As I step onto the street again, my gaze drifts once more toward the route she took. Even though she’s out of sight, the echo of her lingers.
***
It’s late, the kind of late where the streets turn thin and the city sheds its crowds one block at a time. Eden walks with her notebook tucked beneath her arm, her steps unhurried but alert. She always checks her surroundings; she just doesn’t check them well enough.
The man tailing her is easy to read. Young, wiry, jittery. His eyes keep drifting to her bag, then to the quiet stretch of sidewalk ahead.
A petty thief—one of the many pests this city breeds by the hour. Normally I wouldn’t waste a breath on someone like him. Not worth the bullet. Not worth the disposal. But when his pace shifts to match hers, something sharp flares through my chest.
I move.
He doesn’t hear me approach. Eden keeps walking, oblivious to the danger only a few yards behind her. The thief reaches inside his jacket and I’m on him before he gets the chance to decide courage over hesitation.
My hand closes around the back of his neck and I slam him against the brick wall of the nearest building. His breath bursts out in a strangled gasp. I press my forearm to his throat—not fully, just enough to choke off sound.
His eyes go wide. Recognition dawns, and fear spreads like ink.
“Wrong girl,” I say quietly.
“S–Simon, man, I didn’t know—”
“You don’t need to know.” I tighten my grip a fraction. “You just need to disappear.”
He nods rapidly, trying to talk, trying to swallow. I release him only enough to let him breathe. He stumbles, clutching his throat, scrambling backward.
“If I see you anywhere near her again,” I add, “you won’t walk away.”
The threat lands. He bolts, tripping over himself as he vanishes down the alley. Pathetic.
Eden never turns around. She keeps moving down the block, adjusting her scarf, unaware of the danger that trailed her or the hands that removed it.
A strange heat lingers beneath my ribs. It takes me a second to recognize it.
Relief.
I hate that I feel it.
I slip back into the shadows, keeping my distance as she crosses the street and heads toward her apartment building. She has no idea how easily she could have been caught off guard. She has no idea she walked past two other men who clocked her before deciding she wasn’t worth the effort.
She’s lucky they weren’t hungrier.
The thought irritates me, because I know exactly who is doing the protecting.
I follow her to her building, but I don’t let her see me. A streetlight flickers overhead—broken earlier today by one of my men, deliberately.
A section of the block is pitch-black now, forcing her to walk on the opposite side of the road, closer to the building entrances and farther from the alley corners. She adjusts without thinking. She adapts. She keeps her guard halfway raised, even if she doesn’t understand why.
I planned that. A small change. A subtle one. One of many.
Over the past forty-eight hours, I’ve redirected a security patrol so they pass her route ten minutes earlier. I altered one of my meetings so it takes place two blocks from her afternoon café. I had a street vendor move his stand, forcing her to shift her walking pattern slightly left instead of right—away from a man who’s been watching women in the area for weeks.
She doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know that she walks inside a web I’m weaving thread by thread.
I tell myself it’s caution. Precaution. A way to keep an unpredictable witness contained. But the truth presses against the inside of my skull, inconvenient and unwanted.
I don’t want her harmed.
My men don’t understand why I keep issuing these adjustments, why I stay close enough to intervene but far enough to stay unseen. They think I’m being paranoid. Or strategic. Or ruthless.
