Page 105 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

I did, actually. But I never asked because it made me feel safe.

“The good news,” Pell says as we head down the stairs, “is he’s making himself scarce while I take care of you.”

“Yippie,” I say flatly.

In the basement, Pell quickly locates and removes a small camera from one of the ceiling joists.

“I never noticed,” I say. “I’m never down here.”

“Surprising.” He glances around the unfinished concrete space. “Thought you’d make use of a second kill room.”

Holy shit. It is. The epoxied floor has a slight downward slope leading to the drain in the center. It’s subtle, but now that I know who my landlord really is, it’s clearly a domestic version of the Chamber of Consequences.

Once we’re back on the main floor, Pell heads to the front door and frowns.

“Aww, hell.”

“What?”

Instead of answering, he strides to the kitchen and studies the doorframe, then curses again, dropping his drawl like he does when he gets serious. “This might take longer than I thought.”

He returns to his bag and starts rummaging around.

“Goddammit, Pell, what?”

He sighs. “This ain’t the tech I installed. Your boy must’ve upgraded.”

“Upgraded,” I say slowly, too rattled to remind Pell that Hugo’s not my anything.

He pulls out two black, palm-sized gadgets, each with different dials and gauges.

“RF detector,” he says, tapping one, then the other. “Camera lens detector. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

He fires up his anti-peeping tom devices and moves slowly around the perimeter, passing them over my beloved paperbacks, my collection of framed vintage postcards, the pretty blown-glass vase from my trip to New York with Felicity last year. He does the same thing in my kitchen and laundry room, and the detectors light up.

They light up so many times.

“He asked me to recommend some high-end surveillance cams ’round the time you moved in,” Pell says twenty minutes later around the screwdriver gripped in his teeth. He’s standing on a stepladder to disassemble my smoke detector. My fucking smoke detector. “I assumed it was for a target.” He glances down at me. “Guess that was you.”

When he finally pulls the unit free, he holds it at eye level and gives a low whistle.

“Spared no expense. This is high-end shit. Clear-as-day picture and audio.”

“Great,” I say tightly. “So glad he’s been enjoying me in high-def.”

Along with the smoke detector, Pell finds pinhole cameras in electrical outlet covers in the living room and laundry room, plus ones in the clock in my kitchen and my front hallway coat hook and nearly invisible motion sensors over my doors nestled alongside my own goddamn security cameras.

I feel a little sicker with each one he uncovers and removes.

“Upstairs next?” he asks.

I already know what he’s going to find. I saw it on Hugo’s phone last night. I stand in the upstairs hallway, my arms wrapped around my midsection.

“Hell, even I don’t put cameras in people’s bedrooms without a damn good reason,” he mutters as he exits my bedroom holding the cardboard box full of the removed cameras. Pointing at the hallway smoke detector, he says, “This is the last of ’em.”

I watch as he positions his ladder under it and makes quick work of the retrieval. When he’s done, I say, “Thank you on behalf of whatever unsuspecting woman he rents to next.”

“You’re movin’?” he asks as he descends.