CHAPTER 11
Watched
°°°
Emery had almost talked herself out of being afraid by Thursday, four days into a stay at a house that wasn't hers, four days of Ghost's unmarked rotations and Rhys's careful, constant checking-in, four days with no further calls, no further sign that the voice from her living room had meant anything beyond a single ugly attempt at intimidation.
She'd gone back to the shop that morning against a mild chorus of objection, because Winters & Wax didn't run itself and Priya could only hold so much alone, and by six that evening, locking up in the gathering dusk with her keys in one hand and a bag of receipts in the other, she'd almost convinced herself the fear had been an overreaction.
The four days had passed in a strange, suspended rhythm — mornings at the shop trying to focus on stitching and orders and the ordinary business of running a business, afternoons half-alert for a phone that never quite stopped feeling like it might ring with bad news, evenings back at a house that still smelled like the life she used to have, careful conversations with Rhys that circled everything except the almost-kiss and the almost-something else neither of them had named yet.
She'd told herself the normalcy was working.
She'd told herself a lot of things this month that turned out not to be entirely true.
The man across the street disabused her of that notion within about four seconds.
She clocked him the way she clocked a bad stitch — not consciously, not at first, just some instinctive wrongness registering before her mind caught up to naming it.
He was leaning against a parked sedan that didn't belong to anyone on this block, watching her with the specific stillness of a man who wasn't actually interested in his phone despite holding it up like he was.
She kept walking toward her truck, forcing her pace to stay even, and felt her heart rate climb anyway, adrenaline flooding her system with a speed that startled her.
He started walking when she did. Not fast. Not obvious. Just matching her pace from across the street with the patient, unhurried confidence of someone who had nowhere better to be and no reason to rush.
She got her phone out with hands that weren't quite steady and called Rhys before she'd consciously decided to, her thumb finding his contact by pure animal instinct.
"Em?" His voice, immediate, alert — he'd clearly picked up before the first ring finished.
"There's a man." She kept her voice low, kept walking, forced herself not to look back across the street again. "Across the street from the shop. He's been standing there since I locked up, and now he's walking when I walk."
"Where are you exactly. Which direction are you facing."
"Heading toward my truck. Corner of Fifth and Larkin."
"Don't run. Don't look at him again. Keep walking to your truck like nothing's wrong, get in, lock the doors, and stay on the phone with me.
" His voice had gone flat and controlled in a way she recognized now as his operational voice, the one she'd heard through the wall four nights ago coordinating with Ghost. "I'm eight minutes out.
There's a prospect two blocks from you doing rounds, I'm calling him the second I hang up with you. "
"Eight minutes is a long time."
"I know. Keep walking, Em. You're doing great. Just get to the truck."
She reached the truck with her pulse hammering in her ears, fumbled the key into the lock with fingers that didn't want to cooperate, and got the door shut and locked behind her with a sound that felt, in the moment, like the most important click she'd ever heard.
Through the windshield, she watched the man across the street stop walking.
He didn't approach. He simply stood there, watching her sit in the locked truck, and something about his stillness felt more calculated than threatening in the moment — a message being delivered rather than an attack being staged.
Her hands found the wheel without her telling them to, gripping it hard enough that her knuckles went pale, some old instinct wanting the illusion of control even though the truck wasn't moving and wasn't going to move until Rhys told her it was safe.
She kept her eyes forward, resisting the pull to look back across the street, and focused on the specific, grounding details of the truck's interior — the fabric softener smell of the seat cover, the crack in the dash she'd meant to get fixed for two years, anything ordinary enough to keep the panic at a manageable distance.
"He's stopped," she said into the phone. "He's just standing there. Watching me."
"Don't move. Don't drive yet. I want eyes on him before you go anywhere, in case he follows."
She sat in the driver's seat with the engine off, watching the man watch her, for what felt like considerably longer than the six minutes it actually took before a motorcycle she recognized instantly by sound alone came around the corner too fast and skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, close enough to the parked sedan that its owner — if that's what he was — took an involuntary step back.
Rhys was off the bike before it had fully stopped rolling, and Emery watched, heart in her throat, as he crossed the street directly toward the man with the specific, controlled violence of someone who'd spent years learning exactly how much presence a body could project without throwing a single punch.
She couldn't hear what he said. She watched the man's posture change, watched him hold up both hands in a gesture that might have been placation or might have been something else entirely, and then watched him walk — not run, walk, unhurried, insultingly calm — back to the sedan and pull away.
