Free Hypnotized by the Billionaire by Winter Gemissant

1.
    It was a late night at the office, but I knew the drill: keep the light on in my cubicle, and keep the door locked. The locked door was really more of a formality, one that up until recently I hadn’t even bothered with. However, after the incident that happened on the floor above mine in the building, I decided I wasn’t going to take any chances.
    It had been five weeks without any more incidents, but everyone was still talking about it in hushed tones, as though at any moment someone else would disappear, only to be found in a fetish club downtown a week later with no memory of their past life as a respected grant writer, or an up-and-coming web developer, or as was the last case, a very adorable pink-haired but definitely not fetish-club-attending graphic designer named Cass. At least, that had always been the impression I had gotten of her prior to the incident.
    The incidents. It was all we around the office ever called them. Incidents. It was a totally neutral term for them, devoid of any feeling, good or bad. We could have been talking about the traffic during rush hour, the mysterious way someone glanced at us on the metro, or a rash of pranks around the office. But we all knew deep down in our bones...underneath our skin...right down to our teeth the way you do with a truth you can only barely keep inside...we all knew what we were really talking about when we talked about the incidents. We were talking about the way overnight, people who had once been our colleague, our friends, and our lunch partners seemed to transform into sex addicts. It’s all they talked about -- how they were only working for the moment they could leave work to go to the club and fuck a stranger, or how they were suddenly discovering that what they’d really wanted all their lives was to be someone’s sub-slave (a title I’d only just now had inserted into my hushed daily office vocabulary).
    The funny thing was, everybody knew about the incidents, and yet everyone talked about it in code, as though to outright ask ‘is something happening to each of us one by one to turn us into different people?’ would be tantamount to asking to be fired, or admitting that you yourself were secretly interested in being tied to a Saint Andrew’s Cross at the club downtown. One evening someone would leave work, and the next morning, they’d have bite marks on their neck. Different offices had different numbers of people involved. The coding team had a particularly rough time of it on the third floor, with three of their members involved in incidents (separate incidents, we thought at first, but there were rumors that the three were involved in each other’s incidents as well); the city’s art commission group on the second floor had one person. My own office, a group working on a seemingly endless project of trying to build bike paths in the city, hadn’t had anyone -- yet. The cute graphic designer had been my lunch buddy, but ever since her incident, all she ever talked about was pleasing her Master while I politely sipped my coffee and hoped eventually that it was a passing phase. Except I knew it wasn’t. None of the prior abrupt incidents had been passing phases, and so it seemed logical that whatever had happened to Cass was permanent. Her life revolved around doing whatever her Master wanted her to do, and from the marks around her wrists and the way her eyes lit up, it was some rough stuff he wanted her to do, and she loved the hell out of it.
    The final straw -- the one that exasperated and perplexed me beyond all patience -- was earlier that afternoon over our usual lunch meetup in the cafeteria.
    “So then he told me that I wanted him to let me be handcuffed to the cage for the night at the club,” she told me in a hushed whisper, her eyes wide as she leaned over to tell me. “But then halfway through the night he thought I was flirting too much with the other guys who were looking at me -- and I mean, I was handcuffed to the