Behave for Me

Toner and ink… that’s what my skin smells like now, and I don’t wash it off.

This shrine demands devotion. The walls are gone under hundreds of paper faces, pinned edge to edge, a mosaic of him that only I get to see… a black-and-white confession.

I find a fresh print, and my finger goes straight to his jaw, following the line of it because I know exactly where it sits even with my eyes closed. I want the man underneath the paper so bad my hand shakes doing something this simple.

His nose. The curve of his lower lip. It’s just static, ink on glossy stock, and it still pulls at me like his arrogance has a gravity of its own.

His eyes get my thumb next. Brown, dark, burnt-coffee dense… eyes that have never once actually looked at me, not really, not the way I look at him. That’s fine. That’s temporary.

The binder’s next, and I don’t care about beauty in these pages...I never did. I care about what he buries under his expensive suits, the truth he thinks nobody’s tracking. My handwriting’s crammed into every margin.

“08:14. An expression shift in the left corner of the mouth. Irritation.”

My pen already knows the clench of his jaw from the board meeting three days ago. I marked it down before the meeting even ended.

He thinks he’s impenetrable.

His irises harden every time he talks to his mother… that’s the tell, the one crack in the mask. Exhaustion pulls the skin tight around his eyes, and for a second there’s a ghost of a real man underneath the CEO.

Every print is a confession he never meant to make. I’ve been mapping the topography of his boredom for weeks now, waiting for the exact second his control snaps… and I will know it before he does.

He’s watching me from the wall, except he doesn’t know it, doesn’t know this version of him even exists. I press my palm flat against his chest on the print by the door, and my heart’s going wild against my ribs like it’s trying to climb out and get to him first.

“Soon, Marcello. The map is almost complete.”

That first day hits me as if it happened an hour ago, not years. He stood in the centre of the crowd in a suit worth more than my tuition, and something in me went quiet and starving at the same time. Being invisible in his orbit wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough.

My pulse hammered under my collarbone.

"Mr. Vitale, I think that tie is choking your ambition. It would look better on my bedroom floor.”

He stopped, and the whole world seemed to slow down with him. Dark brown eyes swept over me...void of warmth, utterly unimpressed.

“You’re cute. But your taste is clearly expensive, and your potential is nonexistent. Don’t waste my time. There are plenty of other places for you to humiliate yourself.”

“Is that a rejection, or are you just terrified of what happens if you actually look at me?”

A thin smile pulled at the corner of his mouth as he leaned in.

“It’s a dismissal. Learn the difference before you speak to me again.”

He turned and walked away as if I’d already stopped existing.

I watched his spine retreating, and the rejection settled into my chest like lead. Defeat felt different that day. It tasted like an invitation to sharpen the blade.

Humiliation didn’t burn. It hollowed me out instead, and something sharper and hungrier moved into the space.

He disappeared into the crowd, and I heard it... the finality of it clicking shut like a heavy lock.

He wasn’t just a man anymore. He was a puzzle made of bone, suit, and silence, and I decided right there that I was going to solve it.

Obsession took hold. My life stopped being mine and became a series of calculated manoeuvres, all pointed at one thing... stripping him bare.

Years bled together into a relentless cycle of preparation. I traded sleep for late-night archives, and I studied the friction of his high corporate power until I understood it better than he did.

Negotiation seminars taught me how to dismantle him. Every etiquette course became a blade in my hands, something I sharpened until I could slip past his defences without him even noticing the cut.

I stopped serving and started consuming. I became the mirror he didn’t know he needed.

Silence was my only tool. I moved only when necessary, and eventually I wasn’t a person in the room anymore. I was a fixture, a shadow, something the eye slides past.

My existence at Vitale Capital was a performance of invisibility.

Coffee arrived at the precise temperature he craved. Files aligned with his unspoken preferences. Meetings were anticipated long before he opened his mouth.

Their mistake was looking through me instead of at me. People saw a competent, quiet assistant...a blur of efficiency...while I stood three feet away and watched his expression fracture, piece by piece, every time he got closer to breaking.

The distance between us keeps shrinking. I’m dismantling the man I once wanted to undress, one piece at a time.

A stranger meets my gaze in the mirror. Tailored silk, hair locked into a knot, eyes vacant of everything but the mission.

Each button clicks a gear into place as I fasten it. I step outside, and I don’t enter the city... I infiltrate a war zone.

