Chapter 15
Killian
I know what I am.
I’m a man sitting in a dark loft three blocks from a woman’s house, surrounded by monitors that show every room she moves through, watching her on an infrared scope because the binoculars don’t work when she turns her lights off.
I hacked her estate security system. Sixteen cameras — interior and exterior.
A normal person would call this stalking. A professional would call it surveillance. I call it the only thing keeping me alive. I don’t care what it is. I care that she’s safe.
I cross another day on the calendar taped to the wall beside the monitors. The marks are getting heavier, deeper, the pen nearly tearing through the paper. Fourteen lines. Half of them slashed.
I watch the infrared outline of her body shift from horizontal to vertical, the heat signature moving from bed to bathroom. Three minutes later, the light comes on — same as yesterday, same as every day since I left her. She doesn’t sleep.
She’s sitting on the edge of her bed, phone in hand, staring at it.
Ghost’s last message is probably still open.
She does this every morning — checks the phone, reads whatever I wrote last, and sits with it for a few minutes before the day starts.
I know because I watch her do it. Every morning. From this chair.
I should feel something about that. Shame, maybe.
The awareness that I’m monitoring a woman and justifying it as protection.
, but what I feel is the constant, grinding need to be closer.
The cameras aren’t enough. The binoculars aren’t enough.
The DMs aren’t enough. Nothing is enough except being in the room with her, and I can’t do that for seven more days.
So, I watch, and I don’t apologize for it, and I don’t plan to stop.
She’s leaving the estate today — a lawyer’s office, for an estate management meeting.
She hasn’t left the house voluntarily since the funeral.
The FBI interviews were obligations. The funeral was performance.
This is the first time she’s chosen to step into the world on her own, and I’m going to be behind her when she does.
I pull on the tactical black, grab the helmet and gloves, and I’m parked two blocks from the estate in under four minutes, engine idling, watching the gates.
The Mercedes pulls out and I follow — three cars back, standard tail distance. My thighs grip the tank on every turn, body low, just another rider in Veridian Shore traffic. She’s staring out the window, hair pulled back in a high ponytail, dark sunglasses hiding her eyes.
I want to see your eyes. I need to know if you’re okay.
At a red light, I let the Monster drift closer to see her profile through the glass. She looks small in that big car, like something precious placed in a box that’s too large for it. I want to open the door, pull her out, put her on the back of my bike, and ride until Veridian Shore is a memory.
I notice the unmarked sedan in one of my mirrors.
Three cars back from me, which makes it six from Ivy.
I clock the driver through the side mirror.
Reeves. She’s tailing Ivy on her own — no partner, no backup, which means this isn’t sanctioned.
She’s gone rogue. Everyone told her the case is closed, the kidnapper is in the wind, the girl is a victim.
Reeves isn’t buying it and she’s not stopping.
I’m supposed to walk back into Ivy’s life. I’m supposed to show up at the estate and take her away, and Reeves will be watching. She’ll see a man arrive. She’ll see Ivy leave with him willingly. And every suspicion she’s been sitting on will crystallize into certainty.
Problem for later. Right now, keep Ivy safe.
The Mercedes stops in front of a glass tower downtown. Ivy exits — all black, sunglasses, moving with that precise, contained grace that makes her look lethal without trying. She walks into the building without looking back.
Reeves parks across the street and pulls out binoculars. I pull into an alley one block over, kill the engine and wait.
Forty minutes. I spend every one of them split between watching the building’s entrance and watching Reeves watch the building’s entrance.
Then Ivy exits. She says something to Gregor through the car window — I catch his confused expression, followed by a nod. She starts walking away alone, into the city, on foot.
My chest does something it has no business doing.
She’s walking down a busy sidewalk, anonymous, just another woman in black, and I can see the relief on her face from a block away.
This is the first thing she’s done for herself since I left her.
The first decision that isn’t performed or mandated or choreographed by someone else.
I follow on foot — helmet off, jacket collar up. She’s fifty meters ahead, weaving through pedestrians, and I match her pace without thinking. I know her stride by now. Quick, precise. The ballerina grace that hides the strength underneath.
She stops at a coffee shop. I look through the window as she picks a corner booth — back to the wall, exit in her sight line.
That’s my girl. You learned.
The pride that moves through me is possessive and dark. I taught her that. Back to the wall. Eyes on exits. I taught her to survive and she’s doing it without me, and I should be proud from a distance, but what I actually feel is the violent need to be sitting across from her.
I take position in the alley across the street. She shifts in her seat, her eyes scanning the street through the window, scanning everything.
Then she pauses. Her body goes still and her head turns slowly — not in any specific direction, just a general sweep, like an antenna picking up a frequency she can’t identify.
She senses me.
Something hot and electric moves through my body. Not alarm — a thrill. She can’t see me. She has no evidence I’m here. But her instincts are telling her someone is watching, and her instincts are right, and the fact that her body knows I’m near before her eyes can find me does something to me.
