Chapter 1: The Email: A Shattered Reality
The apartment was quiet, a hollow kind of quiet that amplified the hum of the laptop’s fan. Dave hadn’t moved in seventeen minutes. The pale blue light from the screen washed over his face, catching the sweat beading on his upper lip. His living room, usually a comfortable clutter of mismatched furniture and accounting textbooks, felt like a crime scene. A half-eaten slice of pizza congealed on the coffee table next to a dead plant.
The email had arrived at 3:04 PM. Subject: FYI. No body text. Just an attachment labelled ‘CONF_ROOM_7_10.23.MP4’. He’d almost deleted it as spam. Now he wished he had.
On the screen, grainy security camera footage showed a conference room he recognized. The one on the twelfth floor of Katherine’s office, with the shitty abstract art and the view of the parking garage. The time stamp in the corner read 10:23 AM, two days ago.
Three people were in the room. Two men in shirt sleeves and loosened ties—Mark from Sales and that new guy, Leo, from Logistics. They were leaning over the table, pointing at a spreadsheet projected on the wall. And between them, kneeling on the deep pile carpet, was Katherine.
Dave’s breath hitched.
Her blouse was completely undone, hanging open to her navel. The lace cups of her bra were a pale peach against her skin. Her head was down, her dark hair a curtain around her face, which was turned toward the man on her left—Mark. Her hands were busy at the waistbands of their trousers, her movements efficient, unhurried.
“—so the Q3 projections are fucked unless we can pull the Ontario deal forward,” Mark was saying, his voice slightly distorted by the camera’s microphone. He placed a hand on top of Katherine’s head, not pushing, just resting it there, his fingers threading through her hair. His gaze never left the spreadsheet.
“Logistics can’t miracle that,” Leo replied, his voice tighter. He let out a sharp, controlled breath. “The earliest we can get the dedicated fleet is November 15th. That’s the bottleneck.”
Katherine’s shoulder moved. A soft, wet sound, barely audible over the hum of the projector. Mark’s eyes fluttered shut for a second before he refocused.
“Then we need to renegotiate the client’s timeline. Or eat the cost for air freight.” Mark’s hand flexed in Katherine’s hair. “Fuck. Do that again.”
She did. Her head bobbed forward, taking him deeper into her mouth. Dave could see the muscles working in her jaw. He could see the wet gleam on her lips in the poor resolution. His own stomach clenched, a sick lurch of horror and something else, something hot and shameful that slithered up from his groin.
Leo was watching now, his professional detachment crumbling. He looked down at Katherine, at what she was doing to his colleague, and his mouth fell open. He fumbled with his belt, popping the button on his trousers. Katherine’s right hand, which had been working at his zipper, slipped inside. Leo groaned, his head falling back against the conference chair.
“Air freight blows the margin to hell,” Leo managed to gasp out, his hips giving a shallow thrust into her hand.
“Then we find the margin somewhere else.” Mark’s voice was rough now, gravelly. He was thrusting into her mouth in a slow, steady rhythm, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the table. “God, Katherine… yes. Just like that.”
She moaned around him. The vibration of it made Mark swear again, filthier this time. The sound was a punch to Dave’s diaphragm. He knew that moan. It was the one she made when she was really into it, when she was close herself. He’d heard it last weekend in their bed, muffled against his own shoulder.
On screen, Katherine’s free hand slipped between her own legs, under the hem of her skirt. Dave could see the frantic motion of her wrist. She was touching herself. While she sucked one man off and jerked the other, she was getting herself off in the middle of a fucking business meeting.
Leo came first. It was sudden—a choked-off cry, his body stiffening, his hand clapping over his mouth to stifle the sound. Katherine’s hand kept moving, milking him through it, while her mouth never stopped its relentless work on Mark. She was looking up at him now, her eyes wide and dark, meeting his gaze as he fucked her face.
“I’m gonna… fuck, I’m gonna come,” Mark grunted, his pace turning frantic, brutal.
She took it. She took all of it, swallowing convulsively, her throat working. A strand of spit and something else glistened on her chin. As Mark slumped back, spent, Katherine closed her eyes and let out a long, shuddering sigh. Her body went taut, then slack, her own climax washing over her features, softening them into a look of profound satisfaction.
For a few seconds, the only sound was the hum of the projector and three people trying to catch their breath.
Then Leo zipped up his trousers, cleared his throat. “So. November 15th. We present that as the new baseline?”
Mark, tucking himself away, nodded. He ran a hand over Katherine’s head, almost affectionately. “Yeah. New baseline. Good work, Katherine.”
