Chapter 3: The bossy boss
The home office felt like a crime scene waiting to be staged. Sara had cleaned it meticulously, not to restore order, but to curate the backdrop. She stacked her design awards neatly on a shelf, facing the camera. A framed certificate of excellence from the AIGA was propped against her monitor. Her Wacom tablet and stylus lay centered on the desk, tools of a former life. The room smelled of lemon polish and her own nervous sweat.
She wore the dress. A simple, elegant sheath in navy blue, the kind she’d worn to pitch the rebrand for a downtown tech startup two years ago. It was professional, tasteful, and it felt like a shroud.
Charly adjusted the lighting, a soft ring light around the webcam to flatter her face, and a harsher key light to the side that would cast dramatic shadows. Tyler, via encrypted chat, had remote access to her laptop, ready to record the screen and the feed from the secondary camera Charly would operate.
“You remember what to say?” Jake’s voice came through her wireless earpiece, calm and directive.
“Yes,” Sara whispered. Her throat was tight.
“It’s not just about breaking you. It’s about breaking him. The man you respected. The man you argued with about font choices and brand integrity. We want to see the moment he realizes the woman who told him his layout was ‘visually illiterate’ is now a phone-sex slut. Make him complicit. That’s the art.”
Bruce stood in the corner of the room, a silent monolith in the dimness outside the lights. He was already shirtless, his tattooed chest rising and falling slowly. He watched her with the flat patience of a predator.
“Chat is live,” Tyler’s voice crackled in her ear. “Six hundred and twelve subscribers waiting. Countdown is on screen. Thirty seconds.”
Sara’s finger hovered over the video call button on her screen. Greg’s contact info was pulled up. His professional headshot, a smiling, silver-haired man in his fifties, looked out at her. The Creative Director of Mason & Pierce. The man who had once told her she had the sharpest eye in the city. The man she’d last emailed with a furious, professional dismissal after he’d taken credit for her work on the Helios campaign.
“Fifteen seconds.”
Charly gave her a thumbs-up from behind the handheld camera, his face pale but his eyes bright with a feverish intensity.
“Five. Four. Three…”
She clicked ‘call’.
The ringing tone was deafening in the quiet room. It trilled once, twice. On the third ring, the screen resolved.
Greg was in what looked like a home study, shelves of books behind him. He wore reading glasses and a look of mild, professional curiosity. “Sara? This is a surprise.” His voice was exactly as she remembered—avuncular, confident, slightly bored.
“Hi, Greg.” Her voice didn’t shake. It was her client-meeting voice, cool and poised. “Thanks for taking the call. I know it’s out of the blue.”
“It is,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I heard about… well, I saw some of the online chatter. A real meltdown. I’m sorry to see it. You had talent.”
“Thank you.” She folded her hands on the desk. “That’s actually why I’m calling. I wanted to apologize.”
His eyebrows rose. “Oh?”
“For my last email. It was unprofessional. I was… emotional about the Helios project.”
Greg waved a hand, a magnanimous gesture. “Water under the bridge. We’ve all been there. Passionate people clashing. So, what can I do for you? Looking for a reference? I’m not sure I can, in good conscience, given the… nature of your recent publicity.”
“It’s not a reference.” She took a breath, the script Jake had written for her scrolling behind her eyes. “I’m calling to formally retract all my professional criticisms of you. You were right. About everything. My designs were derivative. My arguments were emotional, not logical. You were the true creative force. I was just a pair of hands.”
Greg’s expression shifted from polite condescension to wary confusion. “Sara, what is this? Is this being recorded?”
“It’s a public retraction,” she said, her gaze steady on the camera lens, not on his face. “I’m live right now. There are over six hundred people watching. I’m telling them, and you, that you were the genius. I was the hack.”
His face went through a fascinating series of transformations. Confusion, then dawning horror, then a sharp, calculating interest. His eyes flicked to something on his own screen—likely the live chat feed Tyler had provided a link to. She saw the exact moment he understood. His eyes widened slightly. His lips parted. The color in his cheeks deepened. It wasn’t embarrassment. It was arousal.
“You’re live?” he repeated, his voice dropping an octave.
“Yes. And I wanted to demonstrate my sincerity.” She stood up, her movements smooth. The camera on Charly’s shoulder followed her. She turned her back to Greg’s window on her screen, facing the room. She looked at Bruce and gave a single, small nod.
Bruce moved. He didn’t rush. He walked into the frame, his bulk blocking the key light for a moment, casting her in shadow. His hands settled on her shoulders.
Greg was silent on the call. But she could hear his breathing, shallow and quick through her speakers.
Bruce’s hands slid down her arms, then around to the front of her dress. He found the zipper at the back of her neck and pulled it down in one long, slow rasp. The navy fabric gaped. He pushed the dress off her shoulders, letting it pool at her feet. She stood in only her heels, the ring light gleaming on her skin.
“What…” Greg’s voice was a dry croak. “What are you doing?”
“Apologizing,” Sara said, her voice losing its professional clip, becoming softer, emptier. “Showing you what I really am. What I always was, underneath the design talk.”
Bruce’s hands, rough and possessive, cupped her breasts, his thumbs rubbing over her nipples until they hardened into tight peaks. He pinched them, sharp enough to make her gasp. The sound was clear on the microphone.
On the screen, Greg’s hand came up to his mouth. He wasn’t hanging up.
“Chat is going wild,” Tyler murmured in her ear. “He’s watching the feed. He’s seeing the comments.”
“Tell him what the chat is saying,” Jake instructed, his voice a cold thrill in her ear.
