My fists tighten against the restraints, ropes biting into my skin. But I keep my face still.
“You asked about your mother and sister,” he continues. “And I was going to make you wait. Drag it out a little, play a guessing game, and see how long before your voice cracked and you begged. But since you’re being so very good…”
His breath is warm and sour, tainted with cologne.
“They’re alive.”
Relief floods through me.
“For now,” he adds.
“I swear to god—” I begin.
“No, no.” He lifts a finger. “Don’t ruin it. You were doing so well. Don’t make me think we’re back to shouting. I hate that part. It’s… predictable.”
He spits the word like it tastes wrong.
I bite down on my rage and ask, evenly, “What do you want?”
He grins.
And that’s when I finally see it clearly.
Everything I pictured when Sabine first told me about the stalker, all the shadows, the disgust, the certainty that he was a monster. It was right.
I might be made from similar cloth. But the way he’s stitched together? It’s nothing like me.
“Isn’t that the golden question?” he says. Then he rises from the chair and walks to the desk beneath the wall of screens. He presses something on the keyboard lying flat in front of him, and the monitors flicker before switching, one by one, to new feeds.
“What do you think, Cassian? Why do I do what I do? Can you guess?”
My heartbeat spikes as I look at the screens. Nausea crashes over me before my brain can fully process what I’m seeing, but even though it makes me sick, I can’t unsee it. I don’t think I ever will.
They’re showing places. Not just random ones. Every single feed shows somewhere connected to Sabine or our family.
One shows the entrance to her workplace. Another, what must be the inside of the building, maybe her desk. The colors match some of the selfies she’s sent me from there. Another shows the entrance to Grayson’s family home. One is inside his office.
Then there are the ones placed lower, near the base of the desk. The ones he clearly positioned for easy access. The crown jewels of his collection.
One in the scarecrow near my mother’s garden, aimed at the back of our house. I never thought to check it, since it didn’t directly face Sabine’s window. But I see now how wrong I was. The angle wasn’t meant to see everything. Just enough. Just enough to catch whether the light in her room is on. You can barely make it out on the edge of the feed, but the signal is there.
And then the rest appear. The cameras I should have found but somehow didn’t.
The dead space behind the refrigerator vent.
A baseboard in the hallway.
One disguised as a panel, even though I know I checked that hallway. I swept it again and again.
For days, I tore through every vent, every outlet cover. I pulled apart baseboards, crawled under the floor, over the ceiling. I even went under the damn house.
And I still missed these.
Because he planted them knowing I’d be searching. He planned for this. He set traps just for me.
Jesus.
“I have to give it to you,” he says, nodding like some smug, haunted philosopher. “You really made it difficult to get a clean visual on your pretty little sister.”
