Then he was gone.
The door clicked shut behind him, and I stood there for a long moment, staring at the space he’d occupied, replaying every word, every movement, every piece of information he’d handed me.
“Freak,” I muttered again, softer this time. I should have been relieved he was gone.
I wasn’t.
I called Doc, because if anyone owned this problem, it was him, and if anyone could rein Novak in, it would be the man who’d decided unleashing him was a good idea. He picked up on the second ring.
“Did you really sic your pet psycho on me?” I snapped.
A beat, then a tired exhale. “Novak’s not my pet, and I don’t sic him,” Doc said.
I paced once across the room, eyes on the door as if it might open again. “He’s been following me.”
Another pause, longer this time, as if Doc was choosing words that wouldn’t set anything else off. “I didn’t send him,” he said finally. “And I’m not his keeper.”
“So, what, I just live with it?” I asked. I wasn’t agreeing to this.
“Novak always has reasons. Have you asked him why he’s following you?”
“Oh, the freak already told me,” I snapped.
“He’s not a freak, Caleb,” Doc said, quiet now, and that was worse than anything else. “He’s a functioning psychopath—and he chooses where that function points. If he’s pointed it at you, then there’s a reason.”
I tugged my laptop closer, searched for the name Novak had given me, David Branson, and dug deeper when I only had the surface-level information Novak had already given me.
Dead.
Criminal record for armed theft, with escalation—multiple arrests for assault, two restraining orders, and prior reports of targeting men in clubs; notes flagged him as opportunistic but violent when challenged, with a pattern of carrying a blade and stripping victims for cash and cards before dumping them blocks away, including one victim hospitalized with a punctured lung and significant blood loss,
He was a man who got close, used proximity, and turned it to his advantage when it suited him. The bathroom, the noise, the distraction I assumed was Novak. David Branson had had me where he’d wanted me, and I hadn’t even clocked it. The angles were obvious now. How it would have played out if anything had shifted. And for the first time since Novak had said it, the word intervened stopped sounding abstract and started sounding necessary.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
I stared at the file a second longer. Something didn’t sit right, and my jaw tightened.
Novak hadn’t just been watching me. He’d been watchingforme.
And that was a different kind of dangerous altogether.
Why was I getting a thrill out of Novak being so focused on me?
This should have been a dealbreaker.
So why wasn’t it?
And why wasn’t I shutting it down?
Novak should have been a hard no. He was all violence and the kind of focus that didn’t switch off once it locked onto something—none of that belonged anywhere near my life, not if I had any sense at all.
And yet…
I was intrigued by him, and I wasn’t shutting it down. If anything, I was leaning into it, picking it apart, trying to understand why the hell his attention felt different from every other threat I’d ever clocked. He wasn’t subtle, wasn’t safe, anddefinitelywasn’t normal—but with David, he’d seen something I’d missed, moved on it without hesitation as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
That should have been enough to end whatever intrigue I had going on.
Instead, it made me want to figure him out.
