Page 2 of Don’t Scream

I swallow.

“Answer.”

“Yes,” I reply, my voice barely audible.

“Good boy. I want you in the file room on nineteen. The dead files. The lights in there shut off automatically at seven-forty, and there are still no cameras in that room, so nobody will see us.” A wicked laugh carries through the phone. “Hang up. I am calling your cell. Then walk. Keep me on the line. I want to hear you get desperate in the stairwell.”

I hang up. Two seconds later, my cell buzzes. The number comes up internal. Preswood & Vale. I answer on the first ring, shove my shoes back on, and start walking with the phone at my ear.

Willa watches my mouth.

“If that’s Chen, I’m not here,” she says.

“It isn’t Chen.”

She gives me a forced smile and goes back to her conversation while I keep walking.

Ivy Chen is at the copier in seamed black stockings and a blouse that obviously does not care it is after hours. She is twenty-seven, a paralegal, small in frame but very sharp, and nothing gets past her. Dark hair. A beauty mark at the corner of her mouth. She glances at the phone at my ear and lifts an eyebrow.

“Archive run? Eh, so romantic.”

“Files,” I say.

“Sure. Whatever you say.”

The thirty-seventh floor is smaller than the floors below it, and the offices there all have glass walls. Lauren “Lo” Brooks is thirty-eight, a partner in the firm who works under Rhys. She stands in her doorway in a wine-colored dress cut low enough that her full, heavy breasts are pushed up and together, soft and straining at the fabric. The kind of cleavage that looks warm even from the hall. She has perfect auburn hair and long legs that go on for days.

She looks at me like I’ve made a deadly mistake.

“If Preswood asks, I never saw you,” she says.

“Thanks, Lo.”

Kit Mori is in the kitchenette stealing someone else’s oat milk. Thirty, an associate at the firm, and so handsome it is hard to say if he looks more like a man or a woman. He has a sharp jaw, long mouth, black hair in a short cut, and a body that looks expensive in anything. He gives me a small two-finger wave, his sleeves rolled up.

“You look like you’re about to do something you’ll deny.”

“Who, me? Always.”

The voice in my ear stays filthy the whole walk.

“When you get down there, I want you waiting against the shelves. When I get there, I am going to take your belt in my hand. I want to know if you would let me fuck you with the door unlocked. Say it.”

I hit the service stairs so the lifts will not ping. Concrete. Echo. My own breath.

“I’d let you.”

“Louder.”

“I’d let you fuck me with the door unlocked,” I rasp.

“Would you come in my mouth if I asked you not to make a sound?”

“Fuck, yes.”

“Would you die pretty if I asked you that, too?”

I laugh and reply, “You’re sick.”