Chapter Four - Simon
I keep my distance for the next three days. Not out of restraint—if I wanted her, I’d have her—but because watching her without being seen tells me more than any confrontation ever could.
My men stay two blocks behind her at all times, rotating shifts so she never notices the same face twice. I check in on the updates every few hours, and when the footage streams in, I watch that instead of sleeping.
Patterns always reveal the truth. People lie with words, not with habits.
Eden walks the same three routes. Her apartment to campus. Campus to a tiny bookstore on Twelfth. Bookstore to a café where she sits by the window, always choosing the seat that gives her a view of the door.
She drinks tea, not coffee. She writes more than she reads. When someone passes too close to her table, her shoulders pull tight before she forces them down.
Eden is hyperaware but not in the way of someone trained. More in the way of someone who learned to pay attention because the world didn’t give her the privilege of safety.
When she texts, her face softens. When she speaks to anyone, she smiles politely even if her eyes say she wants to be left alone.
She isn’t na?ve, but she trusts the world far more than she should.
It’s a contradiction that shouldn’t exist. Softness balanced against sharp instinct.
Warmth balanced against caution. Innocence threaded with something that isn’t innocence at all.
I watch her on one of the cameras near her bookstore—the security feed is grainy, but clear enough. She pauses at the display window, staring at a psychology text before deciding against it.
A woman bumps her shoulder, and Eden murmurs an apology, even though she wasn’t at fault. She keeps walking, notebook hugged to her chest.
She’s careful, but not careful enough.
My second-in-command, Viktor, stands beside me in the surveillance room. His arms are crossed, his expression unreadable.
“You’re spending a lot of time on this girl,” he says lightly.
“It’s surveillance,” I reply. “Nothing more.”
His silence says he doesn’t believe me.
I turn my focus back to the screen. Eden steps into the café.
Her hair is pinned up today, messy strands escaping, her cheeks flushed from the chill outside.
She orders tea with a quiet voice, then settles into her usual seat.
She skims her notebook. She tucks her hair behind her ear when she concentrates. She chews her lip when she’s thinking.
None of this should matter. It bothers me how much it does.
I leave the surveillance room and head outside. The city is cold, the kind of cold that bites rather than stings. I pull my coat tighter and cross the street, pacing slowly until I’m close enough to see the café door.
I don’t go in. I never go in.
Instead, I stand by an alley entrance across the road, posture relaxed, hands in my pockets, eyes half lidded. Anyone watching would think I’m waiting for a ride. I’m not.
I’m watching her.
Ten minutes pass before the door swings open and she steps outside. She tucks her notebook into her bag and buttons her coat with slow, deliberate motions. A man walking past clips her arm, knocking her slightly off-balance.
Before I can move, she steadies herself.
She doesn’t snap at him. Doesn’t glare. Instead, she pauses and turns when she hears someone else whimper.
It’s a girl—a stranger—standing by the café wall, shaking with her hands over her face.
Eden goes to her instantly, no hesitation.
She crouches down beside her, touches her arm gently, and asks if she’s alright.
The stranger sobs something unintelligible, clutching her stomach, and Eden listens. Really listens.
People notice them. People walk around them. Even so, Eden stays.
Her empathy is raw, unguarded, and deeply inconvenient.
I watch the scene unfold with a tightening in my jaw.
She has no idea how dangerous it is to kneel in the open, distracted, vulnerable.
She has no idea who walks these streets at night or who owns the buildings she’s standing between.
If someone saw weakness in her, they could use it. They would use it.
My men stand a few shops down, pretending to smoke while keeping an eye out. They know not to interfere with her unless she’s in actual danger.
One wrong encounter and she would be.
She finishes consoling the woman, walks her inside the café, and stays until the manager calls for help. It takes ten minutes. Ten minutes of Eden being soft in a place that eats softness alive.
My fingers flex inside my pocket, irritation burning hot in my chest.
She shouldn’t be doing that. She shouldn’t be comforting strangers in a neighborhood held together by fear and silence. She shouldn’t be giving pieces of herself away like she doesn’t know what lurks under the surface of this city.
For a moment—one sharp, dangerous moment—I consider ending the problem entirely.
Killing someone like her would be easy. Forgettable. A quiet incident in a crowded city that swallows tragedies by the hundreds each week. But as I watch her walk out of the café again, tucking her hair behind her ear with a small, tired smile, the idea feels… off.
I push off the wall and move farther into the alley shadows as she continues down the street. My gaze stays locked on her until she turns the corner.
One of my men approaches. “Boss, you want us to keep following her?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Up close or—”
“No. Distance. Report movements. Nothing more.”
He nods and disappears.
I stay where I am for a moment longer. The city hums around me—cars rushing, sirens distant, chatter spilling from storefronts—but none of it fills the strange silence she leaves behind.
Curiosity was one thing. This is something else.
As I step onto the street again, my gaze drifts once more toward the route she took. Even though she’s out of sight, the echo of her lingers.
***
It’s late, the kind of late where the streets turn thin and the city sheds its crowds one block at a time. Eden walks with her notebook tucked beneath her arm, her steps unhurried but alert. She always checks her surroundings; she just doesn’t check them well enough.
