Watching from the Dark (He's Been Watching #7)

1. Ezra

EZRA

Six weeks through a rifle scope and I still hold my breath when her lights come on.

I know this. I know everything about her. From watching, from letting myself into her apartment more times than I should admit, from reading the evidence she leaves without knowing anyone is taking notes.

My name is Ezra Lowe. I kill people for a living. I’m a patient man.

I’ve been pulling triggers for eighteen years. Not one contract that went sideways because I rushed. Patience is the professional virtue I’ve built my entire career on—the willingness to sit in a cold room for forty hours waiting for one clean window. The willingness to watch.

Then six weeks ago she walked to her kitchen window in an oversized sleep shirt, no bra, eating cereal from the box at eleven PM, and I forgot what I was supposed to be watching.

My actual target lives two streets north. Window at street level. Clear night, no wind, I could finish the contract in under ten seconds. I’ve had dozens of clean windows.

I’ve been moving my scope to her window instead.

Her name is Dove Sinclair. Twenty-eight years old.

Five-two. She teaches kindergarten at Marchfield Elementary eight blocks northwest. Paint on her hands on Wednesdays, chalk dust on Fridays.

She has a blue dress she wears on planning Mondays and a third dress with small buttons down the front—she always misbuttons the second one from the collar and finds it in the hallway mirror when she gets home and laughs at herself every time.

I know her laugh.

From two hundred meters and from inside her apartment, standing in the dark.

I’ve let myself in so many times I’ve lost the pretense of counting. Here’s how it started.

First time, I told myself it was a security sweep.

Force of habit—I case a building, I check the vulnerabilities.

Her locks are standard residential, not worth half her rent.

I changed the strike plate on the front door and reinforced the bedroom window latch the way I’d secure a safe house.

Then I stood in her bedroom doorway, looked at the bed, and walked out.

Drove to the river. Sat there an hour before I could go home.

After that: no justification. I went because I wanted to be in the space she lives in.

I read the books on her nightstand. I sat in the chair she grades papers in—I know it from the scope—and I looked at her apartment from her angle.

A specific hunger: wanting to see what someone sees when they look at their own life.

I’ve sat across from targets in restaurants.

I’ve memorized floor plans of buildings I was hired to enter once and leave with a body cooling behind me.

I have never wanted to understand someone’s daily view.

A few visits in, I took two pairs of underwear from the top drawer.

Cotton. One white, one gray, waistband worn soft.

The everyday ones, not the nice ones kept at the back of the drawer.

I told myself I’d return them. That was weeks ago.

I’ve had them in my jacket pocket so long they smell more like me than her.

I need that to change tonight.

I don’t remember which visit it was when I first heard her use her vibrator. They’ve blurred together—the letting-myself-in, the standing in her rooms, the wanting.

I was crossing the hallway toward the door when I recognized the sound. The quiet mechanical hum of it through the bedroom wall.

I stopped.

I stood with my back against her wall until she finished.

The sound of the device. The change in her breathing. The rhythm of it shifting—slower, then faster, then slower again. The sounds she made: small, private, nothing like anything you put on for an audience. The sounds a woman makes when she’s alone and has no idea anyone’s listening.

I had my cock out before I made any decision about it.

Hand wrapped around myself, stroking slow, back against her wall, listening.

I timed myself to her. When her breathing changed I changed my pace.

When she went still I went still. I was so hard it ached—the kind of hard that comes with a pulse you can feel in your teeth.

I came in the dark of her hallway while she came in the light of her bedroom.

Came so hard my knees buckled. Stood in the aftermath with my hand on the wall and my cum on the floor and thought: I need to hear that from two feet, not twenty.

I went back. More than once. Enough that the pattern became something I stopped pretending was incidental.

Night after night at her wall. My cock in my hand while she used her vibrator on the other side.

Hard before I reached the hallway. Hard from the key in the lock, from the smell of her apartment, from knowing she was on the other side of the plaster doing what I was doing except she didn’t know I was there.

Coming in the dark of her hallway while she came in the light of her bedroom.

Cleaning up and letting myself out and sitting in my car and the want didn’t go anywhere.

It accumulated. Compounded. Banked behind my ribs with nowhere to release.

I’ve sat in hides for days waiting on a target.

I’ve watched a man eat breakfast knowing I’d end him before dinner.

None of that patience felt like this. That patience was professional.

This was the patience of a man losing his mind, one orgasm at a time, in a dark hallway that smelled like her shampoo.

One night I was in her apartment when she came home—I hadn’t planned it, I’d been replacing a dead battery in the kitchen smoke detector and I heard her key in the lock.

I got behind the bedroom door and held still.

She came in, made dinner, watched television, went to her bathroom, started the shower.

And I stood in the dark of her bedroom with my cock hard and every muscle locked, and I did not move toward her.

The discipline it took was the kind I usually reserve for a shot I can’t miss.

I walked out after her shower started and I sat in my car for an hour.

I could have gone in. I didn’t. I’ve put bullets through men’s skulls at six hundred meters and felt less afterwards than I felt walking out of her apartment that night.

Not until I’d made the decision properly. Not until tonight.

The scope is cruder than the wall.

What the scope gives me: body language, silhouette, the shape of her in whatever she’s wearing. The first night she came to the kitchen window in the sleep shirt—I could tell she had nothing on underneath, the way the fabric moved—I held my breath until her light went out.

What the scope gave me on more nights than I should have been looking: shadows moving against the curtain.

The specific arc of her right arm. The tilt of her head when she was close.

That total stillness when she finished—I know that stillness from the wall, from listening to the sound of it.

Seeing the shape of it through glass at two hundred meters while my cock strained in my jeans and I couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it except watch.

I’ve held a scope on a target for eighteen hours without shifting.

Holding the scope on her while she touched herself was harder than any kill shot I’ve ever waited for.

The scope also gave me: watching her touch her clit in the shower, her arm moving under the frosted glass, her head tipping back, her whole body going still at the end. The frosted glass is cruder than the curtain. I watched anyway.

The scope also gave me: the kitchen dancing.

A small hip shift when a song changes, something she doesn’t know she’s doing.

I wrote about it in my notebook when I was still calling the notebook a surveillance file.

She dances in the kitchen. She shouldn’t be allowed to do that.

It’s unreasonable. The notebook started the way my field reports always do—clinical, detached, the way I’d document a target’s movements before a job.

Entry points. Sight lines. Behavioral patterns.

It stopped being a field report fast. The handwriting changed. I started using her name instead of subject. I started writing things that had nothing to do with any contract anyone was paying me for.

Other things the scope gave me: the couch at midnight, television light catching her face when she thinks she’s alone.

The cereal at eleven PM, standing at the window without a bra because why would she need one, nobody can see through an alley from a dark building.

The chair at the table that’s never pulled out, the unused placemat, the eating standing up over the counter or the sink.

She’s been alone for a while and managing it and I’ve been watching her manage it from across the alley and every night I watch her turn off her kitchen light and go to bed alone, that management looks more like a problem I intend to solve.

Other things: the book she’s been reading for five weeks and keeps putting face-down on the couch cushion, which tells me she falls asleep before the chapters end.

The mug she refills twice before work and holds with both hands, which tells me she runs cold in the mornings.

The fact that on Friday nights she opens a bottle of wine and pours one glass and puts the rest back, because one glass is the amount a person drinks when they’re managing the quiet.

I know her. Imperfectly. Through glass and distance and walls.

Tonight I close every remaining distance.

She’s had years of evenings before this one.

Tonight is the last one that will go this way.