3. Caleb
THREE
Caleb
Three days since the hurried blow job in a club bathroom and my skin was tight and I was restless.
I didn’t know if I wanted sex, dancing, food, work, or sleep, so I ended up heading out to clear a list of chores I’d been putting off forever.
Working seven days a week at all hours played havoc with laundry, food buying, and banking.
I was still decompressing from the last retrieval the Cave had worked on, too many deaths, too late to save some kids, and my brain was a mess.
Still, that didn’t mean I was too tired to spot my stalker for the second time in the last thirty minutes.
The first instance, I’d dismissed him being there.
People crossed paths in cities all the time, reflections lied, timing overlapped.
It meant nothing. It had meant nothing right up until it happened again, and this time there was no denying the deliberate adjustment, the distance, the sense of being tracked without ever being crowded.
I slowed as I crossed the street. Cars passed in a steady stream, someone argued on a phone, a cyclist swerved too close to the curb and cursed. Normal noise, normal motion, a world that didn’t care about me in the slightest.
Except for him.
I didn’t turn. I didn’t need to. The reflection in the shop window gave me enough—dark jacket, hands in pockets, gaze angled away a fraction too carefully.
Novak.
Doc’s pet psycho had a habit of appearing when I didn’t want him there, and lately that habit had started to seem a lot like intent.
I kept walking, counting steps without thinking, letting my pace vary enough to test whether he compensated.
He did. Not perfectly, not in a way anyone else would notice, but I saw it—the delay, the adjustment in stride, the way he maintained distance as if it were something he’d calculated and locked in place.
That was new.
The first time I’d seen him outside the Cave, I’d assumed it was a coincidence. The second time had made me suspicious. This was confirmation.
I cut left without warning, slipping into a narrow side street between a pharmacy and a closed florist, my phone already in my hand as if I were checking messages. The front camera came up for half a second, long enough to sweep the space behind me.
The street behind me was empty, which meant nothing because Novak wasn’t an amateur and he’d be out of sight. I walked another ten paces and then stopped and turned sharply, expecting—hoping—to catch him mid-adjustment, to force the mistake, but there was nothing to catch.
No footsteps, no movement, no telltale trace of someone caught out.
I exhaled slowly, more irritated than relieved.
Of course, he wouldn’t be obvious. Novak didn’t do ‘obvious’, and the single reason I knew he was there at all was that my short stint in Army Intelligence had trained me to see things that weren’t obvious.
“Freak,” I snapped, and turned back toward the main road.
It happened again when I left the coffee shop with my chocolate-sprinkled donut and espresso, and by then it wasn’t even a question of if Novak was following me; it was how long he’d been doing it without me noticing.
This time it was a car window that gave him away, the briefest distortion of shape where nothing should have been, a presence that didn’t match the flow of everything else around it.
I changed direction twice, doubled back once, stepped into a convenience store and out again through a different exit, building a pattern that would shake anyone who wasn’t paying attention.
It didn’t shake him.
He stayed beyond the edge of visibility, but I knew he was there.
Doc’s pet psycho was watching and for some reason he’d decided I was his project.
Along with the staring he did whenever we were near each other, which had been more often recently since Doc was regularly using him for interrogation and wet work.
By the time I got back to my apartment building, I was done pretending this was anything other than deliberate.
I didn’t go straight in. I walked past the entrance, continued to the corner, crossed the street, and approached again from the opposite side, scanning windows, doorways, and shadows. Anyone less careful would have slipped and given me something to work with.
Novak didn’t.
“What the fuck are you doing, freak?” I asked, loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear.
I let myself in, took the stairs, then stood inside my room for a moment, leaving the door ajar.
Laptop open, systems up, a quick sweep across my network, and cameras showing nothing had been touched.
No breaches, no anomalies, nothing digital to match the physical certainty I’d been carrying all day.
He walked inside, and I glanced over at him.
Tall, solid, dressed in dark clothes that didn’t draw attention but didn’t make him disappear either.
His posture was loose, but it wasn’t relaxed; it was contained, as if everything about him existed on a leash he held himself.
