6. Boundaries Breached #3
My throat closes. I’m scrambling for my phone, hands shaking so bad I drop it twice.
Who the hell do I even call? Cops are twenty minutes out, if they bother showing up at all.
I could grab the baseball bat under my bed and go charging out there like a complete lunatic — but there are three of them, they’ve got gasoline and lighters, and shit. By the time anyone gets here…
The thought dies in my brain as another figure steps out from the shadows at the side of the house.
He’s taller than the others, moving like some big cat on a slow stalk, and my stomach does this ridiculous flip.
My mouth goes dry watching him just… walk toward those assholes.
No yelling. No running. Just coming at them like he’s got all the time in the world.
And damn him. He’ll show himself to these random dickheads but won’t give me the time of day?
Something hot and angry twists in my gut, tangled up with that same stupid heat I felt reading his journals.
I press my face against the glass, breath fogging the window as I watch it all go down.
The tall figure steps into a sliver of moonlight.
I still can’t see his face, but something about him hits me like a gut punch.
Those wide shoulders. The way he stands, the ground belongs to him. It’s him. My Watcher.
The tallest vandal sees him first, his body goes rigid, a strangled “Fuck!” cutting through the rainfall.
His friends whip around, fumbling their gasoline cans and lighters onto the wet grass as they stagger backward.
My Watcher moves toward them with the steady inevitability of an approaching storm.
His lips move, forming words that don’t reach my window but hit the intruders like physical blows.
They bolt in three different directions, tripping over their own feet, abandoning their half-finished crime like prey fleeing a predator.
Within seconds they’re gone, swallowed by the dark beyond my property line.
My Watcher stays motionless in the yard, rain streaming off a heavy coat.
My hand finds the window latch. I could be down those stairs and out the door in thirty seconds — face him while he’s right there in the open, demand answers.
My legs tense. But before I can move, his head tilts up.
His gaze finds my window without a second’s hesitation.
My breath catches. He knows exactly where I am. Exactly which window I’m standing at.
I should duck away, pretend I saw nothing, but I remain frozen, locked in this distant connection through glass and rain and darkness.
My reflection in the window betrays me; the corner of my mouth has curved upward without permission.
I catch myself smiling at him and quickly press my lips together, unsettled by my own reaction.
When did he transform in my mind from The Watcher to My Watcher?
After what feels like an eternity, he gives a single, deliberate nod before turning and melting back into the shadows at the edge of the property.
I don’t sleep again. Instead, I drag the armchair to the window, cocoon myself in the thickest wool blanket I can find, and keep vigil.
Hours crawl by. My eyes burn, and I have to remind myself to blink.
The darkness outside softens, bleeds into grey, then blooms with the weak morning light.
Somewhere between my third and fourth hour of staring, the rain stops, leaving everything outside slick and gleaming, as if the world decided to rinse away the evidence of what could have happened.
I force myself outside at dawn. The rain’s washed everything clean, like the night is trying to pretend it never happened.
My bare toes curl against the damp grass as I scan the yard, half-expecting to find nothing but morning dew and my own paranoia.
Part of me wants to believe I dreamed it — the gasoline smell, those figures, him — but then I spot it.
Evidence scattered across my lawn like breadcrumbs, leading somewhere I’m not sure I’m ready to go.
I pick my way across the lawn like I’m in some twisted scavenger hunt.
There’s the evidence: spray paint can tossed by the steps, some douchebag’s lighter winking up at me from the wet grass, and a gas-soaked rag hanging off one of my bushes like the world’s shittiest Christmas ornament.
Each piece they dropped tells the same story: someone wanted to torch my house last night, and someone else told them to fuck right off.
Near the driveway, I spot a balled-up piece of paper and grab it.
My hands are still shaking like crazy as I flatten it out.
“GET OUT WITCH,” it says, with my address underlined three freaking times underneath.
My gut does this awful drop thing, like when you miss a step on the stairs.
Some asshole in town hates me enough to try to burn my house down with me in it.
And someone else put themselves between me and that.
I drag myself around the yard, gathering up each bit of trash those assholes left behind.
When I reach the side of the house where he stepped out of nowhere like some dark guardian angel, something stops me cold.
There in the mud is a footprint, massive compared to mine, pressed so deep it’s like he stood there forever, waiting for me to find it.
The rain should have washed it away, but instead it’s preserved perfectly, like a message.
He wanted me to see this. My heart does a stupid little skip as I realize he left it for me to find, proof I’m not crazy, that he’s real, that last night actually happened.
I crouch beside it, my fingertips suspended just above the mud’s edge.
Not some half-heard creak or scribbled page I could have imagined, here’s proof pressed into the earth itself.
I can almost see him again: rain streaming off broad shoulders as he faced those men, that deliberate tilt of his head finding me through glass and darkness, acknowledging me with a single nod that said everything without a word.
I sink to my knees beside his footprint, my fingers trembling as they trace its outline in the mud.
“Thank you,” I breathe, the words ripping from somewhere deep and primal inside me, my voice breaking as tears blur my vision.
My protector, my shadow, my watcher, whoever he is, just saved my life, and suddenly I need him to hear me with an urgency that burns through my veins like wildfire.
The sun breaks through the clouds, throwing my shadow right across that footprint as I stand.
My brain is a complete mess — half of me terrified that someone knows me well enough to show up exactly when I’m in deep shit, and the other half just stupidly, embarrassingly grateful they did.
What would his voice sound like? Low and rough?
Quiet? Would his skin be warm if I reached up and touched his face?
God, what is wrong with me. I’m standing in wet grass fantasizing about a stranger who is either stalking me or saving me — and honestly, maybe both.
Trudging back to the house with my arms full of trash, I glance up at the watchtower windows.
Nobody there, or nobody I can see, but that prickly feeling between my shoulder blades says otherwise.
And the weird thing? I don’t hate it anymore.
A week ago, I was jumping at every creak and shadow.
Now it’s almost like having a bodyguard.
A seriously messed-up, zero-boundaries bodyguard who goes through my stuff and won’t show his face — but still.
Someone’s got my back. And until I figure out why, until I crack whatever weird connection keeps us locked in this freaky little game of peekaboo, I’m staying put.