Chapter 2: The Second Revelation: Garters and Betrayal
The link opened a browser window, stark and dark, with a single password field blinking in its center. No instructions. No website name. Just a cursor pulsing in the blank box.
Dave stared at it. His mind, still reeling from the storage room footage, struggled to latch onto this new, sterile obstacle. A password. Of course. Nothing was ever free. The previous videos had been bait. Now the hook was being set.
He tried ‘Katherine’. He tried her birthday. He tried ‘accounting’. He tried ‘fiancé’. ‘Dave123’. Each attempt met with a soft, dismissing chime and a red flash around the field. He was locked out after six failed tries, a ten-minute countdown timer appearing beneath the box.
Ten minutes to think. To reconsider.
He spent it pacing, the squeak of his socks on the hardwood the only sound besides the frantic thrum of his thoughts. He could close the laptop. Walk away. He could call Katherine, right now, and just… ask her. The thought was laughable. What would he say? ‘Hey, Kat, I’ve got some videos here, mind explaining?’ His hand went to his phone again, cold and slippery in his palm. He put it down. He couldn’t. He wasn’t ready for the world to break. Here, in the blue glow, the nightmare was contained. Out there, it would become real.
The timer hit zero. The password field reappeared, innocent and blank. He knelt before the coffee table like a supplicant. His fingers hovered.
He thought of her passwords. She used variations of her old dog’s name, ‘Buster’, plus numbers. He typed ‘Buster23’. Error.
He tried ‘KatherineBuster’. Error.
His mind, trawling through the silt of shared life, surfaced a memory. A joke. Last tax season, stressed out of his mind, he’d complained about a client’s password being ‘Password123’. She’d laughed. ‘Mine’s way better,’ she’d said, eyes gleaming with mock pride. ‘It’s “Osc@rW1n”’. Their inside joke about her desperate desire to win the office ‘Excellympics’ trophy, a stupid plastic Oscar statue.
He typed it now, carefully: O s c @ r W 1 n
The chime was different. Green. The screen dissolved.
A video player loaded, high-definition and crisp, a shocking clarity after the grainy security footage. This was from a phone, held steady. The timestamp was recent. Last Friday. 1:15 PM. Lunch hour.
The setting was the twelfth-floor break room. Dave knew this room too. The too-bright LED lights, the laminate counters, the large window overlooking the soulless corporate plaza below. The microwave with its stubborn popcorn smell.
Katherine was there. And Mark. Just the two of them.
She was sitting on one of the high stools at the central island, her back to the window. She was wearing the emerald green silk blouse he’d bought her for her birthday, the one that brought out the flecks of gold in her eyes. It was unbuttoned now, hanging open. Her bra was black lace. Her skirt, a tailored pencil skirt, was hitched up around her thighs. Black lace garters held up her stockings.
She wasn’t kneeling. She was in control.
Mark stood before her, his suit jacket off, his tie loosened. He looked amused, aroused, his hands resting on her knees as she bracketed him with her legs.
“So you’re saying the Brandenburg proposal is fundamentally flawed?” Katherine asked, her voice playful. She ran her hands up his shirtfront, popping a button open.
“The costings are a fantasy,” Mark replied, his voice husky. He leaned in, nuzzling her neck. “They’ve underestimated the volumetric by at least twenty percent.”
“Mmm,” she murmured, tilting her head to give him better access. Her hands went to his belt. “So we scrap it? Go with the Zurich model?”
“Zurich is safe. It’s boring. But it’s deliverable.” His breath hitched as she unbuckled his belt. The sound of the zipper was loud in the quiet room.
On the couch, Dave’s own traitorous body responded. The horror was there, a cold stone in his gut, but it was wrapped in a searing, undeniable heat. He watched her hands, those familiar hands with the delicate silver ring he’d given her, work with deft certainty. She freed Mark, stroking him once, twice, her grip sure. Then she hitched her skirt higher, revealing the dark triangle of her underwear, and guided him to her.
She didn’t impale herself. She lowered herself onto him, inch by agonizing inch, her head falling back, a soft sigh escaping her lips. It was a slow, controlled conquest.
“Safe is… good sometimes,” she breathed, beginning to rock, a gentle, rolling motion of her hips.
Dave’s hand moved to his own belt. He didn’t want it to. It felt like watching a car crash in slow motion, powerless to look away. He undid the button, the sound a pathetic echo of the one on screen.
Mark groaned, his hands gripping her waist. “Christ, Katherine.”
“Deliverable is better,” she said, her rhythm increasing. Her moans were soft, vocal, punctuating her words. “A sure thing… is its own… kind of thrill.” Her breaths came faster. She leaned forward, bracing her hands on his shoulders, her blouse falling completely open. “Don’t you think?”
She was looking right at him, at Mark, but Dave felt seen. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, clouded with a pleasure so deep it was a physical entity in the room. This wasn’t the frantic, raw fucking of the storage room. This was slow. Luxurious. Intimate. It was worse. So much worse.
Mark couldn’t form words anymore. He just nodded, his thrusts meeting her downward strokes.
Katherine’s smile was victorious. “Come on, Mark,” she coaxed, her voice a throaty whisper right by his ear. Her pace quickened, turning urgent. “Give it to me. The quarterly report… is due… at three.”
