Chapter 3
In the photo, she dies at the abandoned chemical plant on the East Side. As long as I take out the guy in black tonight, this three-month nightmare will be over for good. She’ll live on, safe and sound, carrying her misunderstandings about me, while I complete this grand sacrifice. I grabbed the black hoodie from the desk and shook it out. A small, hard object fell from the lining. *Clack.* It hit the floor. I looked down, my pupils contracting sharply. It was a rusted hex nut. Exactly like the one attached to the blood-stained key shoved under my door three months ago.
I flipped the hoodie inside out. Right by the collar tag, there was a line of tiny text scrawled in red Sharpie: *Put it on, and you become him.* I stared dead at the words, my fingertips tightening. What was the bastard implying? Trying to mess with my head? I let out a cold scoff and pulled the hoodie on without a second thought, zipping it up to my chin. "Whatever mind games you're playing," I said to the mirror, adjusting the brim of the hood, "tomorrow night, I'm taking this knife and opening your throat." Right then, from outside the heavy iron door of my basement—secured with three deadbolts—came a faint, raspy sound. Fingernails scraping against metal.
The scraping stopped. Holding my breath, I gripped my hunting knife in a reverse hold and yanked the door open. The hallway was empty. The dim, motion-sensor light flickered twice, illuminating a crumpled medical bill on the floor. I picked it up. It bore the red stamp of the Orthopedics Department at County General Hospital. Patient name: Lily. I let out a long breath, my frayed nerves easing just a fraction. Just a piece of trash blown in by the wind, or maybe a deliberate psychological cue left by the mastermind. But I couldn't gamble on it. I quickly packed my gear, ditched the basement, and drove to County General Hospital.
Half an hour later, I was sitting in a cheap motel across from the hospital. The showerhead in the bathroom was cranked to the max, scalding water blasting over my hands. Pale pink blood swirled in the sink, winding down through the creases of my knuckles. Just an hour ago, in the shadows of the hospital's back alley, I’d taken a solid steel pipe and shattered the tibia in Lily's right leg. The sickening *crack* of splintering bone was still echoing in my eardrums. She’d convulsed in agony back then, cold sweat soaking her hair, biting her lip so hard she didn't scream. When she looked at me, there was no fear in her eyes—just a deeply unsettling calm. "You think... breaking my leg is going to end this?" she’d panted, the corners of her mouth actually twisting into a bizarre, eerie smile. I didn't answer. I just dropped the pipe, a wave of relief washing over me. Mortal flesh is too fragile; only physical mutilation could cleanly sever the scythe Death was swinging at her. With a broken leg, she’d be bedridden. Tomorrow night at eleven, there was absolutely no way she could show up at the abandoned chemical plant on the East Side. I am her god. Even if she hates me to her very core, I will drag her back from the edge and keep her in the land of the living.
Toweling off my hair, I walked to the window and peeled back a slat of the blinds. Across the street, on the sixth floor of the inpatient wing, the lights in the ortho ward were still on. I mounted my high-powered scope with infrared night vision and dialed in the focus. The crosshairs pierced the glass, locking onto the bed by the window. Lily wasn't sleeping. Her right leg was encased in a thick cast, elevated high in a sling. But her face wasn't contorted in pain. Instead, she looked wired, almost manic, driven by a morbid mix of panic and urgency. She was swiping frantically at her phone screen, her fingers moving so fast they were a blur. Then she pressed it to her ear, her lips moving a mile a minute, clearly in a heated argument with whoever was on the other end. After hanging up, she started nervously gnawing on her thumbnail, her eyes sweeping the hospital room like radar. Suddenly, she snapped her head toward the window, staring straight out—straight at my window. Even across the hundred-foot drop and the tinted glass, I could feel her gaze licking up my spine like a cold snake's tongue. She yanked the curtains shut.
I lowered the scope, my heart rate kicking up. Something was off. A woman who’d just had her leg broken and was facing a death threat shouldn't be reacting like this. She was scared, but not of the pain, and not of the unknown shadow. Was she scared of me? Or was she guarding against me? I turned and booted up the laptop on the desk, plugging in my encrypted network dongle. As her landlord, I’d planted a stealthy mirroring trojan on her old phone half a year ago. When she upgraded, the backdoor synced through the cloud, still lurking deep in her iCloud. I punched in the commands, bypassed the 2FA, and slipped into her cloud photo library. It was mostly landscapes and food pics, but at the very bottom, in the "Hidden" album, there was an encrypted folder. Password her birthday? Nope. I tried the anniversaries of her parents' deaths, her college student ID—all wrong. Finally, on a whim, I typed in the date I first rented her the apartment. *Ding.* The folder unlocked. The folder was named: [Stalker].
My breath hitched. I opened it. Inside were hundreds of photos and videos packed tight. The timeline spanned exactly three months. The first photo was from mid-April. It showed a DoorDash receipt, clearly capturing the altered delivery address for the old reservoir park. And in the background of the receipt, there was a convex traffic mirror on the street corner. Reflected in it was the profile of a man in a baseball cap, looking down at his phone. That was me. The second photo was from early May. The electrical box of her office building was pried open, stuffed with wet wipes. The angle was a stealth shot through a crack in the fire escape across the street. And in the bottom right corner of the frame, there was a pair of muddy old sneakers. On the outer sole, a distinct "Z"-shaped split. My stomach did a violent flip, my hands and feet turning instantly to ice. The third photo, early June. A blind spot in the underground parking garage. A close-up of the clean cut on severed brake lines. Right next to it lay a pair of red bolt cutters. Wrapped around the handle was a small piece of worn anti-slip grip tape—my personal signature. What I thought was flawless, what I thought was my covert protection, was nothing but a clumsy one-man show in her eyes. She was never blinded by my "rescues." From the very first gas explosion, she’d sensed my presence. She didn't call 911. She didn't make a scene. Instead, like a patient spider, she sat in the dark, quietly collecting every single thread I left behind.
