The Performance Review

His job was on the line. Then his boss offered him a different kind of performance plan.

Ryan Peck has spent years being adequate.

Adequate employee. Adequate boyfriend. Adequate man.

Then senior executive Alan Briggs sits in on Ryan's performance review and sees exactly what everyone else has missed: Ryan is capable of more. He just needs someone willing to demand it from him.

The private mentoring sessions begin innocently enough. Better posture. Stronger decisions. No apologizing. No hesitation.

Then Ryan makes a mistake.

Desperate to keep his job, he tells Briggs he'll do anything.

Briggs decides to find out whether he means it.

Soon the locked conference room on the twenty-eighth floor becomes a place where ordinary workplace rules no longer apply. Every lesson pushes Ryan further into a world of obedience, humiliation, control, and desires he refuses to name. And the more Briggs takes from him, the harder it becomes for Ryan to pretend he keeps returning only because of the job.

Because Alan Briggs isn't simply improving Ryan's performance.

He's rewriting the rules of Ryan's life.

And eventually, the most important question won't be whether Ryan can satisfy his boss.

It will be whether there's anything left of him that doesn't belong to Briggs.