Chapter 6
RAVEN
The presence returned night after night.
I felt it the moment I sat down at the piano. A shift in the air, subtle as a change in temperature. A prickle on the back of my neck.
Someone was watching me.
I'd felt it every night for the past fourteen nights.
I knew it wasn't Viktor. He had that same predatory stillness that made the hairs on my neck stand up, but Viktor's watchfulness made my skin crawl. Like the attention of a perverted uncle who hated you because he was attracted to you and knew he shouldn't be.
No, this was different.
I didn't just feel watched. I felt hunted. And yet, not in a threatening way.
I settled my fingers on the keys, letting muscle memory guide me through the opening bars of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The restaurant murmured around me as I played—the clink of silverware, the low hum of conversation, the muted laughter from the bar.
But beneath it all, I tracked him.
He was near the back tonight. Not the service alcove where he'd been two nights ago, or the bar where I'd sensed him yesterday. Instead, he was somewhere by the far wall, where the booths curved into shadowed privacy.
I couldn't explain how I knew it was the same person every time. But I did.
First, there was a scent. A barely there, clean, masculine scent, woven through the restaurant's usual cocktail of expensive cologne, wine, and Viktor's ever-present mint. Like standing at the edge of the ocean at dusk.
And something else. Something familiar that I couldn't quite place, sitting just out of reach in the back of my mind, like a word on the tip of my tongue.
I frowned as I tried to place it, my fingers pressing harder into the keys.
The Moonlight Sonata was supposed to be delicate, restrained.
But tonight, I played it like the challenge it was.
The notes built, the tempo increasing, my left hand driving the bass line with more force than the piece required. I felt, rather than heard, the shift in the restaurant's energy. Conversations paused. Someone near the piano stopped mid-sentence.
And he leaned forward.
I didn't hear him do it. I didn't see it. But I felt the weight of his attention sharpen, and my pulse kicked up.
Did the music sing to his blood like it did mine?
I smiled at the thought and let the final notes ring out into silence before transitioning into Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. Fast, dramatic…reckless, and my last song of the night. The kind of piece that demanded your full attention or you'd stumble.
I didn't stumble.
My fingers flew across the keys, and I played for him. For the stranger in the shadows who'd been watching me for weeks. Who'd followed me to the bus stop and watched me walk into my apartment.
Who'd been in the alley that night.
The realization had come to me yesterday as I stood at my kitchen sink with soap-slick hands, my heart trying to claw its way out of my chest.
I'd been replaying that night again—because of course I had, it was the only excitement I'd had in years and all I could think about—and I'd remembered something I'd dismissed at the time.
When I'd stepped through the back door into the alley, before I'd taken more than a few steps, I'd stopped because I'd stepped in what I thought was a puddle.
But there'd been something else in the air.
A heaviness that made the space feel occupied even though I'd heard nothing at all. No breathing. No footsteps.
And there'd been a scent. Faint. Almost lost beneath the stench of the trash and the smells from the restaurant.
The scent was clean, masculine, and it reminded me of the ocean. And THAT'S what made me stop.
Someone had been there. Someone had watched me walk through that alley, step into what I now knew was blood, and pause with my cane hovering over the slick pool.
Then that same someone had watched me walk away.
And they were still watching me now.
My hands crashed into the final chord of the Fantaisie-Impromptu, and the sound reverberated throughout the restaurant, too loud and violent for people trying to enjoy a nice dinner.
Abruptly, I stood, ignoring the polite applause scattered through the room. My fingers found my cane, and I moved through the tables on autopilot, my mind already three steps ahead.
He'd follow me tonight. He always did.
I stepped out of the restaurant through the side entrance, my cane sweeping the familiar path to the bus stop one block east. The rain had stopped, but the streets still smelled like wet concrete and exhaust.
I counted my steps to the corner. Right turn. Twenty-three more to the crosswalk.
Behind me, measured and careful, I heard a distinct set of footsteps.
Most people wouldn't notice. The city was full of footsteps, a constant percussion of strangers moving through their lives. But I'd learned to filter sound the way sighted people filtered visual noise, cataloging what mattered and discarding the rest.
