Chapter Twenty-Four Cole
“What the fuck just happened?” Tyler’s voice cuts through the buzz in my ears. He’s in my passenger seat, already on high alert.
“She hung up on me.” I stare ahead, clenching my jaw.
“Yeah. I got that part. What did she say before that?”
“She quickly realized I shouldn’t know what Lars Winters looks like. She told me not to come to her apartment. Said she needs space.” I grip the steering wheel so tightly it feels like it might crumble beneath my hands.
“Jesus Christ, Cole.”
“I know.”
I take the next right fast enough that the tires chirp.
“Slow the fuck down,” Tyler shouts as I run another red light. “We’ll find him, but we’ll be no use to Hailey if you wrap this car around a tree before we get there.”
I scan the street, eyes cutting from the sidewalk to spaces between parked cars. Every movement in the corner of my eye kicks my pulse up another notch.
Then I see him as we turn onto Hailey’s street.
There.
He’s walking away from her building, hands jammed in his jacket pockets.
My vision narrows, and my blood turns red-hot.
I pull to the curb hard enough that Tyler swears and braces himself between the dash and the oh-shit handle.
“Cole. Cole, listen to me. We are not doing this at her front door.” He’s trying to be the voice of reason, but there’s nothing he can say right now that’ll stop me from confronting this piece of shit.
“We’re not at her front door.”
“We’re close enough that she’ll hear it.”
I’m already jumping out of the car.
Lars hasn’t seen me yet. He’s too busy looking back toward her building, eyes locked on her windows.
I’m fast but quiet. The natural-born predator in me tells me to close the distance before he knows I’m here.
Tyler catches up behind me, hissing under his breath. “Do not touch him, Cole. Do not fucking touch him.”
I don’t answer.
When Lars finally turns, it’s because I’m close enough that he can feel my presence. He knows he’s in trouble before his eyes catch up. I watch the realization land on his face a half second after the fear does.
“Hey, shitbag.”
He startles and takes a step back, then looks up and down the street like he’s just now noticing how empty it is. There’s no one here to save him.
Except maybe Tyler.
“I don’t know who you—”
“Yes, you do.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. “You keyed her car. You threw a brick through her fucking window. You’re standing in front of her apartment trying to see through her windows. We both know exactly who I am, and we both know exactly who you are.”
His mouth opens, then closes as he fumbles for words.
“You think you’re here to play hero.” He finally finds his voice, and his words are half question, half accusation. Like he’s offended I’m here.
“You think I care about what someone as vile as you thinks of me?” I take another step forward.
“What should matter to you is that I know your license plate. I know your address. I know your name. I know every place you’ve been in the last six weeks, including the bar you hit last Thursday after you watched her leave her shift.
If you come within a mile of this block again, I’ll find you before the police ever do. Do you understand me?”
His entire body seems to shrink, and then he begins to tremble.
He’s literally shaking in his fucking boots.
Good.
“You can’t—”
“I already did.”
Tyler steps up beside me, scanning the area around us. “Cole,” he says quietly. “Enough.”
Lars looks at Tyler like he might be a savior, but the joke’s on him—he won’t find one. Tyler’s expression is cold when he looks at Lars.
Knowing someone is on my side sends a warm tendril through the stone-cold heart of me.
“Go,” I tell him. “Run. You’re being given a chance to leave, and you’re never getting this chance again.”
Some semblance of self-preservation kicks in, and Winters doesn’t hesitate.
Fast at first, then faster, until he’s almost sprinting, glancing back at me every few steps like he thinks he’ll suddenly find I’m closer than I was a second ago. By the time he rounds the corner at the end of the block, I’m sure he’s running for his life.
I stand there long after he’s gone, still breathing hard, still lit up and angry.
“Get in the car,” Tyler says.
But I don’t move. I can’t.
“Cole. Get in the fucking car. We’re leaving.”
“I’m going up.”
“No, you’re not.”
“She’s not answering her phone. He was right here, Tyler. I need to know she’s okay.”
“She told you not to come.” There’s frustration in his voice, but his eyes show me understanding.
“I know.”
“Then don’t go, Cole. That’s how you start fixing this. Listen to her.”
“I have to see her face.” I turn toward her building. “I have to see she’s okay with my own eyes. After that she can hate me all she wants.”
“Cole—”
But I’m already running. I take the stairs two at a time once I’m inside, desperate to see she’s okay.
If he laid one finger on her, I’m going to fucking kill him.
