Because the work I did mattered. The cases I flagged. The patterns I identified. Someone took those threads and pulled, and the fabric is coming apart.
I turn another page.
And catch movement.
At the end of the aisle.
The detection is peripheral—a shift in the visual field that my officer’s training registers before my conscious mind labels it. A shadow relocating. A shape present and then absent, withdrawing from the aisle’s sightline with the specific, measured retreat of someone who was watching and realized they were about to be seen.
I look over.
No one there.
The aisle ends at a junction with the next row of shelves. Empty. The warm wood and the colored spines and the afternoon light from the dormer windows presenting a scene that is, to any casual observer, unremarkable.
I frown.
Paranoia?
Maybe. You’re a woman who has survived two assassination attempts in the same week and has a six-month prognosis and a stalker with institutional resources. Paranoia isn’t a diagnosis—it’s situational awareness with a justified threat matrix.
But maybe it’s nothing.
Maybe it was another customer. A browser. Someone who walked to the end of the aisle and turned back because the section wasn’t what they were looking for.
Except browsers don’t withdraw. Browsers turn corners. Browsers walk with the unhurried pace of people who are here for the same reason you are—to look at books. That shape retreated. Pulled back. The motion carrying the specific,deliberate quality of someone who was maintaining a sightline and broke it because the target started to turn.
I open the book.
To a random page.
Pretend to read.
The investigator’s reflex engaging automatically—the practiced, I’m-not-looking-at-you performance that every officer learns during surveillance training. Look relaxed. Look absorbed. Let the target believe they’re undetected, because an undetected watcher gets comfortable and a comfortable watcher makes mistakes.
My eyes are on the page.
My attention is on the aisle’s end.
And there it is again.
The sensation. Not visual this time—felt. The lingering, skin-level awareness of being observed. The specific, primal, Omega-receptor response to being in someone’s focus. My scent receptors are working overtime, trying to isolate a foreign signature from the ambient perfume of paper and wood and coffee, but the bookshop’s olfactory density is too high—too many layered scents for my system to extract a single thread from the tapestry.
Someone is watching me.
In a bookshop. In a cottage town two hours from Sweetwater Falls. On a date with a detective who is currently downstairs making a phone call.
I don’t have my gun.
I don’t have anything. I’m standing in a fiction aisle in a knitted dress holding a romance novel with no weapon, no radio, no backup within shouting distance, and no tactical option that doesn’t involve revealing that I’ve detected the surveillance.
I pout.
The expression is involuntary—the frustrated, lower-lip-forward gesture of a woman who is accustomed to handling threats with professional resources and currently has nothing but a hardcover book and an attitude.
How do I catch them?
I can’t confront directly—no weapon, no backup, and confrontation in a public bookshop creates civilian risk. I can’t call Alaric without breaking cover—pulling out a phone signals awareness. I can’t leave the aisle without giving the watcher a clear view of my exit path, which tells them I’m mobile and potentially triggers escalation.
