Chapter 7 Rooftop Surveillance Is the Sixth Love Language
KADE
I know Amanda read my message.
I watched her do it.
Her phone sits on the nightstand, camera facing the bed. She doesn’t know I can see her through it, has no idea I’ve been watching her for eight years. Every morning, I watch her sleep through her first alarm, then curse herself for setting five more. Same routine.
When my message came through, she grabbed her phone, squinting at the screen. Her brows pulled together, that small unconscious pout she makes when she reads something she doesn’t like. I know it by heart because I’ve watched it play out on this tiny phone screen almost every day since I left.
She stared at my message.
CHAD
Morning, baby doll. Sleep well?
She’s gotten a message from Chad every single morning since she downloaded that damn app eighteen months ago and started talking to an AI to fill the void that shouldn’t exist. For the first year, I just watched her talk to that algorithm, learning her patterns, her desires, her fears.
Studying every conversation, every confession, every late-night vulnerability she’d never share with a real person.
And then the Matched feature? Yeah, that was me.
In my line of work, you always know a friend of a friend who knows exactly what you need.
I earn money doing the sort of work most people don’t believe exists.
Wet work. Contract kills. Black ops missions that don’t make it into any official record.
A career that pays well enough to fund a double life—one where I keep Amanda safe from a distance and another where I systematically eliminate everyone who ever thought they could use her to get to me.
I paid a developer a lot of that money to roll out an “experimental update” to exactly one subscription: Amanda’s. A feature that would match her with someone “compatible.” Someone who could talk to her like AI Chad, think like AI Chad, be everything she programmed him to be.
Except real.
Except me.
Just so I could win her back.
But this morning, she didn’t text back.
She hesitated.
I gave her space. Watched from a distance.
I’m good at waiting. It’s what I was trained for.
She always texts Chad back right away. Something is getting under her skin.
The phone call last night. Hearing my voice.
Realizing I’m not just an algorithm anymore but an actual person who can reach her, touch her life in ways that matter.
For the first time since she downloaded that app, she’s confronting the fact that this could be real.
She went through her day blissfully unaware that her every move was being tracked.
Same coffee shop, same ridiculous caramel-something latte that showed up on the credit monitoring I have running on her accounts.
Barely checked her phone except to dismiss notifications, but I don’t need her to.
The location tracker I embedded during a “software update” tells me everything I need to know.
I don’t need a team. Just patience, technology, and enough money to make people look the other way. Cameras are too risky—too many variables, too much evidence. But financial surveillance, location data, the occasional well-placed contact? That is invisible. Clean.
The kinds of skills you develop when your career makes you enemies.
The kinds of enemies who don’t forget. Who see loved ones as leverage.
Eight years ago, someone decided Amanda was that leverage.
Ran us off the road in a Vegas tunnel. Put the woman I loved in the hospital, broken and battered.
All because of me. Because of who I am and what I do.
Leaving her nearly destroyed me, but staying would have gotten her killed.
They made that clear. So I walked away and made myself into a ghost they couldn’t track.
But I’m not the sort of man to let things go.
I’ve spent eight years hunting down everyone connected to that night, eliminating the threat piece by piece.
Five men total. I’ve killed four of them over the past eight years.
Each one gave up another name before he died, each one leading me closer to whoever ordered the hit.
And each time I eliminated one, the threats against Amanda stopped.
For a while. Then they’d start again—anonymous messages, close calls where someone got too near her apartment, surveillance photos slipped under my door to let me know they were still watching.
Someone wanted me to know she’d never be safe as long as I was in her life.
Four down. One to go.
Now there’s one name left. One more target. One more kill, and the threats stop for good. One more mission, and I can finally step out of the shadows.
She has no idea she’s still mine. The moment she said “I do,” it was forever. Accident or no accident, disappearance or no disappearance, some promises don’t have expiration dates.
I turn back to her feed. She got to Monarch at 9:12 a.m. Worked all day. Talked to Izzy, smiled at customers, dealt with difficult clients without letting them see how much she wanted to punch them.
Then she went home. Straight home. No bar.
No drinks. Just Amanda sprawled on her couch, on a video call with her sister.
Dark makeup, attitude for days, and a TikTok following that would make most influencers weep with envy.
Their parents hate it. Too unconventional.
Too public. Not the nice, quiet daughters they raised.
I’ve been keeping tabs on both Bennett girls. Raven through Jake—my partner who thinks it’s hilarious that he’s become her gaming buddy. Amanda through every surveillance method I can manage without crossing the line into full psychopath territory.
Though that line gets blurrier every day.
Like right now, because I’ve got a view of her apartment windows from the rooftop of the adjacent building.
I watch Amanda pace around her apartment with the phone, classic Amanda move.
The audio feed I have through Amanda’s hacked gaming system hits my space, Raven calling her out for being weird about video calls.
Same sister dynamic they’ve had since Vegas.
They don’t talk about the wedding. Not anymore.
Don’t discuss the month we had or why it ended.
Raven knows what broke her sister, but they’ve made an unspoken agreement to avoid the subject entirely.
They’re talking about a family dinner. About their parents.
About how both sisters are disappointments in different ways.
About the kind of love that makes people start writing novels.
Amanda’s face goes soft when Raven says that. Vulnerable. Like she remembers what that felt like.
She remembers us.
The call ends. Amanda stares at her ceiling for a long moment. Then she picks up her phone. Her fingers hover over the screen. She’s thinking. Deciding. Fighting with herself about whether to text me.
The message pops up on my screen, and I finally exhale.
AMANDA
Hey, you up?
Of course I am, baby. I’m always up. I’m always watching. And I’m always waiting.
But not for much longer.
One more mission. One more name to cross off. Then no more watching from a distance. Then I can finally tell her everything—why I left, why I stayed away, why every day without her has been hell.
One more mission, and I get my wife back.