But not Eris.
She keeps coming back like it’s her new source of oxygen.
Kieran hasn’t said much about the message he deleted, but I saw his jaw working that night when he came home. He had cleaned the logs as if he were stomping out embers before a fire could catch…
Tell him to walk away. Or I will.
We didn’t have to ask who sent it because all three of us would have said the same thing. Silas didn’t flag it, and I didn’t either. But it did serve one purpose… Showing us we’re all teetering on the edge.
It doesn’t matter that we all know the rules.
Observe, record, don’t interfere.
We’ve never met someone like her. So, how can we not interfere?
I’m in the loft kitchen, crunching cereal and watching Silas work at the counter. His typing sounds like rain against glass… Steady, impossible to ignore.
Kieran is locked in his room again, pretending he’s coding and not obsessing over the way she looked at him across a crowded bar. He’s a poet when he’s moody, so I’m not sure how accurate his description is, but I think I’d be in his shoes if the entire room stopped moving while I stared at a stranger.
Except she doesn’t feel like a stranger anymore.
“She got another text,” I say, abandoning my cereal to retrieve my laptop.
Silas doesn’t look up. “From the app?”
“No. The guy.”
That earns me a glance. “When did you hack her phone?”
I spin the laptop toward him. No need to answer; he doesn’t actually care when I did it, just that I didn’t tell him before now. The screenshot is enough to make him forget any ire with me… It’s the moment her expression changes, the way she flips her phone face-down like it’s toxic.
“Same number?” he asks, tone darkening.
“Yeah.”
He types something quickly, frowning. “He’s still listed as a flagged contact. I’ll block him through the cell company’s servers.”
“No.” I lean back in the chair, a smirk playing on my lips. “Let him keep texting. Let her keep realizing we’re better.”
That gets me the full Silas stare. Cold, exact. “You’re playing with fire.”
I grin. “Sure. But it’s our fire.”
“She won’t realize we’re better if she doesn’t know there’s aweto begin with,” he warns, standing and stalking out of the kitchen. “We’re not better if we burn it down.”
I nod my agreement, but there isn’t anything I can say back. We need to meet her in real life and stop hiding behind the accidental anomaly excuse from the app.
An hour later, I’m still at the screen, thinking about how easily we could make Erisourgirl… And also watching the external feed from her building.
Daniel is there again. I’ve seen him at her apartment complex, coming and going more than she does. He doesn’t go near the door, doesn’t even knock.
He just stands at the edge of the sidewalk like he’s thinking about it.
My hands twitch as I watch him disappear around the corner of the building next door right as Eris gets out of a cab.
“She doesn’t know he came by,” I say to the room, my eyes glued to the screen.
No one answers. The loft hums with machines and silence, but I know they’re behind me. They just don’t know what to say.
