in those soulless gray eyes. “He thought he had a chance with you.”
“That’s not a crime!” I cry out.
“It is to me.”
“Then you’re delusional.”
“Almost certainly.” He tilts his head. “But he won’t do it again, will he? He understands now.”
I don’t realize he’s baiting me until I’ve already taken it hook, line, and sinker. “Understands what?”
“That he doesn’t have a chance with you. That no one does. Except for me.” His mouth spreads in a twisted grin. “I’m your only hunter from now on, little fox.”
I jump up, my chair screeching as it’s thrust backwards. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that?”
“You’re angry,” the Masked Man notes.
I gather up two tufts of my hair in my hands, milliseconds away from ripping it all out. “Do you blame me?!”
He frowns, almost as if he’s confused by my reaction. “I told you not to go. You didn’t listen, so you had to be punished. At least I was restrained.”
“That was ‘restrained’? You pretty much caved his face in! What part of hospitalizing an innocent man is ‘restrained’?!”
“You should see me when I’m not.”
I shake my head vehemently. “Hard pass. The hardest of passes.”
He scrutinizes me as I sink slowly back onto my chair and clamp my shaking hands between my knees so he can’t see me tremble. “I did warn you,” he sighs. “I told you not to go out with him. I was very clear.”
“You don’t get to tell me who I have dinner with.”
“We’ve had this conversation.”
“And we’ll keep having it,” I hiss, “until you get the message through your thick, masked skull.”
“I admire your persistence.”
“And I find yours terrifying. So we’re even.”
“Well,” he replies, “then I’d say everything is going according to plan.” Then something turns in his posture. The casual sprawl tightens as he plants both feet flat on the floor and puts his forearms on the table. “Alright,” he says. “This has been fun, but it’s not why I’m here.”
“Oh, good,” I retort. “I was worried you only liked me for the sparkling conversation.”
He ignores that. “Tell me what you know about the Lazarevs.”
I keep my face neutral. “What about them?”
He wags a scolding finger at me. “Don’t play dumb. You’re too smart for it and it insults both of us.” He taps that same finger once on the tabletop. “You’re working a story. I want to know what you have.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to know how much trouble you’re in.”
“From who? You?”
“No. From people who make me look like a Boy Scout.”
I study him. He’s not joking. The amused edge from before is completely gone. “You first,” I prod. “You tell me who sent you to kill me, and I’ll tell you what I’m working on.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Then we’re at an impasse.”
“No, we’re not,” he says. “An impasse implies equal footing. You’re sitting in your kitchen in pajamas. I climbed through your window. These are not equal positions.”
I screw up my face in a grimace. “And yet you’re the one asking me for information. So who really has the leverage here?”
He doesn’t answer that. I take it as a win.
“Here’s what I think,” I continue, pressing my advantage.
“I think whoever sent you is getting impatient. I think you were supposed to kill me and you chickened out, and now, you’re scrambling.
You’re here because you need to figure out how much I know so you can report back to your boss like a good little—”
“Careful.”
“—errand boy.” I finish the sentence anyway. “That’s what you are, right? Somebody’s stupid, thuggish little errand boy. You break in, you rough people up, you write scary messages on walls. But you don’t actually make any decisions. You just do what you’re told. Empty-headed toy soldier.”
He goes very still. His hands, which had been loosely folded on the table, curl into fists. I watch the knuckles go white.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he growls.
“Don’t I? Because from where I’m sitting, it’s pretty straightforward. Somebody points, you go fetch. Good boy and a nice chew toy and a pat on the head when you get it done, maybe. That’s the whole job description.”
“Shut up.”
“Oh, did I hit a nerve? The big, scary masked man doesn’t like being called what he is? What if I said—”
“I said shut up.”
“Make me.” I cross my arms. “No, seriously. Make me. Because so far, all you’ve done is shove me around and beat up a guy half your size.
You haven’t actually done the one thing you were sent here to do, which means either you can’t or you won’t, and either way, that makes you a pretty lousy soldier, doesn’t it? ”
He shoves the table. It lurches toward me, hitting my hip, and I grab the edge to stop it.
“You don’t know a single fucking thing about me,” he snarls.
“Au contraire, I think I know plenty. I know you answer to someone. I know that someone is connected to the Lazarevs. I know that a body came through the Queens Medical Examiners’ morgue that’s raising some really nasty red flags re: all things Lazarev.
And I know that right now, right this second, you’re sitting in my kitchen losing your temper because a woman in flannel pajamas called you an errand boy and it fucking stung. ”
His breathing is heavy above the mask. His fists haven’t unclenched.
“How am I doing so far?” I taunt. “Getting warm?”