She pulls out her phone and my phone buzzes a second later.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop alone for the first time since I can’t remember. It’s making me paranoid. I feel like I’m being watched. Anyway. Counting the days until you take me on that ride.
My hands start shaking. She’s texting Ghost about feeling watched while the man watching her reads the message in real time from sixty meters away. The layers of this are so fucked I could laugh, if it didn’t feel like my ribs were closing.
Replying now while she’s scanning the street would be too risky — if her phone buzzed the moment she looked up, the timing would register. She’s too smart for coincidences.
Reeves gets out of the sedan, walking toward the coffee shop. Casual pace, civilian clothes, but the body language is unmistakable. Not happening.
I pull the burner phone from my pocket and dial the coffee shop’s number. I found it on the receipt that blew out of their trash this morning when I scouted the block, because I scout every block she might visit.
“Hi, I’m a resident on the street and I’m getting a strong gas smell near your building. Blue Hour Coffee, right? Just thought you should know.”
I hang up. The manager starts moving, checking the kitchen before making a call. Thirty seconds later he’s evacuating customers. Precautionary protocol.
Reeves stops on the sidewalk. She can’t approach Ivy in the middle of an evacuation without drawing attention. She turns, walks back to her sedan, and I watch the frustration in the rigid set of her shoulders — the look of someone who’s been outmaneuvered and doesn’t know by whom.
Good.
Ivy exits looking annoyed and confused, pulls out her phone, and calls Gregor. Then she stops. She’s looking at the alley. At me.
Not at me. She can’t see me. I’m inside the shadow, back against the brick, completely still. The light doesn’t reach this deep. But she’s staring directly at the mouth of the alley like she can feel the shape of me in the dark.
My heart stops. Actually stops — the organ in my chest that has been functioning through twenty years of combat, and a hundred kills simply ceases to beat for two full seconds.
She takes a step towards me.
Every muscle in my body locks. If she takes three more steps, she’ll see my boots.
Five more and she’ll see my face. Then what?
The cover is blown, the seven days collapse, Reeves is fifty meters away with a notebook, and Ivy discovers that her kidnapper has been hiding in alleys watching her drink coffee.
She takes another step. Her head tilts. Those gray eyes are searching the shadow the way she searches anatomy — looking for what’s hidden beneath the surface.
The Mercedes pulls up to the curb. Perfect timing, Gregor. He opens the door and she turns, distracted. She looks at the alley one more time — three seconds, eyes narrowed — and gets in the car.
I press my back against the brick once the Mercedes pulls away, and my hands are shaking so hard I can’t make fists. My heart has restarted and it’s running at a speed that would concern a cardiologist. My legs feel liquid.
She almost saw me.
And the thing that’s destroying me isn’t the fear of being caught. It’s the fact that for two seconds, when she was walking toward me, every cell in my body was screaming to let her find me and end the waiting.
I ride back to the Ironworks and spend the rest of the day watching her. She’s in the lab for two hours, then in her bedroom. The infrared shows her body heat moving from desk to bed to window to desk. Restless. Pacing. The same way I pace this loft when the walls start closing in.
Night falls. I go to my spot — the rooftop two buildings over from the estate that gives me a clear line to her bedroom window. The light is on and my phone buzzes.
Where were you today? I needed you.
The words hit me in the chest like a hollow point. She needed me. She needed Ghost, who is me, who couldn’t answer because answering would have exposed everything.
Another text follows.
I felt like someone was watching me. Protective or predatory, I couldn’t tell. Am I just paranoid?
That hot, electric pulse again — the knowledge that she felt me, that her body recognized my presence before her mind could explain it. She’s connected to me on a frequency neither of us chose, and the fact that she can’t rationalize it, can’t make it clinical, does something to me.
Trust your instincts. They kept you alive for seven years. But if someone was watching? Maybe they were making sure you were safe.
Safe from what?
The world. Yourself. Everyone who wants a piece of you.
I watch her through the binoculars. She’s lying in bed now, phone on her chest, staring at the ceiling. Her lips are moving. She’s talking to herself, or maybe to me.
I sit on the rooftop in the dark and think about what I am.
A killer who watches a woman sleep. A ghost who comforts her through a screen while hiding in the shadows of her city.
A man who hacked her security system, follows her car, intercepts her detective, and feels a physical thrill when she senses his presence.
A normal person would be horrified, but I’m not a normal person. I’m the man who’s keeping her alive, and if that requires watching every breath she takes from a rooftop, then that’s what I’ll do. For seven more days. For however long it takes.
She’ll understand. Or she won’t. Either way, she’s not leaving my sight.
Her bedroom light goes off. The infrared shows her body heat curling on the bed, settling into something that might eventually become sleep.
I don’t leave until it does.