Page 9 of Dark Billionaire Stalker
I'm thinking about her.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the sketch. I've looked at it a hundred times since I took it from her apartment, but I unfold it again now, holding it up to catch the pale morning light. A serpent coiled around a dahlia. The serpent's mouth open, not to strike, but to whisper. The dahlia's petals dark and perfect, cradled in those scaled coils.
She drew this a week ago. Before she knew my name. Before she witnessed anything.
She felt me watching her from the gallery, and this is what her mind produced.
I trace the lines with my fingertip, following the curve of the serpent's body. Her hand made these marks. Her mind conceived this image. Some part of her understood, even then, what was circling her. And she didn't draw the serpent as a threat. She drew it as a lover. A guardian. Something that holdsthe flower close and speaks to it in a language no one else can hear.
What are you, Poppy Rivers?
I fold the sketch and slip it back into my pocket. I've been carrying it with me since that night in her apartment, this piece of paper that proves something I can't quite articulate. That she sensed me. That some part of her was already reaching toward some part of me, before we ever exchanged a single word.
I don't believe in fate. I've never believed in fate.
But I don't know what else to call this.
I replay the moment in the study for the hundredth time. I was standing over Woolworth's body, breathing slowly, letting my heart rate return to normal. The kill had been clean—strangulation, my preferred method. Intimate. Personal. I could feel his pulse fade beneath my hands, could watch the light leave his eyes. There's no distance with strangulation. No hiding from what you're doing.
The silence was settling over me, that beautiful emptiness I chase every time. For a few precious moments, my mind was quiet.
Then I felt it. That prickle at the back of my neck. The sense of being watched.
I looked up, and she was there.
Framed in the doorway, hand raised as if to knock, her face pale in the candlelight. The florist. The woman I'd been watching all week. The woman whose apartment I'd stood in while she slept, whose shampoo I'd smelled, whose sketches I'd studied. She was supposed to be gone. She was supposed to have left hours ago, before the gala began. But there she was, looking at me with those wide eyes, seeing exactly what I am.
I expected the usual response. The scream. The hysteria. The blind animal panic that takes over when prey confronts a predator.
She didn't scream.
She stared.
And in her eyes, I saw something that made my breath catch in my chest. Not just fear. There was fear, yes—I could see her pulse hammering in her throat, could see the tremor in her hands. But underneath the fear, there was something else.
Recognition.
Like she was seeing something she already knew. Like some part of her had been expecting this, waiting for it, preparing for the moment when the darkness she'd always sensed would finally step into the light.
She understood. On some level beneath language, beneath thought, sheunderstood.
And then she ran, and I let her go, and I've been thinking about nothing else since.
I could have caught her. Three strides, maybe four, and I would have had her. My hand around her arm, pulling her back into the room. The door closing behind us. Her fate sealed as surely as Woolworth's. It would have been the practical choice. The safe choice. Josiah would have approved—he's always telling me to be more careful, to leave no loose ends, to prioritize security over impulse.
But I didn't want to be practical.
I wanted to see what she would do.
I watched her flee through the security feeds, her panic making her clumsy, her breath coming in visible gasps as shestumbled through the corridors. She passed staff members who didn't stop her, guests who didn't see her. She was invisible in her terror, just another body moving through the chaos of the gala. She made it to her van. Dropped her keys twice before she could get the door open. Sat there for a long moment, hands shaking, before she started the engine.
I watched her drive away, and I felt something I haven't felt in a very long time.
Anticipation.
Would she call the police? Would she be brave, or foolish, or both? Would she try to bring me down with her shaking testimony and her complete lack of evidence?
I monitored her phone records through the night. She picked up the phone a dozen times. Typed the numbers. Never pressed call.