These footsteps mattered.
They were too deliberate to be a random person who happened to be going the same way. Maintaining exactly the same distance between us, block after block.
I stopped suddenly at the entrance to a bar, tilting my head as if considering whether or not to go inside, and the footsteps behind me stopped when I did. Something threw off heat I could feel against my right cheek. Probably the large neon sign I remembered from before the accident.
Did neon signs get warm? I honestly didn't know. But I wasn't about to try to touch the source of the heat to find out. I'd learned that the hard way during the first few months of learning to live with my blindness.
I counted to five, then continued walking.
The footsteps resumed. Same distance. Same careful rhythm.
There was no mistaking it, I was under professional surveillance.
My heart kicked into a faster tempo, but it wasn't panic flooding my veins. It was something else entirely.
I felt alive.
For over two years, I'd been suffocating under the weight of everyone's pity and careful handling. I'd been sanded down into something smooth and harmless, a fragile thing to be protected and managed.
But this…this stranger in the dark tracking my movements…he wasn't treating me like I was fragile. He was treating me like I was dangerous.
The thought gave me a rush.
Maybe I was a fool for not being scared. Too much attention from the kind of people who'd killed a man in an alley and left him bleeding out onto the pavement was never a good thing.
And yet my pulse was racing with something that wasn't entirely fear.
I followed the corner of a building and turned down what I thought had to be an alley judging from the lack of traffic noise.
The footsteps hesitated.
Then followed.
I walked until the sounds from the street faded to almost nothing. Then I stopped…
And I turned around.
"I know you're there." My voice cut through the low, muffled sounds of the city, steady and clear. "So you might as well introduce yourself."
Complete and utter silence met my request.
I waited, my cane gripped in both hands, my heart hammering against my ribs. As the minutes passed, I began to wonder if I'd only been imagining that someone would actually have this much interest in me. For any reason.
Then I heard it.
He made no effort to hide his approach this time.
The footsteps stopped a few feet away. Close enough that I could smell him. It was that same scent that's been haunting my dreams. This time, underneath it, I could swear there was the slightest odor of chemicals. Or perhaps it was just the particular chemistry of a dangerous man.
"Milo."
His voice was low. Warm. Almost casual. The kind of tone a man used when he was leaning across a bistro table, not standing in the shadowy throat of an alley being confronted by the woman he was stalking.
But it was a lie. That tone.
The warmth in his voice didn't match the heavy, oscillating pressure radiating off him. I could feel it against my skin. A static charge that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up. Violence had a specific weight, a density that displaced the air around it, and this man was heavy with it.
"Milo," I repeated. My tongue flicked against the roof of my mouth, testing the texture of the name. It sounded completely innocuous. But I knew better. "Why are you following me, Milo?"
I didn't step back. I refused to give him the satisfaction of showing any kind of fear. Instead, I tilted my chin, staring blindly into the void where his voice had originated.
"Because."
The judgment was dry, delivered without heat. Like he was stating a fact about the weather.
A laugh tore out of my throat. It was sharp, brittle, and entirely devoid of humor. "That's not an answer."
He inhaled through his nose, then released the breath long and slow. After a slight pause, he said, "But it's the only one you're getting."
The voice came from my left now. and it was closer than before.
My fingers tightened on the handle of my cane. He'd moved without me noticing. He'd closed the distance between us, and I hadn't heard a single scuff of leather on pavement. No shift of fabric. No intake of breath.
My auditory map was my lifeline. If he could bypass it, he could also kill me before I even knew he was there.
He was good.
Terrifyingly good.
I felt a slight tug on my scalp and realized he was touching my hair. In my mind's eye, where I could still see, I could almost picture him rubbing a lock of it between his thumb and forefinger. "You're not making it very easy to keep you alive," he mused, almost to himself..
The arrogance of that statement made my jaw ache. I hated the implication that I was some fragile thing that needed minding. I hated even more that my heart was hammering a traitorous rhythm against my ribs from the electric thrill of being this close to the fire.
With a jerk of my head, my hair slid from his grasp. "I don't remember asking you to keep me alive."
"That's because you didn't."