She was close. Dave could see it in the tension of her neck, the flush spreading down her chest. Her orgasm wasn’t a surprise attack; it was a summit she was deliberately climbing, pulling Mark up with her. Her muscles clenched. She cried out, a sharp, beautiful sound that twisted in Dave’s chest. As she spasmed around him, Mark buried his face in her shoulder and shuddered, his own release triggered by hers.
For a moment, they stayed locked together, breathing heavily. The break room was silent except for their panting. Katherine ran a hand through Mark’s sweat-damp hair. “Good meeting,” she whispered, and laughed, a light, genuine sound that shattered something in Dave.
The video ended.
Dave was frozen, his own release sticky and cold on his hand. The self-loathing was a tidal wave this time, pulling him under. He had just… he had watched his fiancée make love to another man, had been aroused by it, had mirrored their act in his own pathetic solitude. He was a voyeur in his own life, a ghost haunting the ruins of his future.
The video player closed automatically. The dark browser window remained. Then, text scrawled across it, line by line, as if typed by an invisible hand.
You see? It’s not just sex. It’s her job. She’s good at it.
She believes in it.
Do you want to more?
A new field appeared. Not for a password. For a response.
The cursor blinked. Waiting.
He thought of her laugh at the end. The comfortable, satisfied sound of it. The way she’d looked at Mark—not with love, but with a profound, professional approval. Good meeting.
Good meeting.
The words echoed in the hollow space behind his eyes. They were so ordinary. So devastatingly normal. Dave stared at the blinking cursor in the response field. His fingers were numb. The taste of bile was still at the back of his throat, a sour counterpoint to the lingering, shameful throb in his groin.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw the laptop against the wall and watch its plastic shell splinter into a thousand pieces, taking the images with it. Instead, a terrible, quiet curiosity settled over him, cold and smothering as a wet blanket. It wasn’t about desire anymore. It was about mapping the boundaries of the disaster. He was an accountant. He needed the full ledger.
His finger, trembling only slightly now, moved to the keyboard. He typed a single word.
Yes.
He hit enter. The word vanished from the field. For a moment, nothing happened. The silence in the apartment was absolute. Then, new text scrawled across the dark screen.
Good.
Good.
The word hung on the screen for a moment, a pale judgment. Then it vanished.
New text spilled out, the letters appearing one by one with a faint, digital ticking sound that seemed to echo in the quiet room.
Record yourself and Katherine having sex.Film it. Send it to us.
You have seven days.
Dave’s entire body went cold. The noise in his head—the revulsion, the curiosity, the sick arousal—all of it silenced under a sudden, glacial wave of pure terror. This wasn’t observation anymore. This was participation. They wanted to pull him into the frame, to make him a performer in Katherine’s secret world. To turn their own bed, their own intimacy, into just another file im.
“No,” he whispered to the empty room. The word was dry, cracking in the middle.
The cursor blinked. A reply field opened.
He stared at his hands, still faintly sticky. He saw Katherine’s smile in the break room, the way she’d said ‘good meeting.’ He saw the monstrous, growing part of himself that needed to click on the next link, and the next, that needed to see how deep the rabbit hole went. That part was a crouching animal in his chest, its hunger drowning out the voice of the man he’d been two days ago.
Seven days.
The silence stretched. The hum of the laptop was the only sound.His fingers moved. They typed a question, the only one that mattered now.
Why?
The reply was immediate.
To see if you can do it. To see what she’s really like when she’s with you.
The clock starts now, Dave.
The screen went completely black. A small, digital timer appeared in the bottom right corner of his desktop, superimposed over his wallpaper—a photo of him and Katherine hiking at Smith Rock. Her smile was bright, untroubled. The timer read 6:23:59:58.
The seconds ticked down.
He slammed the laptop shut. The room plunged into near-darkness, the only light a sliver under the kitchen door. He sat in the thick gloom, the after-image of the timer burned onto his vision.Seven days. A week. He could hear his own pulse in his ears.
The front door lock clicked.Keys jangled. The handle turned. Light from the hallway spilled into the apartment, framing Katherine as she stepped inside, dropping her leather tote bag with a tired sigh.“Dave? You home? God, it’s dark in here.” Her voice was just her voice.Warm. Familiar. The voice that asked him to pass the salt, that whispered I love you in the dark. She flicked the switch by the door, flooding the living room with harsh overhead light.
He blinked, exposed, feeling the guilt tattooed across his face.
She stood there, still in her work clothes—a crisp white shirt, tailored black trousers. Her hair was up in a tidy knot. She looked professional.Beautiful.Normal. She looked like the woman he had asked to marry him.
She looked nothing at all like the woman on the screen.
Her eyes found him on the couch, hunched and pale. “Hey,” she said, her smile softening into concern. She walked over, her heels clicking on the floor. She perched on the edge of the coffee table, right in front of him, and reached out to touch his knee. Her hand was warm.“You okay? You look like hell.”
He flinched. Just a tiny, involuntary spasm, but her hand stilled. It was a micron of a hesitation before she withdrew it, folding her own hands in her lap. And in that single moment, he saw her differently. Her gaze wasn’t passing over him, its focus sharpening. She was observing him. Analyzing a subtle, telling glitch in real-time.
Her office self was in that look.
The moment passed. She leaned back slightly, her expression still open, still concerned. But something intangible had shifted in the air between them.
“Long day?” she asked, her tone gentle, but calculated in its gentleness.
He looked at her. The countdown in his head synced with the one he knew was ticking on his laptop.
Six days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-nine minutes.
“Yeah,” he managed, his voice rough.