Page 44 of The Devil Wears Nada

And tucked away in their cushy offices, the three men who could make this whole nightmare disappear with a rounding error go about their morning, and not one of them knows I exist past the phones I answer. They do not give a shit about Diablo and they do not give a shit about me.

I'm still rehearsing my Sal speech when a shadow falls across my desk.

I look up. It's Theo Marsh.

Not KindRegards. Theo. My boss, in his tailored gray suit, standing at my desk at eleven in the morning, which is something he has maybe done twice in the whole time I've worked here, and both times, he was handing me something to file. His hands are empty now. And his face is doing something I have never seen it do, and every alarm bell I own goes off at the same instant.

I glance behind him at the lobby doors and consider making a break for it.

"Agnes." His voice is so careful, it scares me worse than shouting would. "Do you have a few minutes? I need to talk to you. In private please."

And my brain, running on no sleep and pure animal fear, jumps straight to the worst version of it. He knows. My secret climbed all the way up here, from Birdie to Kayla to some roommate to the top floor of Ardent Capital, and now the kindest of my three bosses has drawn the short straw and come down to fire the front-desk girl who takes her clothes off for strangers online. This is it. This is the implosion I’ve been waiting for in my invisible little life. Everything I've ever done will be gone in the next five minutes.

"Sure," I hear myself say, already on my feet, on legs I can't feel. "Of course, Mr. Marsh."

He walks me to the small conference room in the back, the one with solid walls and no glass, and he holds the door, and pulls it shut behind us. There is no assistant. No laptop. No reason on this earth for the two of us to be alone in a soundproofed room, except the one I'm dreading.

He doesn't sit. He looks at me for a long moment, and there is no boss left anywhere in his face.

"I have to tell you something," he says. "And I need you to let me get all of it out before you say a word. Can you do that for me?"

I nod. It's all I've got. My whole body is one held breath and I’m pretty sure my heart stop beating a couple pulses ago.

He looks equally as fucked up.

"I know exactly who you are, Agnes." His tone is quiet and steady. "I have since the beginning."

The room tilts. I’m still not breathing.

He knew.

He always knew.

They all did.

14

AGGIE

I have since the beginning.

The words go in and keep going, down through my chest and my stomach and out the bottom of me, and they take the floor with them on the way. I'm still standing. I can see that I'm still standing. I just can't feel the floor under my feet anymore. I’m not sure whether I’m falling or floating, or something horrible in between.

I don't say anything. I promised I'd let him finish, and even if I hadn't, I couldn't push a word past the thing that's closed tight around my throat. So I stay where I am in my cardigan, in a room with no windows, and one of my hands finds the back of a chair without being told to, and holds on.

"It was Elias," he says. "The first night you went live. He was already on the site, he found you by accident, and he knew right away. Your laugh. It gave you away." A breath. "He told Beck and me the next morning. And instead of doing the decent thing and leaving you alone, we did the opposite."

He makes himself keep going. I watch his mouth move, and the sound reaches me a half second late, the words traveling a long way to get to wherever I've gone.

"Beck set the whole thing up. Buy up your time so no other man could get near you. And we did it, all three of us, knowing exactly who you were. Every night. Every dollar. We knew."

My grip on the chair goes white-knuckle. It's the only thing keeping me upright.

I had one rule. One. Nobody looks at Agnes, so nobody would ever stand Agnes next to Diablo and see one woman. I built two people so they would never be in the same room at once. And from the very first night, my bosses watched quiet little Agnes from the front desk get undressed, and called her a made-up name to be polite about it.

My face is hot. My hands are ice. I didn't know a body could do both at the same time.

Night after night, I knelt in that red lipstick certain I was the one with the secret. Certain I had something on these guys, that I held the upper hand, and that for once in my life, I was the one running the game.