She smiled up at him, a warm, genuine smile. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then re-buttoned her blouse with the same efficiency she’d shown unbuttoning it. “Thanks, Mark. I’ll get the adjusted figures to you by noon.”
The video ended. The screen went dark, reflecting Dave’s own stunned face back at him.
His hands were trembling. A sour taste flooded his mouth. He thought he might be sick. He lurched off the couch and made it to the bathroom sink before the dry heaves took him, gripping the cold porcelain until his knuckles ached.
Who sent this? Why?
The questions screamed in his head, but beneath them roared a torrent of other, darker feelings. The hot twist of arousal he’d felt watching her. The grotesque fascination with her expertise, with the sheer, casual normalcy of it for her. She’d looked… happy. Fulfilled. More than she ever looked after their careful, considerate Saturday night sex.
He stumbled back to the couch. The video file was still open. His cursor hovered over it.
He shouldn’t. God, he shouldn’t.
He double-clicked. He watched it again. And again.
He saw details he’d missed. The way she’d looked at Mark, not with submission, but with a kind of fierce, proud ownership. I’m making you feel this. The way her orgasm had seemed to crest because she’d felt Leo come, because she was swallowing Mark’s. ‘lt's good to feel satisfied at work' she’d said once, offhandedly, when he’d asked if her new job was stressful. ‘In fact, it’s encouraged.’ He’d thought she meant a sense of accomplishment. He was a fucking idiot.
He leaned forward, the ache in his jeans insistent now, a brutal counterpoint to the wreckage of his heart. He unzipped himself, his hand moving in time with the remembered rhythm of hers on the screen. He hated himself. He hated her. He hated the fucking anonymous sender of this clip. But most of all, he hated the need burning through him, the desperate, ugly urge to see more.
His orgasm, when it came, was a violent, shameful thing, ripped from him as he stared at her frozen, satisfied face on the paused video. He slumped back, panting, slick with sweat and self-loathing.
The email window was still open. The cursor blinked in the reply field.
His fingers, clammy and unsteady, found the keys. He typed three words. He stared at them for a full minute, the glow of the screen the only light in the tomb-like room.
Then he hit send.
Who sent this?
The reply came three hours later. Three hours of Dave pacing the worn path in the carpet, of jumping every time his phone chimed with a mundane notification, of watching the first video seven more times until every frame was seared into the back of his eyelids.
The new email had no subject. The body text was just two lines.
The sender isn’t important. The truth is.
Do you want a name? Or do you want to see more?
Dave’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. He read the lines over and over.A name. An answer. Something to fight, to confront, to make this nightmare tangible. He could picture himself storming into Katherine’s office, grabbing some smug bastard named… Chad or Brad… by the collar. He could taste the righteous fury.
But underneath that fantasy, a darker current pulled. See more.
His mouth was dry. He got a beer from the fridge, cracked it open, drank half in three long gulps. The cool liquid did nothing to douse the heat in his gut. He sat back down at the laptop, the glow making his skin look sallow.See more.
What else was there? A conference room blowjob had redefined the boundaries of his world. What else had she done? In the stock room? Bent over her own desk? In the back of a fucking taxi? His mind, treacherous and slick, supplied the images. Katherine laughing, Katherine with her head thrown back, Katherine taking two men at once, her face contorted in a pleasure he rarely seemed to give her.
He finished the beer. Crushed the can in his fist.
This wasn’t curiosity. This wasn’t even lust, not really. It was a sickness. An infection. He needed to understand the scope of it. He was an accountant.He needed data. Ledgers.Proof. How could he possibly confront her, or the unknown sender, with just one piece of fragmentary evidence? It was out of context. Maybe… maybe there was an explanation. A one-time thing. The video could be misleading.
He knew he was lying. The lie felt greasy and pathetic even as he formed it in his mind. But it was the only lie that allowed him to click the button, to make the choice his whole body was screaming for.
His fingers trembled over the keys. He typed a single sentence, the words a betrayal of every principle he thought he held.
“Send me another video.”
He hit send. The whoosh sound of the email leaving his inbox was like a door slamming shut behind him. He sat in the new, thicker silence, waiting. The shame was immediate, a cold flood that made him shiver. He wrapped his arms around himself.Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. He refreshed the inbox compulsively, every minute on the minute. Nothing. He felt a bizarre, crushing sense of rejection.Had he chosen wrong? Had he failed some test?
He was about to get up, to retreat to the shower and try to scrub the feeling of his own skin off, when a new notification appeared.Another email. Another attachment. This one was labelled ‘STORAGE_B_AFTERHRS.MP4’.
He didn’t pause. He didn’t think. He double-clicked.
