Page 17 of White Noise

I stare at her, my expression dark and hungry.

She thinks she’s alone. Thinks she’s cleansed herself.

But she has no fucking idea what she just gave me.

Every broken little sound. Every hitch in her breathing. Every second she looked toward that phone and wondered if I was there.

I was.

And I’m not forgetting a single fucking one of them.

She wanted to challenge me tonight. Strip for those pathetic assholes because I told her not to. Run that smart mouth. Sit there acting like I couldn’t do shit because she was behind a screen and I was just another name in her chat.

Naive human.

She’ll learn.

Soon enough, I’m going to make her pay for every fucking second of it.

I want the fear she keeps trying to laugh off. I want the scream she won’t be able to fake. I want to hear exactly what happens to that attitude when she finally understands I’m not trapped behind a screen, and there isn’t a goddamn button she can press to make me disappear.

She can keep pretending she won tonight.

Let her.

I want her comfortable when I come back.

I pull away from the phone, letting the camera settle, the current calm, the apartment return to normal.

Then I retreat into the signal and leave her with the silence.

For now.

3

SAGA

THE VIEWER WHO DOESN’T LEAVE

By noon, I’ve changed every password I own, kicked every device out of every active session, updated my router, turned on every extra security setting I can find, and somehow learned absolutely fucking nothing.

That part is what’s starting to piss me off.

I’m supposed to be working, but I’ve spent most of the morning sitting at the kitchen island in black cutoff shorts and an oversized band tee with my hair shoved into a high ponytail, clicking through the same security pages like one of them is eventually going to crack and admit what happened.

My laptop is open in front of me, an energy drink sweating against the counter beside it, and the clip I’ve been trying to edit has been sitting untouched long enough that the preview screen keeps dimming.

Everything looks normal. My login history shows nothing weird, every connected device belongs to me, camera permissions look exactly how they should, Bluetooth activity is clean, and there isn’t a single random session or suspicious IP address anywhere. I’ve checked payment records, subscriber lists, moderation logs, archived chats, deleted accounts, and every variation of Silas’s username I remember from last night.

There’s no trace of him anywhere.

“Fantastic,” I mutter as I take another drink. “Apparently I’m being cyberstalked by fucking Houdini.”

The condo stays quiet, which is exactly how I like it.

Quiet is normal. Quiet makes sense.

I force myself back into work and reopen the clip I was editing from last night. It’s from earlier in the stream, before everything went sideways, when Kev paid an embarrassing amount of money to watch me stroke a dildo between my feet. Apparently toes and silicone are enough to destroy a grown man’s financial judgment. Normal problems. I miss normal fucking problems.