Chapter Nine
Knox
I don’t want to leave her. Standing on the sidewalk outside her building, watching her window light up, I can still taste
her on my lips. Still feel the press of her body against mine, the way she arched into me when I backed her against that building.
Every nerve is screaming at me to go back up those stairs, to pound on her door and finish what we started.
But I told her tomorrow. Dinner at my place. I promised to do this right.
So I force myself to turn away, to start walking toward where I parked three blocks over. The cold air does nothing to cool
the heat still thrumming under my skin. I keep seeing her face in the lamplight, lips swollen from kissing, eyes dark with
want. The sound she made when I gripped her hip. The way she said come upstairs like it was a challenge and a plea wrapped together.
I wanted to. God, I wanted to.
I wanted to push her through that door and pin her against the wall. Wanted to fist my hand in her hair and pull until her
throat was bared for my mouth. I’ve spent months imagining what she’d look like underneath me, what sounds she’d make if I
bent her over and took what I wanted. Whether she’d fight back or melt. Whether she’d beg.
I’m betting she’d do all.
The fantasy is so vivid I almost miss him.
Almost.
A figure on the corner, half-hidden by a delivery van. I catch the movement in my peripheral vision and my training kicks in before my brain fully registers what I’m seeing. I stop walking. Turn my head just enough to get a better angle without telegraphing that I’ve spotted him.
He’s watching her place. Same spot I saw him last night, give or take twenty feet.
This time I get more. The streetlight catches ink on his neck, dark lines crawling up past his collar toward his jaw. He’s
not wearing the hood tonight, but he’s angled away from me, face in shadow. I can make out dark hair, a lean build. Wiry,
like a distance runner, someone you’d underestimate right up until you couldn’t. But the rest is just impression. If I passed
him on the street tomorrow, I’m not sure I’d know him. All I’ve really got is the tattoos and the way he carries himself.
I take a step toward him.
He’s already moving. Not running, not rushing, just gone. Around the corner and into the darkness like smoke dispersing.
By the time I reach the spot where he’d been standing, the street is empty. I scan doorways, parked cars, the gaps between
buildings. Nothing. Whoever this guy is, he knows how to vanish when he needs to.
I stand there for a long moment, breathing hard, hands flexing at my sides. Close. I was so close.
The walk back to my car feels longer than it should. I drive home on autopilot, and by the time I’m sitting at my kitchen
table with the leather notebook open in front of me, the want has curdled into darkness. Something that won’t let me sleep.
I flip backward through the pages. Months of observations. Months of documenting every detail of her life like a man possessed.
October 3. She stayed late at the studio, left at 9:47. Stopped for Thai food on Smith Street. Nothing unusual.
October 17. Late night walk through the Village. Alone, no destination. Walked home alone. I followed from two blocks back.
November 2. She looked over her shoulder three times on her walk home. I thought she’d clocked me.
I pause on that entry. Thought she’d clocked me. I know better now. She told me tonight, standing in the snow with her fingers curled into my coat, that she’s known for weeks.
Maybe longer. She let me follow her. Wanted me to.
All those nights I congratulated myself on being invisible, she was playing me like a violin.
The thought should bother me more than it does. Instead, I find myself smiling in the dark of my kitchen, remembering the
look on her face when she admitted it. No shame. No accusation. Just that spark in her eyes, like we’d been dancing this whole
time and she was finally letting me know she’d been leading.
I keep flipping through the notebook, but now I’m looking for something else. Moments when her attention might have snagged
on something other than me. Times when she seemed nervous, distracted, spooked by shadows I wasn’t casting.
There. November 15. She stopped at her mailbox and stood there for almost a minute, just staring at something in her hand. When she went inside,
she left the lobby light on all night.
And here. November 28. She took a different route home. Doubled back twice. I thought she was testing me, but her shoulders were tight the whole
walk. She looked over her shoulder six times in ten blocks.