The video was darker, grainier. A storage room. Metal shelving stacked with office supplies, boxes of printer paper. The time stamp read 8:17 PM.After hours.
Katherine was there. And Leo, the logistics guy from the first video. And a woman Dave recognized—Sarah from HR. Katherine was on her knees again, but she wasn’t the focus. Sarah was. Sarah was leaning back against a pallet of copy paper, her skirt hiked up around her waist, her blouse ripped open. Leo was behind Katherine, his trousers around his ankles, his hands gripping her hips, fucking her hard and deep from behind.
The sounds were different. Rawer. There was no pretense of work talk here. Just the wet, rhythmic slap of skin on skin, the grunt of a man’s effort, the high, sharp cries of the women.
“Fuck her harder,” Katherine moaned, her voice ragged. She was reaching between Sarah’s legs, her fingers working in time with Leo’s thrusts. “Make her come. I want to feel you get harder when she comes.”
“You’re such a filthy bitch,” Leo growled, pistoning into Katherine. His hands came around her, roughly squeezing her breasts through her silk camisole.
“I know,” Katherine gasped, a wild smile on her face. She leaned down, capturing one of Sarah’s nipples in her mouth, sucking hard. Sarah screamed, her back arching off the paper pallet.
“I’m gonna—Katherine, I’m gonna—” Sarah chanted.
“Do it,” Katherine commanded, lifting her head. “Come for him. Now.”
Sarah’s body bowed, a silent scream on her lips as she climaxed. Katherine threw her head back, her own cry echoing in the concrete room as Leo drove into her, his rhythm breaking into a final, brutal frenzy.
“Take it,” he snarled. “Take all of it, you greedy cunt.”
He shuddered, collapsing over her back. For a moment, the only sound was their ragged breathing. Then Katherine, still on her knees, still impaled, looked over her shoulder at him. Her face was flushed, triumphant. “Told you,” she panted, a ghost of a laugh in her voice. “The best ones happen after hours.”
The video ended.Dave was rock hard. He was crying. Silent, hot tears tracked through the stubble on his cheeks. He fumbled for his zipper, his movements frantic, animalistic. He didn’t touch himself with any tenderness. It was a punishment, a release valve for a pressure that was going to blow him apart. He came with a choked sob, his seed spattering the coffee table, the laptop screen, his own shaking hand.
He came with a choked sob, his seed spattering the coffee table, the laptop screen, his own shaking hand.
He stared at the mess, at the opaque streaks blurring Katherine’s frozen, triumphant face. A wave of revulsion so profound it was nausea crashed over him. He scrambled back on the couch as if the laptop itself were toxic, wiping his hand on his jeans, then on the couch cushion, desperate to be clean. He couldn’t get clean. The filth was inside him now, pumping through his veins with every sick, eager heartbeat.
For a long time, he just sat there in the gloom, the only sounds the hum of the fridge and the frantic thud of his own pulse in his ears. He wanted to smash the laptop. He wanted to drive to Katherine’s office right now, break down the door of that storage room, and scream until his lungs bled. He wanted to scrub his brain with steel wool. Instead, he stood on unsteady legs and walked to the kitchen, wet a paper towel under the tap, and went back to the living room. With methodical, grim focus, he wiped the table, the laptop screen, his hand. He balled the paper towel up and threw it hard towards the kitchen trash can. It missed, bouncing off the cabinet door and landing on the floor. He left it there.
He sank back onto the couch. The silence was a pressure. He needed to hear her voice. Not the version from the videos, but his version. The one who laughed at bad movies and bit her lip when she was concentrating on a spreadsheet. He picked up his phone. His thumb hovered over her name in his favorites. What would he say? ‘Hey Kat, just watching you get railed by your coworkers. How was your day?’
A bitter, acrid laugh escaped him. It sounded like a cough.
The laptop screen had gone to sleep. In the dark, his reflection was a ghost floating in the black rectangle. He reached out a trembling finger and tapped the trackpad. The screen glowed back to life, the email client still open, the video file icon sitting there like a landmine. He couldn’t look at it again. He couldn’t not.
He minimized the window. His inbox stared back at him. Three new messages. A newsletter from his gym. A shipping confirmation for printer paper. And a third, from the same anonymous sender as before.
His breath caught. The subject line was blank. His cursor, a tiny arrow of damning light, hovered over it. Do not open it, a sane part of his mind begged. Throw the whole computer out the window. Go. Now.
He opened it.
The body text was just five words, centered on the screen like a threat.
THIS IS THE LAST FREEBIE.
Below it, a single hyperlink pulsed, blue and innocent. Not an attachment this time. A link. To where? Some dark corner of the web? A private server? His finger shook as he guided the cursor. He clicked.