What right does he have to violate her like this? She’s not his.
Tyler’s trailing me the whole way. He stopped arguing somewhere on the second flight, but he didn’t turn around.
I pound on Hailey’s door harder than I should, and instantly regret it.
“Hailey, it’s me. Please open up. He was here.”
Silence.
Tyler catches up and leans his shoulder against the wall beside the door, shaking his head at me but not saying anything while he catches his breath.
“Hailey, Lars Winters is running down the street right now. We scared him off.”
But my words are met with more silence.
That’s when it dawns on me how serious she was when she said she didn’t want to see me.
I lean my forehead against the doorframe and force myself to slow down and take a breath.
“Please,” I say, keeping my voice low enough the neighbors won’t hear, but loud enough she will. “I know you’re upset. I know you told me not to come. We can talk about all of that. I just need to see that you’re okay.”
“Let’s just go,” Tyler says softly, nodding toward the stairs with his hands in his pockets.
“Go away, Cole.” Her voice comes through the door, quiet but so clear. “I know what you’ve been doing.”
I freeze, swallowing hard. “What do you mean?”
“I know you’ve been following me.”
“Hailey, let me explain—”
“No.” Her voice is stronger now, angry. “You told me you needed me to let you explain later. You told me to lock the door and wait. What you did not tell me, Cole, is how you knew what Lars Winters looked like.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I say, pressing my palm against the door like I can reach through it. “Lars has a history. Restraining orders, assault charges—”
“And how do you know all that?” she interrupts.
The door rips open, revealing the woman who’s quickly become my entire world.
The rage in her eyes makes me take a step back.
She’s been crying. She’s in an old T-shirt and leggings, her hair knotted in a bun at the top of her head.
Even now, as she stares me down with her wrecked face and her locked jaw, my stupid, reckless brain is still clocking how devastatingly beautiful she is.
“How did you even know enough to look him up?” she demands.
I close my eyes. Here it comes. The confession that’s going to unravel anything I had left with her.
“I got his license plate the night he keyed your car. I pulled security camera footage in the area until I had him on film. I ran the plate. I got his name, his address, his record. And a few other things.”
“What other things, Cole?” Each word comes out harsher than the last.
“I’ve been tracking his phone.” I force it out. “That’s how I knew he was here tonight. He crossed a geofence I set around your building.”
The color drains out of her face.
“You—” she starts, and stops, and starts again. “Do you know how much trouble I could be in for that, Cole? The fact that I told you his name is already a HIPAA violation. You took that name and you ran it, and you built a whole surveillance operation off it. If this ever comes back on me—”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.” She crosses her arms over her chest.
“I do know that. It’s the one thing I did clean. There’s no paper trail leading back to you.”
“Oh, good.” Her laugh is almost hysterical. “As long as you covered your tracks, right? What a fucking relief!”
“Hailey—”
“Who’s he?” Her gaze snaps past me to Tyler.
“This is Tyler. He’s from my therapy group.”
“Your therapy group?”
“I haven’t found the right time to tell you about it yet.
” The words come out in a rush. Maybe I can still save this.
I have to try. “I’m in therapy. Jack’s company is making me go, but still.
I’m working on myself. I started the program just before I met you, and I thought I could handle it.
I thought I could be normal with you, but when you called me so scared that night…
I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing. ”
Her eyes narrow, landing on the words I tried to skip over. “Work-mandated therapy for what?”
“My sister’s ex-boyfriend put her in the hospital.
I spent three weeks finding him. I beat him unconscious in a bar parking lot and used company resources from my last security job to do it.
I got caught. I lost the job. My current boss hired me on the condition that I go to the group for at least six months. ”
She lifts her brows in an expression of incredulity. I want to take comfort in her disbelief, but I know it just means I’ve broken her trust even more drastically than I thought.
My name is Cole, and I’m a recovering stalker. The words from that first meeting feel like a lifetime ago.
Except I’m not recovering.
I never was.
I just got better at hiding my issues.
“And then you met me,” she says slowly.
“And then I met you.”
“And then Lars threatened me.”
“And then Lars threatened you,” I echo her once more.
I watch her do the math. All of it at once. The timeline. The coincidences, the ones I staged and the ones I didn’t. The moments I showed up. The things I knew that I shouldn’t have.
“How long?” Her voice has gone flat. “Since when?”
“Since he keyed your car. It got worse when he came to the hospital.”
“Have you been following me?”