Rhys stood in the middle of the street for a long moment, watching the car go, before he crossed back to her truck and knocked once on the window.
She unlocked the door with hands that had finally started shaking now that the immediate danger had passed, and he was there instantly, pulling the door open and crouching down beside it, checking her over with the same visual thoroughness he'd used at her apartment four nights ago.
"You're okay," he said, more to himself than to her, like he needed to confirm it out loud. "You're okay. He's gone."
"What did you say to him?"
"I told him if he came within a hundred feet of you again, I'd make sure it was the last thing he ever chose to do.
" His jaw was still tight, adrenaline visibly running hot in his own system despite the controlled voice he'd used on the phone.
"I don't know if it'll stick. Guys like that, sometimes the threat just gets relayed straight back to whoever sent him, and it becomes information instead of a deterrent.
But I wasn't going to stand there and negotiate. "
She realized, looking at him crouched beside her open door in the fading evening light, that her hands were shaking too hard to be useful for anything, and some old instinct — competent, practical, the same instinct that had gotten her through nine years of club-adjacent danger before — reasserted itself even through the fear.
"I need a dash cam," she said. "For the truck. And I need to talk to Priya about who's coming into the shop when I'm not there, and I need to change my route home so I'm not predictable, and I need — " She stopped, hearing her own voice climbing toward something frantic, and made herself breathe.
Her mind kept generating fixes faster than she could voice them, an old defense mechanism she recognized even as she couldn't stop it — the same instinct that had once helped her survive a loud, unpredictable house by staying two steps ahead of the next bad thing, redeployed now against an entirely different kind of threat.
She could feel the shape of the panic underneath the planning, patient and enormous, waiting for the moment she ran out of practical things to say.
"Hey." Rhys's hand found hers, steady where hers wasn't. "You don't have to solve all of it standing here in the dark. You're allowed to just be scared for a minute first."
"If I let myself just be scared, I don't know if I'll be able to stop." The honesty of it surprised her, arriving raw and unguarded in a way she hadn't planned. "This is easier. Solving it. Give me something to fix and I don't have to feel it."
Something in his face softened at that, recognition rather than argument.
"Okay. Dash cam. We'll get one tomorrow.
And I'll talk to Ghost about a rotation specifically on the shop, not just Dally's school and The Wrenhouse.
" He paused, his thumb moving once against her knuckles, an echo of the gesture from her kitchen table a week ago.
"But right now, tonight, I need you to actually let yourself be scared for about five minutes, because I watched a stranger follow you down a street twenty minutes ago and I'm still shaking too, if you want the truth of it. "
She looked at him properly then — really looked, past the controlled voice and the competent crouch and the careful checking-over, and saw it, the fine tremor in his own hands where they held hers, the tightness around his eyes that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with fear he hadn't let himself show until just now.
"Come here," she said, and didn't fully know what she meant by it until his arms were around her, both of them still folded awkwardly through the open truck door, her face pressed into his shoulder and his hand cradling the back of her head like she was something fragile he'd almost lost. He smelled like engine oil and the same soap he'd always used, and she let herself shake against him for exactly as long as it took for the adrenaline to finally start draining out of her system, neither of them saying anything, the quiet street settling back into its ordinary evening rhythm around them like nothing had happened at all.
"You can't stay at your place tonight," he said finally, his voice muffled against her hair.
"Or your apartment. Not with him having found you at the shop now too.
I know we've been doing the careful thing, giving you space, but Em — I need you somewhere I know is secure.
Just for a few more days, until we understand what tonight actually was. "
She should have argued. Some old, careful part of her catalogued the argument automatically — the boundaries she'd set, the business-only rule she'd tried to hold for weeks now, the fact that every night spent under his roof was a night further from the safe distance she'd built her whole post-marriage life around.
She found, pulling back just far enough to look at him, that she didn't have the energy to make the argument tonight, and wasn't entirely sure she wanted to.
"Okay," she said. "Tonight. We'll figure out the rest tomorrow."
"Tonight," he agreed, and helped her out of the truck to drive her own vehicle behind his, close enough the whole way that she could see his headlight in her mirror at every turn, a small, steady presence at her back all the way to a house she hadn't slept in for eleven months.
She kept glancing at that headlight the entire drive, an anchor against the part of her mind that kept replaying the stranger's patient, unhurried walk, the specific wrongness of a threat delivered without a single raised voice.
By the time they pulled into the driveway, her hands had mostly stopped shaking, though something colder and more permanent had settled into her chest in its place — the understanding that whatever came next, safety wasn't something she could solve her way out of alone anymore.