He was the kind of man people stared at—tall, strong, inked skin disappearing under his sleeves, the suggestion of muscle and control in every line of him, the kind of dangerous that read as attraction from a distance.
All I saw was a psychopath, a cleaner, a man who killed on command and stayed on the right side of the law because someone paid him to be there.
I didn’t trust him. And there was no universe where that kind of bad-boy energy translated into anything that made me hard.
Nope. Not at all.
Except for the times it did.
Because for some fucked-up reason I found that asshole attractive.
“What the fuck?” I said, keeping my voice level.
“You didn’t shut your door,” Novak replied. His silver-grey gaze focused on me.
“Do you just follow me around for fun now,” I asked, “or is this a new hobby I should be concerned about?”
“Yes.”
I eyed him. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is,” he said calmly. “I go where you are.”
I huffed out a laugh, more incredulous than amused. “That’s called stalking.”
“No.”
“You literally tracked me across half the city today on my one day off.” Well, hours off, I didn’t really do vacation or weekends, too much shit to fix in the world. But hell, I should’ve been able to pick up dry cleaning and get a coffee without someone following me.
“Yes.”
“But you followed me to my apartment.”
“Yes.”
I dragged a hand over my face, already tired of this conversation. “You’re a freak.”
Something changed in his expression, not offense or irritation, but something closer to interest.
“I know your routines,” he said, as if that were a reasonable response. “The routes you take, the way you check reflections instead of turning, the delay before you cross a street when something feels wrong. You noticed me on the second pass.”
A cold thread tightened down my spine. “I always notice anomalies,” I said.
“That’s not accurate.”
“Pretty sure it is.”
“You noticed me faster than most,” he continued, advancing toward me, his focus never shifting. “That makes you different, but you still didn’t notice me straight away.”
That stopped me for half a second, just long enough for irritation to spike over whatever else I might have felt.
“Right,” I said. “Of course you weren’t.”
“I needed to confirm your awareness threshold.”
“By following me around like a serial killer?”
“Yes.”
I stared at him again, waiting for the correction, the backtrack, the moment where he recognized how insane that sounded.
It didn’t come.
“Doc really needs to get you a leash,” I said under my breath.
“I don’t respond to control measures,” he said evenly.
“Yeah, I’d noticed.”
He came even closer, and great—now he was invading my personal space on top of everything else. Perfect. Exactly what I needed: a six-foot wall of murder vibes breathing my air. “You’re not safe,” he said.
“I’m plenty safe,” I said.
“Last Thursday. You had sex in the bathroom at Black Static.” He wrinkled his nose, a small, precise expression of distaste. “He sucked you off, but you were interrupted before you could return the favor.”
I recalled the interruption, someone shouting about cops right outside the bathroom. Hell, I’d only just gotten off, and the man sucking my dick had been up off his knees and left so fast I’d assumed he was just…
I didn’t know what I’d assumed, too come-drunk to care at that moment.
“He waited for you and followed you.”
Irritation flared first, then disbelief. “He didn’t follow me.”
“He did,” Novak replied. “Not for long. I made sure of it.”
“What do you mean you ‘made sure of it’?” I asked, more focused now.
He didn’t answer immediately. He watched me, as if deciding what I needed to know and what he could omit. “He followed you for three minutes, until you took a shortcut down a dark alley,” Novak said. “Then before you could be punished for your stupidity, I intervened.”
Stupidity? I was a grown man with training. Then it hit me, intervened ? “What did you do to him?” I asked.
A pause, brief and deliberate. “He’s not a factor anymore.”
“Fuck, you’re serious.” I stared at him. Of course, he was. That was the problem and I didn’t have a way to process that.
I dragged the memory back, trying to force it into focus—music, heat, a guy who’d been enthusiastic and messy, on his knees sucking me dry, hands everywhere and no finesse, the whole thing over fast. He’d left after we were interrupted, and I hadn’t even had to return the favor.
If Novak wasn’t bullshitting me, then I’d missed everything that should have been obvious.
I’d been distracted and careless because for one night after the worst kind of day at work, I’d wanted it badly enough that I let my guard slip for the kind of man who was looking for that weakness.