Chapter 8
Caleb
I'm starting to wonder if I might be obsessed. Not in the casual way I normally am, but… clinical definition.
Because here I am, sitting in a black Tahoe across the street from Iron River Fitness, with enough surveillance equipment to make me look like a Mission Impossible cliche.
The drink-holders are littered with empty coffee cups—three of them, all from different days because apparently I've made this parking spot my second office.
In addition to my custom security setup on the dash, there's a laptop balanced on the passenger seat, feeds cycling through every angle I've managed to hack into.
Legal? Absolutely not.
Necessary? Apparently fucking so, because I can't seem to stop myself.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to determine if your good little slut is actually… not yours at all.
The leather steering wheel creaks under my grip. I force myself to loosen my fingers, to breathe. This is what passes for restraint these days—not breaking inanimate objects while I watch her gym from across the street like some kind of deranged stalker.
Which, let's be honest, is exactly what I am. I've crossed so many lines I can't even see them in the rearview mirror anymore.
It's been nine days since I gave her my card with explicit instructions to find me when she's ready. To contact me. To give me some indication that what happened between us wasn't just a fever dream I manufactured in my own twisted mind.
Three of those days count as travel days since she went to Vegas for her little glow-up.
But actually, the third day doesn't really count as a travel day anymore because Ryan fucking Adamson bumped in to her at the baggage claim.
What if that was planned?
No I can't even consider that.
Why Caleb? It's an honest question. You have no idea what's been happening inside Iron River Fitness. You have no cameras in there. Not a single fucking one.
The point is, two days out of nine.
Two full days she was, for certain, not thinking about Ryan Adamson because she was in Vegas getting new hair, and new nails, and new clothes, and new makeup. A complete transformation. A reinvention.
Trying to forget me.
Trying to scrub away every trace of what happened in the maze. Trying to wash the blood off her hands with platinum blonde dye and Charlotte Tilbury foundation. Trying to bury the memory of my cock spewing long ropes of come all over a corpse.
Trying to put her past behind her—to put me behind her.
That's what women do when they break up with a man, isn't it? They reinvent themselves. They emerge from the cocoon as someone new, someone better, someone who never would have done those things in the first place.
They start over. Shiny, and new, and utterly unrecognizable.
Which is bad enough on its own—especially since she hasn't taken a single fucking opportunity to call me.
To reach out. To acknowledge my existence.
Does she have any concept, any remote understanding, of how many women would literally kill to have my card pressed into their palm with a no-strings offer to come find me whenever they wanted?
Not that I'd ever bring one of those corporate vultures back to my cabin—Christ, no.
This is a hard line in the sand for me, drawn in permanent fucking marker.
No professional women. Not the lawyers, not the executives, not the consultants who circle me at networking events like sharks scenting blood in the water.
They're catty, and ruthless, and emotional in all the wrong ways—three traits that aren't so much dangerous as they are utterly psychotic. The kind of psychotic that ends with restraining orders, leaked tabloid stories, and property damage.
The point is—because apparently I need to keep circling back to 'the point'—the card itself was never meant to be casual. It wasn't some throwaway business gesture, some LinkedIn connection request made flesh.
That little rectangle of embossed cardstock with my private number and address, for fucks sake, represented something I don't offer. Something I've spent the better part of a decade not offering, to anyone, under any circumstances.
It was an admission. A crack in the armor. A fucking invitation written in a language I don't speak with anyone else, to come out to my secret Batcave where I go to unwind after balancing the scales and dispose of evidence.
And what did she do with it?
She tossed it in whatever mental garbage bin holds all the other mistakes she's trying to erase from her life. Shoved it into that desktop folder called 'Do not Open' right alongside being raped by Derek and stories that cross all the lines.
She probably really has been lusting over Ryan all these months. Building him up in her head as the safe alternative, the normal choice, which in that case means...
I sigh and just allow myself to think it. To sit with the discomfort of the thought like pressing on a bruise to confirm it still hurts.
Go ahead, Caleb. Say the words. If not out loud, at least in the privacy of your own goddamn head.
