Page 30 of Hunt Me, Daddy

It wasn’t brutal though.

It wasn’t careless.

It wasn’t even threatening, not exactly.

That made me angrier because my body did not understand why we were not afraid. My brain had filed all the correct paperwork. There had been an unknown intruder in my apartment. My personal space had been violated. I should be on the defensive. My body listened, considered the evidence, and offered a deeply inconvenient counterargument.

Arousal.

“Absolutely not,” I said aloud.

The apartment remained wisely silent.

I shut the laptop halfway, then opened it again immediately because no, I was not letting a man I couldn’t name make me flinch from my own files. I checked the hallway feed. Empty. Checked the street camera. Wet pavement, trash cans, passing headlights. Checked the window sensors. Clean.

The couch dug into my back. My neck hurt. My eyes burned. I should eat, sleep, or call someone, but there was no one to call.

Not really.

Evan would answer. Evan would come over if I asked, probably with flowers and a wounded expression and absolutely no understanding of what danger looked like unless it came with emotional vocabulary. The police would take a report, maybe. They would ask whether anything was stolen. They would ask if I had an enemy. I would have to decide how much organized crime and illegal digital surveillance to put into that conversation, and then we would all have a bad time.

So I stayed where I was with my back to the wall, my knife beside me, my laptop open on my lap with fury for company.

Around three in the morning, the heat I’d registered earlier ratcheted up a notch.

I noticed it while staring at the crossword photo, zoomed in on the handwriting until the letters became abstract little strokes of pressure and intention. He wrote neatly, but not very prettily.

I wondered what his hands looked like.

The thought arrived like a slap across the face.

I closed the image.

Then opened it again.

“What is wrong with you?” I asked myself.

Plenty, apparently.

My pulse had picked up, but not in the clean way fear made it pick up. This was lower. Warmer. A slow, unwanted awareness moving beneath the anger like something alive beneath ice.

He had been here.

He had stood in my apartment.

Maybe by my desk. Maybe in my kitchen. Maybe by the couch where I sat now with my back to the wall like the brick could save me from my own bad wiring. He had seen the sticky note on my monitor telling me to eat actual food. He might have seen the book on the couch, the blanket I only folded properly when I thought about it, the mug I hadn’t washed. He might have opened my refrigerator and judged me.

That last idea should not have made my stomach tighten.

It did.

I stood so quickly the laptop slid toward my knees.

“Nope.”

I carried it to the desk, saved the file, locked it, backed it up, and then stood in the middle of my apartment with absolutely no plan beyond not sitting there getting turned on by my own home invasion.

That was a sentence I hoped never to think again.