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Nine squares of it. My living room, my little tree still blinking. My kitchen, my mug still sitting on the table where I’d left it. My bathroom. My bed, the blanket rumpled where I’d shoved it off this morning. Every room I lived in, cried in, touched myself in.

My stomach dropped through the mattress.

“Look at your cameras,” he said softly. “See how safe you are?”

I couldn’t stop staring.

“No one gets in without me knowing,” he went on, and his voice dropped. “No one touches you without me knowing. Not him. Not anyone. The world is filled with men like Rhett, Ru. Men who smile at you at work and put something in your drink. But in here?” He nodded at the screen. “In here, no one can get to you.”

No one but him.

I’d felt it. All these months. Eyes on me in the shower. In bed. Walking home. I’d told myself it was grief. Loneliness. That after losing my parents, my brain had invented a presence because I couldn’t stand being alone for the first time in my life. And some sick part of me had liked it. Liked not feeling alone.

He’d been there the whole time.

“You were in my apartment,” I breathed, tearing my eyes from the screen and back to him.

“Yes.”

“The tea,” I whispered. “The faucet. Everything.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

Tears burned my eyes. My guardian angel was a masked stalker. “Why?”

“Because you deserved to be taken care of. And because I’ve looked into your eyes while you stripped for me. While you touched yourself. When you came around those needy little fingers.” He paused. “And screamed a name.”

Heat bloomed across my cheeks.

Klaus. Oh, no. Would he be in trouble?

“Who is he, Ru?”

I couldn’t breathe. “No one.”

“He’s someone.”

“You don’t get to—” My voice cracked. I pulled the blanket up to my chest. “You don’t get to ask me that. You watched me. You had no right.”

“I did.”

“What gave you the right?” Tears blurred my vision and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was scared or because he wasn’t Klaus. “You’re no better than him.”

The air in the room changed.

He leaned in slow, close enough that I could smell him through the mask, and that scent hit me so hard my eyes almost rolled back. Campfire. My toes curled. Klaus. My brain screamed it again and I shoved it down again, because I was concussed and so desperate for my mate that I’d project him onto a murderer.

“I’m nothing like him,” he said, deadly quiet. “He took you while you couldn’t say no. When I have you, you’ll be awake for every second of it.” The eyeholes held mine. “And you’ll beg for it.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to go to hell, but pain ripped through my belly.

I doubled over with a gasp. It was like a fist squeezing my uterus. Something hot and deep demanded more, and then heat rolled out from my core and washed over my skin. I needed—I pressed my thighs together as slick soaked through my underwear.

No.

My hand flew to my throat.

Bare. My patch was gone.