She turned her head, looking back at Greg’s image. His eyes were glued to his screen. “They’re asking if you’re enjoying the show, Greg. User ‘TruthTelller’ says, ‘Ask the old man if he ever jacked off thinking about her in the boardroom.’ User ‘DegradeHer’ says, ‘Tell him you were a tight-assed bitch who needed a good fucking.’”
Greg swallowed. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. “This is… this is highly inappropriate.”
“But you’re not hanging up,” Sara breathed.
He didn’t. He leaned closer to his camera, his face filling her screen. The avuncular mask was gone, stripped away by the raw, voyeuristic hunger in his eyes. “You were always a prickly bitch,” he said, the words quiet, almost conversational. “So smug. So sure your taste was superior. All that talk about ‘ethical design’ and ‘user empathy.’ It was just noise. This…” He gestured vaguely at his screen, at her naked body framed by Bruce’s hands. “This is what you were for. Decoration. A hole.”
The words should have felt like glass in her skin. Instead, they felt like absolution. He was seeing her now. Truly seeing her.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Bruce spun her around to face the desk. He bent her over it, scattering her stylus and a stack of sketches. The polished wood was cool against her stomach and breasts. Charly moved in, the camera lens focusing on her face, now sideways on the desk, her eyes looking toward the laptop screen, toward Greg.
Greg’s breath hitched. He could see everything: Bruce positioning himself behind her, Charly filming, her own desperate expression.
“You’re really doing this,” Greg said, not a question. A statement of revelatory awe. “On live video. For anyone to see.”
“For you to see,” she corrected, her voice muffled against the wood.
Bruce entered her in one brutal, deep thrust. There was no preparation, no gentleness. It was a claiming. A reaming. The stretch was obscene, a burning, tearing fullness that forced a ragged scream from her lungs. Her fingers scrabbled against the smooth desk.
“Fuck!” Greg’s exclamation was pure, unfiltered shock and excitement.
Bruce set a relentless, pounding rhythm. Each drive of his hips slammed her body into the desk’s edge. The sounds were hideously intimate: the wet, rhythmic slap of flesh on flesh, Bruce’s low grunts, Sara’s choked, airless cries.
Greg was mesmerized. “Look at you,” he hissed, his face contorted with a cruel delight. “Look at you taking it. All that pride, all that talent… just a vessel for a kid’s cock. I knew it. I always knew you were just a cunt pretending to be a mind.”
His words flowed now, a torrent of pent-up resentment and sexual spite. “Remember when you criticized my color palette for the Renfrew account? Called it ‘juvenile’? You were a juvenile. A stuck-up little girl playing at being a professional. This is your level. This is your purpose. Taking dick. Taking punishment.”
With each degrading sentence, Bruce seemed to fuck her harder, as if feeding on the verbal abuse. Sara’s world narrowed to the pain in her core, the pressure on her lungs, and Greg’s face, twisted and leering, passing judgment on her ruin.
“User ‘BigSpender’ wants to know,” Tyler’s voice cut through, “what it would cost for Greg to have a turn.”
Jake’s command was immediate. “Ask him.”
Sara, her vision blurring, forced her eyes to focus on Greg. The question felt like the final brick in a wall being built around her soul. “Greg…” she panted, each word punched out by a thrust. “How… how much… would you pay… to fuck this ass… you arrogant… prick?”
Bruce slowed, allowing her to speak, but not withdrawing. The implicit threat of him hanging there, buried inside her, was its own form of punctuation.
Greg’s eyes widened. He licked his lips. The businessman re-emerged, calculating, negotiating over a piece of meat. “The ass too? Christ.” He leaned in. “For a full hour? With you talking? Telling me how much better I am than you? How my worst design is worth more than your entire existence?”
“Yes.”
He named a figure. It was obscenely high. A month’s salary from her old life.
“He’s in,” Jake said instantly in her ear. “Schedule it.”
“He’s in,” Sara echoed, her voice broken.
Greg smiled, a terrible, victorious smile. The man who had once signed her checks now looked at her as a purchased commodity. “I’ll have my assistant send the details.” He didn’t look away. He watched, rapt, as Bruce resumed his brutal pace, finishing with a series of deep, grinding lunges that pushed Sara to the very edge of the desk. Bruce growled, his body locking as he emptied himself inside her.
The call ended only when Bruce finally pulled out, the wet, filthy sound echoing in the sudden quiet. Greg had simply waved, a casual, dismissive gesture, and terminated the connection.
Sara lay collapsed over the desk, trembling, used, filled. Charly lowered the camera, his hands shaking. The live stream had ended. The only sound was her ragged breathing and the hum of the computer.
Tyler’s voice was the first to break the silence. “Fourteen thousand dollars in tips during that call. Two hundred new annual subscribers. Greg’s payment is being processed.” A pause. “That was textbook.”
Jake’s voice in her ear was warm with approval. “You see? You’re not just a set of holes. You’re a facilitator. You bring out the truth in people. You turn respectable men into honest pigs. That’s a gift.”
Sara pushed herself up, wincing. She looked at the blank screen where Greg’s face had been. She felt the warm trickle down her thigh. She saw the smeared sketches under her elbows, ruined.
She didn’t feel destroyed.
She felt… useful. Efficient. She had performed a complex service and met all key performance indicators. Viewer engagement, financial yield, psychological demolition of a target.
Charly came over, a blanket in his hands. He didn’t try to cover her. He just stood there, looking from her to the laptop, his expression one of awe and profound, unsettling gratitude.
She took the blanket from him, not for modesty, but because the air was cold. She wrapped it around her shoulders and sat in her office chair, facing the dark eye of the webcam.
“When’s the next call?” she asked, her voice hoarse but clear.