Page 40 of The Devil Wears Nada

Elias’s office light is on.

I stand in his doorway. He's at his desk with his jacket still on at two a.m., laptop open, and he doesn't tell me to leave, which is how I know how bad it really is, because Elias always prefers to be alone.

"You're going to say something reasonable," he says, not looking up. "Don't."

So I don't. I come in and sit down across from him the way I've done a thousand times, except every one of those thousand times we were partners, and tonight we're two men who haven't spoken in a week, the quiet between now toxic and ugly.

His screen has gone dark, but I know what was on it. We both know what was on it. There's only one thing any of us looks at anymore when we think nobody's watching.

"I had it for about a week," he says finally, quiet and precise. "That's the part I keep circling. I had her for one week, Theo. I found her by accident, at one o'clock in the morning, a woman on a screen who didn't know my name and didn't want to, and I knew inside a minute that it was Agnes. Our Agnes. The laugh gave her up. I'd heard that laugh in our own hallway and never once turned around for it, and there it was, coming out of my laptop. I told no one. I just watched, and I said nothing, and for one week, I had exactly one thing in my life that was mine and quiet and hurt nobody, and I kept it in a box, and I was fine."

I know that box. I built one of my own.

"And then I couldn't hold it by myself. That's the ugly truth of it. It was too… big to keep alone, so I took it to Beck, because Beck can handle anything, Beck's never met a thing he couldn't figure out. And I watched him take the most private thing I’ve ever had and turn it into a game."

He finally looks up at me, and God, I wish he hadn't.

"I did this," Elias says. And his voice doesn't break, which is worse than if it had, because I can hear him keeping it level. "She was safe until I couldn't keep my mouth shut. She was climbing out of a hole on her own, hurting no one, and the single worst thing that has ever happened to that woman is the three of us deciding to ‘help’ her," he says using finger quotes.

And here's what I see, sitting across from him. Elias and I are the same brand of stupid. We both wanted her, and we both played it safe. We watched from the dark, called it decency, and did nothing.

"Does she know?" I ask. "That we⁠—"

"No." Too fast. The exact speed Beck said it. The exact speed I would have. "No. And she can't, Theo. Whatever happens to the three of us, she can never find out." His hands settle flat on the desk, slow and deliberate, a man bracing himself on a railing. "If she learns we've been sitting here watching her think she's the clever one, it doesn't hurt her, it guts her. Not the money. That. So we take it to the ground with us. All three."

And I watch Elias Thorne, the guy who does not bend, sit there in his coat at two in the morning telling me we're all going to carry this to our graves, and I see something with total clarity.

He doesn't believe it.

He's not laying down a rule. He's trying to talk himself into one. He can feel the same thing I can, the thing that's been coming for all of us, and he's saying never the way you say it when never is not in the cards.

I stand up. I put a hand on his shoulder and he lets me, and neither of us says anything, because there’s just not a damn thing to say.

I walk out into the empty hall knowing something I didn't know this morning. The steadiest of us is the closest to going over. If Elias can't keep this to himself, then nobody can. It’s all going to fall apart, not someday but soon, and when it does, it lands on the one person in the whole mess who still believes she's invisible.

I sit in my office the rest of the night with that, not worried about the firm or the friendship but her. Agnes, and the look on her face some morning when she finds out, from Beck's big mouth or a stray leak or plain rotten luck, that she was never invisible at all. That we saw everything. That we let her believe otherwise on purpose.

That's the part I won't allow. Not the lie going on forever but it reaching her like that, sideways, from the worst possible mouth, when she's got no one in her corner.

I don't have a plan yet. But I know one thing for certain now. Doing nothing isn't an option anymore.

I book her for a private the night after Elias, and I tell myself I'm going in to come clean.

That plan lasts as long as it takes her to come on screen.

Because there she is in the red lipstick and the black slip, giving the camera that slow first smile like she's got a secret on the whole world, which she does. She just doesn't know I'm in on it, and every honorable thing I walked in here to do goes straight out of my head when I start thinking with my dick.

"KindRegards." Low, teasing, fuckable. "Twice in one week. Careful, or I'll start thinking you like me."

I want to say it. But I can’t. What I say instead is, "Take the strap down. Slow."

The corner of her mouth crooks up. I've always been the one who asks nicely, the one who tells her to take care of herself and get some rest, but tonight, I'm not asking. She likes it. I can see her like it with the way her lips curve.

"Somebody's in a mood," she says, and eases the first strap off her shoulder. Slow, like I said. An inch of skin at a time, making me pay for every one.

"I’ve been thinking about you all day," I tell her. "Now with the other strap. All the way off. I want to see you."

She lets the slip puddle around her hips and wriggles out of it. Then she's kneeling on the bed in nothing but lipstick with her knees slightly parted and her beautiful shaved pussy almost within reach if only there wasn’t the goddamn internet between us.