Something about it doesn’t sit right. She knew I was there—she’s told me as much. So why the tension? Why the doubling back?
It wasn’t for my benefit.
I close the notebook and open my laptop instead. When Hailey first started working for Sloane, I ran a background check. Clean
record, solid employment history, good references. Nothing that raised flags.
But I only went back three years, and tonight I go further.
Five years ago, Hailey Parker appeared in New York. Got an apartment in Brooklyn. Started working freelance jewelry gigs, built a portfolio, climbed the ladder until she landed with Sloane. A clean trajectory that makes perfect sense on paper.
Before that? Nothing.
I’ve seen this before. Helped create it, back in my contractor days, for people who needed to disappear. It takes money and
motivation and usually a very good reason to erase yourself so completely.
Hailey Parker is a ghost who became a person five years ago, and now there’s a man with tattooed skin watching her apartment
at night.
The roses bother me more now than they did before. I already knew they weren’t from me—figured that out the first night I
saw him standing across from her building. But back then I assumed it was just some random guy who’d fixated on her, someone
harmless leaving flowers like a lovesick teenager. Now I’m not so sure.
Now I’m wondering if whoever’s leaving those roses knew her before she became Hailey Parker. If he’s part of whatever she
erased five years ago when she built herself a new life from nothing.
She still thinks they’re from me. Still has them hanging in her kitchen window, dried and preserved like love letters. I should
have told her the truth that first night. Should have warned her.
But I didn’t. And now I’m in too deep to explain why I kept it to myself.
The thought settles into my gut and stays there. This isn’t random. This isn’t some stranger who spotted her on the subway
and decided to fixate. This is someone who was already looking. Someone who found her despite five years of careful anonymity.
I should tell her. Show her what I found, lay out my suspicions, let her decide how to handle whatever past is catching up
with her.
But I don’t know how to do that without revealing how deep I’ve dug. She knows I follow her. She’s okay with that. But there’s
a difference between protective surveillance and excavating someone’s buried history, and I’ve crossed into territory I’m
not sure she’d forgive.
Morning comes too fast. I go to work, run through security protocols with Cole, approve the guest list for next week’s gala. Meetings blur together while my mind keeps circling back to Hailey, to the tattooed stranger, to all the questions I don’t know how to ask.
By 6 p.m. I’m parked outside her building again, an hour early because waiting in my apartment was making me crawl out of
my skin.
I scan her window. The street. Every parked car, every passing figure, every shadow that might hide another watcher.
Nothing.
Just the usual evening traffic, neighbors walking dogs, the ordinary rhythm of a Brooklyn block settling into dusk. No stranger
lurking on corners. No phantom in the dark.
I pull out my notebook and open to a fresh page.
Someone else is watching you now. I don’t know who he is yet, but I will. Whatever secrets you’re keeping, whoever this other
guy is, I’m going to find out. Because I’m in too deep to walk away now.
I stare at the words until they blur. Threat or promise, I’m not sure there’s a difference anymore.
Twenty minutes until I ring her buzzer. Twenty minutes to decide whether I tell her everything tonight or keep digging in
silence, protecting her from a danger she doesn’t know exists while I figure out exactly what we’re dealing with.
Her silhouette passes the window. She’s getting ready, probably putting on that dark lipstick, sliding those silver rings
onto her fingers. Making herself beautiful for me while I sit in my car with a partial sketch and a growing list of questions.
I wanted simplicity. Dinners and conversations and the slow unwinding of two people learning each other. I wanted to earn
her trust the honest way, to wait until she felt safe enough to tell me her secrets on her own terms.
Instead, I’m about to walk up those steps with lies of omission already forming on my tongue, wanting her so badly I can’t think straight, already planning how to hunt down the man who believes he can watch her without consequences.
I will find out who he is. I will find out what Hailey’s running from. And if he’s a threat to her, I will end it.
Whatever it takes.
I get out of the car and head for her door.