24
The man paces his living room, nibbling at the stub of his thumbnail. It’s more out of nervousness than habit. He’s cloaked in it—the fear of being seen by her. He hadn’t planned for Imogen to spot him as he bolted, but he believes doubtlessly that she must have. Now everything is urgent.
He prefers to enter the Bly house in the night: the perfect cover to slip in invisibly and observe without leaving a trace.
Since he’d misplaced the spare key this morning, and the doors have remained locked, he had to improvise.
Lucky for him, he’d slipped out a window in Alice’s bedroom early this morning, not wanting the door to alert his exit like it had his entrance… to be safe. It worked out perfectly.
Until she saw him.
He chastises himself for the risk. He hadn’t meant to be seen, yet the thrill of watching her—of hearing her movements, catching glimpses of her—was something he could not resist. Obedience to caution had always been a challenge for him.
The thought that she might have noticed him mixes panic and desire in confounding fashion.
Yet he’s sick that he may have ruined everything.
He crouches, palms pressed to his forehead as though to contain the surge of fury at his mistake.
What he saw inside the house may have been worse.
His eyes trace familiar woodwork beneath him as he thinks back to it: His back melted into the dining room wall as Imogen crossed the house at the sound of the ringing doorbell.
It caught him off guard. He and Imogen were supposed to be alone. Or so he had hoped.
When she passed the dining room—oblivious to his presence—he leapt across with a barely contained jolt of frustration. He meant to flee out the window while her back was turned. Everything had moved too quickly; the calculated precision he so prided himself on had faltered.
Before he knew it, Rory Holloway was in the house. The man had to sink to the floor, watching them from beneath the dining room table, cursing himself.
It all became worse as Imogen uncoiled under Rory in a scene that was intimate, obscene, holy, and wrong all at once.
He felt it in his gut—a hot, sour pressure at the way he ravished her body.
Part of the man burned with the animal ache he’d been bottling up: the impossible nearness of her, watching her experience this pleasure.
Another darker part flared with a corrosive fury: This was not the way it was supposed to be. Not with Rory.
He didn’t move. He could not. So he stayed and watched.
The sight made him feel small and enormous at the same time: small because he couldn’t cross the room and take what his hunger wanted; enormous because he was witnessing something he felt staunchly was in his future—something he had spent months building in his head.
He tasted bile and desire at once and felt a terrifying tenderness for her that curdled into rage. He told himself he would not scar the moment with violence. Instead, he hardened with intention—a plan that would not be thwarted by petty accidents or clumsy timing.
His blasted boot ruined everything. That single tap against the floorboards had cracked his containment of control, betrayed him in the worst possible way. When he heard Imogen’s fragile gasp of horror, he knew she had heard him.
Snarling now, he tears the boot off and flings it across the room. It hits the wall with a dull thud, leaving a grimy print behind before tumbling onto a side table, breaking a vase into shards against the hardwood.
The crash stirs something below: a thump, a shift. It’s coming from the cellar.
She must be awake, he thinks.
He fetches a broom from the kitchen, each sweep of the shards methodical, as if tidying the aftermath of his own mishap.
A trembling smile forms as he replays tomorrow’s plans in his head, the choreography of his upcoming actions replaying and replaying.
Tomorrow, he promises himself, he will no longer be the invisible specter floating around her house unseen.
Tomorrow, Imogen will be his.