Chapter 4B
Cain
Leo sends me the first surveillance report eighteen days after Grey starts.
Background checks are automatic, credit, criminal, and social media. HR runs them, sends me a summary, expects me to skim it and trust their filters.
Grey's file comes back clean.
Too clean. No social media. No digital footprint before five years ago. No photos, no tagged locations, no drunken tweets from college. No forum posts, no high school reunion lists, no family birthday shout-outs.
It’s like he appeared out of thin air with a résumé and a polite smile and nothing else. I read the report once. Then again.
"Where was he before twenty-one?" I ask Leo.
Leo hesitates on the phone. Paper shuffles. Keys tap. I hear the sound of him digging.
"There’s…a gap," he says finally. "Prior addresses in another state, then nothing. No employment records. No school transcripts we can access. And there’s a sealed juvenile record. We can’t see the contents."
Sealed, juvenile, problem words in HR language. In mine, they mean interesting
"Dig deeper," I tell Leo. "I don’t want speculation, I want facts."
"You sure?" he asks. "If this is…sensitive, we might not have the right."
"You have whatever rights I give you." I cut in. "Find what you can."
That was four months ago.
Now I have a folder labeled Grey with over a thousand files. Not HR’s sanitized report. Mine. Emails, keylogs, screenshots, audio, and Camera feeds.
Everything the system sees when he moves through my building belongs to me.
I know he uses the same password for everything.
Winter2019. The year he graduated. I know because he typed it in front of me once, fingers fast, careless, like he forgot other people might be watching.
I know about the shoebox. The things he’s taken from me.
Leo’s audio picked him opening it. The cardboard squeak.
The soft thump of objects hitting the bottom. Greys breathing, shallow, fast.
Tonight, I watch him through the hallway camera.
Grey is sitting at his desk. The lights are off. His face is lit only by the glow of his laptop screen. He’s not working. He’s just sitting there. Staring at my door. I switch feeds. Watch his screen.
He’s googling me. Cain Micheals net worth. Cain Micheals house. Cain Micheals divorced. Then Cain with Rose Sophie.
Ah. So he noticed lunch.
I had lunch with her because she’s good at her job. Because she keeps the board docile, numbers up, questions down. Because she knows how to play a long game.
He opens a folder. Labeled C.
Of course.
Schedule. Contacts. Photos. Audio. Hundreds of images. Screenshots of my calendar. Photos of me across the street, through windows, in parking garages. One is from inside my apartment.
What the fuck.
My living room, my couch, my fireplace. The book I was reading left open on the arm of the chair. This was taken from inside the room. More photos of my kitchen, my bedroom.
The rational part of my brain screamed at me to call security. To write a report. To protect myself. I heard it clearly. And then I ignored it. Because it was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years.
I close the laptop. Walk to the window, the city is dark. Below, Grey is cataloging photos of my life, dreaming of ways to get closer.
And I’m letting him. No. I’m encouraging him. The late meetings. The we instead of you. The way I said I’ve noticed, letting the words hang like a dare. The little compliments I rarely give anyone, dropped like breadcrumbs in his path.
Grey thinks he’s the predator.
He’s wrong.
I’ve been hunting him since the day Leo handed me that too-clean background check and stumbled over the word sealed.
Since I saw the way Grey looked at me in the elevator, like a starving man looks at a meal.
Since I realized whatever made him scrub his past this clean didn’t scare me. It interested me.
I want to see how far he’ll go. I want to see what happens when someone like him obsessed, careful, empty in all the right places fixes himself to someone who notices.
I want to be there when he finally breaks. And I want to be the one who puts him back together.
My phone buzzes.
Leo: He’s still there. Want me to lock him out?
Leo is nervous around anomalies. That’s his job. Flag the unusual. Treat it like risk.
I type back: No. Let him stay.
Leo: You’re sure?
I look at the camera feed. Grey is standing up now. Walking toward the elevator. He thinks he’s alone. Thinks no one saw him press his forehead against my door, touch the wood like it was something sacred.
Me: I’m sure. Don’t touch him. Don’t warn him. Just watch.
Leo sends back a thumbs-up. He stopped questioning me months ago.
I open the Grey folder again. A subfolder, audio, mostly mundane. Grey on the phone. Grey typing. Grey humming under his breath. Keyboard clicks. Printer jams. The office breathing around him.
But one file I’ve listened to more times than I’ll admit.
A week ago. Late night. Grey was in my office.
He didn’t know I was listening, whiskey in hand, watching the feed from the stairwell. I saw him take out my watch. Press it to his wrist. Saw the way his throat moved when he swallowed.
But the audio was something else.
His breathing. Fast and shallow. A broken sound when he touched his throat.
And then, so quietly.
Cain.
Just my name.
But the way he said it. Like a prayer. Like a threat. Like he was already inside me, under my skin, writing himself into my nerves.
I saved that file.
I named it Prey.
I play it now.
His voice fills the room, soft, wrecked, trembling. Cain.