“You have no idea how warm you’re getting,” he says. “And you have no idea how dangerous that is.”
“See, that’s the thing. You keep telling me how dangerous everything is. But I’m still here, aren’t I?”
The Masked Man jumps to his feet, rounds the table, and snatches me up by the front of my shirt. “Would you like me to change that?” he rumbles in my face, breath hot with cinnamon.
My feet leave the ground. He carries me backward until my spine slams into the wall next to the fridge. His other fist comes up to punch against the wall beside my head.
“Mouthy little girls like you,” he grits out, “should not be so bold around broken, insane men like me. Do you understand that? Do you hear what I’m telling you?”
“I hear you just fine.”
“Then fucking act like it.” His grip tightens on my shirt.
“Because I am not stable. I am not safe. I am not your neighbor with a fucking takeout bag and a schoolboy crush. I am the worst thing that has ever walked through your door, little fox, and the more you wriggle and yelp, the worse it will be for you when the time comes for me to truly put my hands on you.”
He’s so close that the mask is all I can see. Those pale gray eyes boring into mine from six inches away.
He’s enormous. When he’s sitting down, I can pretend this is some kind of fair fight.
But here, with my back pinned to the wall and my feet off the ground and his body taking up every inch of available space in front of me, the reality is unavoidable: He could snap me in half.
He could do anything he wanted and there is not a single thing I could do to stop him.
My hands are clinging to his forearm on some ludicrous pretense of ripping his grip off of me, even though we both know that’s impossible. All it’s doing is reminding me of the corded muscle under his jacket sleeve and the heat of his skin through the fabric.
Once again, I’m brimming over with The Fear. With it is its new companion: The Want. A sick, unwelcome, undeniable hunger.
The press of his body against mine.
The helplessness of dangling here.
The lusty, animal dominance of being held up against a wall by someone who could crush me and won’t—yet.
“You done?” I drawl, infusing my voice with all the I don’t give a fuck-ness I possess.
Somewhere deep in the back of my brain, a quiet alarm is going off.
I know this game I’ve suddenly found myself playing.
I’ve read about it in those dark romance novels I pretend I only consume ironically.
We all understand what happens to the mouthy heroine who pushes and pushes and pushes, not because she wants the monster to leave, but because she needs the monster to stay.
To push back. To break through, because she can’t open the door herself.
I can’t open the door myself.
That’s the cold, hard reality of it, isn’t it?
I no longer know how to ask for what I want.
I don’t know how to say touch me or hold me or I’m drowning and I need someone to pull me out.
The version of me who could ask for those things, if she ever even existed, is trapped inside one of those locked rooms in my heart.
She’s been in there for five long, lonely years.
So instead, I provoke, I poke, I sneer, I snap, I gnash, and I dare this stalker to be a man and fucking do something about it, because if he breaks through, then I didn’t have to ask.
He’ll just kick the door down himself.
I’m aware that this is not healthy. I’m using a masked intruder as some kind of psychological locksmith. Any half-decent therapist would have a field day with this.
But awareness and control are two very different things. Right now, I have plenty of the former and not a whit of the latter.
The Masked Man watches my brain whirl. Then his eyes change. The rage drains out and something else takes its place. That amusement rears up, bright and hot and highly pleased with itself.
“You know what’s interesting, little fox?” he murmurs. “If I’m so evil and you loathe me so much… then why haven’t you called the police?”
I go to reply, but my throat is suddenly frozen. He sees it and knows.
“You’ve got a phone. You’ve got neighbors. You’ve got a voice that carries—trust me, I’ve heard you use it.” He leans his head to gaze at me from a new vantage point. “But you haven’t screamed for help. Not once. You haven’t even tried.”
I swallow.
“Why is that?” he teases. “Hm?”
I don’t have an answer. I have a hundred answers, but none of them are the right one, and he knows it.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.” His face stretches into a vicious grin.
His free hand drops from the wall beside my head. I think he’s going to let me go.
That’s not what happens.
Instead, his hand dives down and plunges inside my pajama bottoms and the underwear beneath. His fingertip rakes through my sex and find me bare and wet. I make a sound that I will despise myself for until the day I die.
He doesn’t move his hand after that. It’s one step farther than what he did last night. We’ve passed the clothes now, but still, he just holds it there, cupping me, feeling what my body has been doing this entire time while my mouth was pretending it wasn’t.
Then he pulls his hand out.
He holds his fingers up between us. They’re glistening. He looks at them, then at me. Then, without breaking eye contact, he puts two fingers in his mouth and licks them clean.
“This, Ms. Pierce, doesn’t taste like fear.”