No ambition beyond the next chapter, the next comment, the next anonymous validation from strangers who don't know her name.
Unless you count her predictable cycle—words on the page, fingers between her legs—as ambition.
Which, knowing what I know about her, might be the most honest thing she does.
She thinks she's invisible. Thinks her online anonymity keeps her safe.
She's wrong.
I've been watching for months.
Learning her patterns. Her routines. The precise rhythm of her isolation.
And soon, very soon, she'll understand exactly what it means to be seen.
Completely.
Unavoidably.
Mine.
My driveway entrance sits under a ranch archway marked with a skull and crossbones instead of a cattle brand. I navigate the ice, pulling slowly as I travel through an encroaching tunnel of hundred-year-old blue spruce.
For a moment, there is no sky above—just tree limbs. It’s disorienting, something out of a dark fairy tale. But it never lasts, never long enough. Because a moment later the amber glow appears behind the floor-to-ceiling windows of my log estate.
The temperature on the dash reads twelve degrees. As I pull the Jeep around the side of the house toward the barn, I catch a glimpse of the hot tub on the back patio, its surface rolling with steam that rises like ghosts in the frigid air. The water glows an otherworldly red from the submerged lights, a beacon of heat in the frozen darkness.
The contrast is stark—civilized warmth against the brutal cold that wants to kill everything it touches.
I guide the vehicle into the barn's wide, dark mouth, the headlights sweeping across the interior before I drive fully inside. The structure swallows the Jeep whole, wood beams overhead and the lingering scent of hay and horse leather from the previous owners.
When I kill the engine, the hardcore Blood for Blood song becomes instant silence. The engine ticks as I look down at myself, studying the scarlet stains on my shirt, my pants, my arms, my hands.
I get out of the Jeep, walk over to the wood-burning furnace, and open the door. The embers glow bright orange under gray ash. The furnace in the horse barn is a nice touch. Part of the reason I bought this place six months ago.
After stoking the fire and loading it with logs, the flames rise up, fervent and yellow.
I strip out of my bloody clothes and feed them into the fire. The flames eat the fabric, racing along the threads until they are nothing but fire itself.
There is nothing about the past to dwell on.
Properly tuned minds only concentrate on the future.
Creating it. Manifesting it into being with planning, and recon, and proper execution.
So once the fabric is ash, I turn back to the open barn door and walk naked into the snow.
It crunches under my bare feet. Cold bites my calves, my thighs, my balls. I don't speed up. Don't hunch my shoulders or protect myself from the wind cutting across the property.
My skin prickles, then burns. But not enough to distract me from what comes next.
The invitation will arrive tonight. Tomorrow, on Christmas Eve, she will walk through my door believing she chose this. Believing the auction was chance, not orchestration. Believing I'm a stranger who won her fairly instead of the man who's been inside her apartment, her laptop, her head for six months.
My cock thickens as I cross the patio. Half-hard already and I haven't even touched myself, haven't thought about anything except logistics and cleanup for the past fourteen hours.
But now it's all about the future.
All abouther.