She really has moved on.
The sight of me coming all over a dead body was her limit. Her actual, genuine, non-negotiable hard limit.
I'm her hard limit.
Should I feel good about this? Like some perverse achievement unlocked?
Hey, congratulations, you're so fundamentally fucked up that you're the actual hard limit for the woman who wrote Call of the Labyrinth—a book where every single scene is a rape fantasy minus the fantasy part, where the heroine gets hunted, and captured, and violated three separate times by literal animals before accepting captivity as the better option.
The descriptions of their cocks included the word 'fur'.
Fur, for fucks sake.
The woman who dreamed that up, who lived inside that narrative for months while writing it, looked at me and thought: Nope. This is too much. He is too much.
I sigh, and the sound that comes out is something closer to defeat than I've allowed myself in years.
Why am I doing this?
That's the actual question, isn't it? Not what I'm doing—because what I'm doing is abundantly fucking clear.
I'm sitting in a vehicle across from a gym, tracking a woman who doesn't want to be tracked, inserting myself into her life in increasingly unhinged ways while pretending I'm respecting her boundaries.
The why is the part I keep avoiding.
Why Idaho Falls? Why this parking spot? Why am I watching Iron River Fitness like it holds answers I don't want to hear?
Why did I give her the card in the first place?
Why does the thought of her with Ryan Adamson—a perfectly decent man who owns a gym and probably has a golden retriever and uses phrases like "let's grab coffee sometime"—make me want to burn the entire building to the ground?
I could be anywhere. I have three homes, multiple offshore accounts, enough resources to disappear completely if I wanted. I run a billion-dollar investment firm from my laptop. I coordinate international operations for The Scales without ever leaving Jackson Hole.
I don't need to be here.
But I drove two hours to sit in this parking lot for the third time this week, waiting for a glimpse of platinum blonde hair and combat boots.
Waiting for her.
My throat tightens around something I don't have a name for.
Or rather—I do have a name for it. I just don't want to say it. Don't want to acknowledge what it means, what it implies about the carefully constructed architecture of my entire fucking life.
Because if I say it, it becomes real.
If I say it, then everything I've told myself about control, and ownership, and possession gets reframed into something infinitely more dangerous.
Possession I understand. Obsession I can justify. Even the stalking, and surveillance, and orchestrated manipulation—I can rationalize all of it through the lens of dominance and submission. Of giving her what she wrote about wanting, of being exactly the monster she needed.
But this?
This sitting in parking lots and tracking her movements and feeling my chest constrict when she flirts with another man?
This isn't dominance. This is something else entirely.
I grip the steering wheel again, forcing the words into existence inside my own head where no one else can hear them.
I might actually love her.
The admission sits there like a grenade with the pin pulled.
Not obsession dressed up as devotion. Not possession masquerading as protection.
Actual love. The kind that makes you rearrange your entire existence around someone else's orbit. The kind that turns you into a version of yourself you don't recognize—softer in some ways, more dangerous in others.
The kind that makes you give someone a card with your private number and Batcave address and then wait, like an idiot, for them to use it.
I force myself to take a deep breath.
Then another.
Then I do something so fucking pathetic I can barely stand myself.
I open a new document on my laptop and title it: Scarletta Desmond - Assessment.
Like I'm preparing a quarterly earnings report. Like she's a potential acquisition target that requires due diligence.
Like I'm a teenage girl with a fucking diary.
I start typing.
CONS.
My fingers hover over the keys for a moment before I commit.
She's a slob. Six months of surveillance footage doesn't lie. Dishes piled in the sink for weeks. Laundry mountains that probably qualified as biohazards. The blanket fort wasn't charming—it was depression architecture. She lived like someone who'd given up on herself completely.
She has no ambition. Forty-seven complete stories posted anonymously online for free.
Not a single one submitted to an agent or publisher.
Brilliant work rotting in digital obscurity because she's too terrified of rejection to even try.
She'd rather starve than risk someone telling her she's not good enough.
She's financially incompetent. Four months behind on rent. Maxed credit cards. Student loans in default.