Chapter 21
Declan
The call comes at six in the morning.
I'm already awake. Since four. She's asleep next to me, face toward the window, one hand on her stomach. She's been doing that in her sleep for three days without realizing it.
My phone vibrates on the nightstand. I pick it up before the second buzz.
"We've got him," James, my security leader, says.
I sit up. Move to the hallway. Close the bedroom door behind me.
"Name."
James gives me the name and the brief. I don't recognize it.
Local. Thirty-one years old. IT support.
Apartment eight minutes from her building.
Eight minutes. He has been living eight minutes from her for the entire time she's been streaming and I have been sitting in this house building a file while this man walked to her street and looked up at her windows and wrote down what the light looked like.
She's pregnant.
She is asleep in my bed carrying my child and this man threatened her.
"Declan."
"I'm here."
"There's no evidence of attempted entry. No escalation to physical contact. The behavioral profile is consistent with fixation, not immediate threat. He's a watcher. He builds patterns. He hasn't crossed to contact beyond the messages."
"Yet."
"Yet." James pauses. "We can have the restraining order paperwork ready by end of day. We'll need her address of record."
"My address."
A beat. James is a professional. He doesn't ask. "Your address. Understood."
I end the call. I stand in the hallway. My house.
My hallway. The bedroom door closed behind me with Billie asleep on the other side and my child inside her and a man named — I have his name now, I have his full name and his address and his workplace and every account he's ever created — has been standing eight minutes from her building mapping her life.
My hands are fists.
I have done this work for twenty years. I have handled fixation cases.
Stalking cases. Cases where it went further than this, where the watcher crossed to contact, where I walked into the aftermath and documented it and moved on.
I have always been the calm one. The professional. The man whose hands are steady.
My hands are fists and my jaw is locked and there is a version of me standing in this hallway that wants to drive to him and put this man through a wall.
That version is not the professional version.
That version who now knows there is something growing inside her that is half me and half her and who will not tolerate — will not accept — will not allow — anyone with bad intentions anywhere near either of them.
I breathe.
I open my hands.
I make the next call. Then the next one. The restraining order. The formal identification package. The police liaison. Every step in sequence. Every step clean. My voice steady on every call because steady is what I do and I am a professional. I’m not a goon.
I am not losing my composure. I am doing my job.
I am also aware that if this man had come closer, if he had tried the door, if he had followed her, if he had been in that building when she was alone, I would have done something I could not undo and I would not have regretted it. Not for a second. Not ever.