The man tailing her is easy to read. Young, wiry, jittery. His eyes keep drifting to her bag, then to the quiet stretch of sidewalk ahead.
A petty thief—one of the many pests this city breeds by the hour. Normally I wouldn’t waste a breath on someone like him. Not worth the bullet. Not worth the disposal. But when his pace shifts to match hers, something sharp flares through my chest.
I move.
He doesn’t hear me approach. Eden keeps walking, oblivious to the danger only a few yards behind her. The thief reaches inside his jacket and I’m on him before he gets the chance to decide courage over hesitation.
My hand closes around the back of his neck and I slam him against the brick wall of the nearest building. His breath bursts out in a strangled gasp. I press my forearm to his throat—not fully, just enough to choke off sound.
His eyes go wide. Recognition dawns, and fear spreads like ink.
“Wrong girl,” I say quietly.
“S–Simon, man, I didn’t know—”
“You don’t need to know.” I tighten my grip a fraction. “You just need to disappear.”
He nods rapidly, trying to talk, trying to swallow. I release him only enough to let him breathe. He stumbles, clutching his throat, scrambling backward.
“If I see you anywhere near her again,” I add, “you won’t walk away.”
The threat lands. He bolts, tripping over himself as he vanishes down the alley. Pathetic.
Eden never turns around. She keeps moving down the block, adjusting her scarf, unaware of the danger that trailed her or the hands that removed it.
A strange heat lingers beneath my ribs. It takes me a second to recognize it.
Relief.
I hate that I feel it.
I slip back into the shadows, keeping my distance as she crosses the street and heads toward her apartment building. She has no idea how easily she could have been caught off guard. She has no idea she walked past two other men who clocked her before deciding she wasn’t worth the effort.
She’s lucky they weren’t hungrier.
The thought irritates me, because I know exactly who is doing the protecting.
I follow her to her building, but I don’t let her see me. A streetlight flickers overhead—broken earlier today by one of my men, deliberately.
A section of the block is pitch-black now, forcing her to walk on the opposite side of the road, closer to the building entrances and farther from the alley corners. She adjusts without thinking. She adapts. She keeps her guard halfway raised, even if she doesn’t understand why.
I planned that. A small change. A subtle one. One of many.
Over the past forty-eight hours, I’ve redirected a security patrol so they pass her route ten minutes earlier.
I altered one of my meetings so it takes place two blocks from her afternoon café.
I had a street vendor move his stand, forcing her to shift her walking pattern slightly left instead of right—away from a man who’s been watching women in the area for weeks.
She doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know that she walks inside a web I’m weaving thread by thread.
I tell myself it’s caution. Precaution. A way to keep an unpredictable witness contained. But the truth presses against the inside of my skull, inconvenient and unwanted.
I don’t want her harmed.
My men don’t understand why I keep issuing these adjustments, why I stay close enough to intervene but far enough to stay unseen. They think I’m being paranoid. Or strategic. Or ruthless.
None of them consider the real reason.
Eden disappears through the front door of her building. I hear her footsteps climb the stairs—light, quick, uneven from fatigue. When her door shuts three floors up, something in my chest loosens, though I refuse to acknowledge it.
I linger on the sidewalk, watching the windows until one flickers with lamplight. That’s hers. Second from the end. She passes the window briefly—her outline small, her hair pulled loose, exhaustion in the slope of her shoulders—and then the curtain falls into place.
I step back into the shadows.
Protectiveness is not something I allow myself. Attachment even less so. I don’t have the luxury of softness, and I don’t want it. In my world, softness gets crushed. Attachment gets exploited. Care becomes a weakness someone else can pull tight around your throat.
Yet here I am, rearranging parts of the city because I don’t want her touched. Watching over someone who shouldn’t matter. Someone who happened to stand in the wrong place on the wrong night.
A nobody who saw something she shouldn’t have seen.
I run a hand through my hair, annoyed at the tension threading through me. I’m irritated by how often I’ve thought of her today. Irritated by how instinctively I stepped in when the thief followed her. Irritated that the idea of her being frightened sits like a splinter lodged beneath my skin.
I pace a few steps, then lean against a lamppost at the corner. My phone vibrates. A message from Viktor.
All clear. She’s inside. Want us to stay?
I type back: One man on rotation. Stay invisible.
The reply comes instantly.
Boss, she isn’t a threat. Why?
They don’t need reasons. They follow orders. That’s enough.
I look up at her window again, watching the faint movement behind the curtain. She’s probably pacing the apartment the same way she paced the sidewalk earlier. Overthinking. Analyzing. Writing in that notebook she clings to like a lifeline.
My thoughts keep circling her whether I want them to or not.
The shape of her fear the night she hid behind the dumpster.
The steadiness in her eyes. The way she stared into that alley as if it could give her answers.
The softness she offered the stranger today.
All of it threads together in patterns I can’t ignore.
Curiosity has turned into something else. Something heavier. Something I don’t allow myself to feel.
Obsession is the wrong word, but it isn’t far from the truth.