Vitale Capital looms, a monolith of black glass. Getting through security feels like breaching an enemy perimeter.

Three metres separate my desk from his office. Through the glass, he’s still just a museum exhibit… a portrait of ambition I intend to steal.

“09:00 AM. Black coffee, two sips, precisely measured.”

“09:12 AM. Watch the way he gnaws his pen when the market shifts.”

“09:45 AM. His pulse, a visible flutter in the hollow of his throat, when the pressure peaks.”

“Zara. The briefing notes.”

I cross the carpet and close the distance faster than I should. I stop inches from his desk… exactly where I want to be… and my mouth is already moving before I’ve decided what to say; the files in my hand are suddenly the least interesting thing in the room compared to the tension pulling at his jaw.

“They’re ready.”

He reaches for the papers, and his fingers brush mine... barely, a second, nothing... and it still goes through me like a shock. He recoils as I burn him, pulling his whole body back to rebuild the space between us.

“Zara, you’re too close. Move back.”

“Just trying to understand what actually drives you, sir. Or is it just fear of what happens if you actually let me get close?”

“Don’t test my patience. Get back to work.”

Camilla Rossi drifts toward his desk, and her fingers land on his wrist like she’s planting a flag.

“Marcello, darling.”

He rises to meet her halfway. The kiss she leaves on his cheek is calculated, deliberate... a mark of ownership dressed up as affection.

My knuckles go white against the desk. Something violent and clawing moves through me, fixed on one need and one need only… Get her out of this room before I do something I can’t take back.

Leaning into his space, her effortless grace acts like poison.

Her smile is practised, shallow, a curve she’s rehearsed in mirrors, and it still stabs straight through my lungs. Does she know how easily she could be unmade?

Sickening. He allows it. He lets her hands linger on his shoulder as they belong there.

Her fingers press into him, and I clock the exact force of her claim. She thinks she owns territory that’s already hollowed out, waiting for me.

Every laugh she spills cracks the glass a little further. I want to be the one who shatters the silence between them completely.

My mind is already cataloguing ways to dismantle her composure: a spilt drink, a quiet threat in the elevator, the exact second her confidence turns to ash. She’s feeding on something without even knowing it. She’s a parasite, and she doesn’t know whose obsession she’s living inside.

Would he greet me with that same cold annoyance if I crossed the room? Does he see the blade I’ve become?

His laugh follows hers, low and resonant, and the sound scrapes the skin straight off my bones.

Three strides. That’s all it would take to close the distance. A sharp word. A shattered glass. One truth laid bare to ruin their pretty little picture.

I hold my breath and wait anyway.

His eyes darken every time she laughs, and I memorise it, cataloguing every agonising second of hers like evidence. Their movements are a debt, mounting, painful...and I intend to collect every cent of it.

Soon, I will be the one demanding full payment. I watch until my eyes ache, tracking the exact moment his carefully constructed mask inevitably slips.

It draws near. My hands feel the heavy, pulsing weight of the coming collapse, a delicious tension I crave.

The office door clicks shut, isolating us in the aftermath. Finally, the blissful silence returns to me.

The bin’s still got it, that crumpled scrap, ink pressed in hard enough to tear the page. He does that when he’s angry. Rips through paper as it owes him something. I want it before the cleaning crew does, so I wait until the floor’s dead quiet, and then I move like nobody’s supposed to notice I moved at all.

My hands aren’t steady when I pick it up, and I don’t try to fix that. Some things deserve to shake. I flatten it against the desk anyway, wrinkle by wrinkle, because this is the part of him nobody else gets to see… the ugly, impatient part… and I’m not wasting it.

His chair’s still warm. That’s the part that gets me every time: how something so small can feel like he never left, like if I sit here long enough, the heat becomes him. So I sit. I let it lie to me for as long as it’ll hold.

Cedar. Ambition. The smell does something to the hunger that’s already sitting in my stomach, and I don’t fight it anymore; fighting it never worked.

My palm finds the curve of the backrest without me telling it to. It already knows where he rests his weight every day. I’ve made sure of that.

“Not much longer, Marcello.”

The space where he usually stands is empty, and I like it better this way...easier to imagine him filling it exactly how I want. My mouth curves before I even decide to smile.

“You don’t see me now, but soon, you won’t be able to see anything else.”