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The cameras were easy work thanks to connections I have in my back pocket, and tracking him from the confines of my apartment was barely a challenge.

The gym’s security system is laughable with its default credentials and no segmentation.

The café’s a little better, but everyone cuts corners somewhere. I tapped into both and watched him from my phone, nothing short of a nature documentary.

And I can’t help but revel in how he flinches every time a door opens, how he precariously watches the exits.

He never relaxes his shoulders.

But at some point, I’ve been watching him enough, and my leg healed to the point I’m functional. So, it was time to meet him properly.

I waited around the corner from the café, rain-slick pavement and the smell of coffee bleeding through brick. His feed went live on my screen as I watched him pack up, exchange a few words with the girl behind the counter. When he pushed the door open, I slipped my phone into my pocket and stepped forward at the exact wrong moment.

Collision, and a perfect accident.

I brought my dog along because who doesn’t trust people with dogs, and nobody questions a man holding a leash. It’s social camouflage, and it works beautifully.

I’m prepared to work for his trust. Slow smiles coupled with shared routes. Becoming background noise in his life before I pull the rug out from under him.

So imagine my surprise when he looks at me through enduring malachite eyes as red blooms across his cheeks and ears prickling to pink. He was flustered... genuinely and embarrassingly so.

I almost laugh at that now.

I planned to play best friends. I was ready to earn it, suffer through small talk and morning pleasantries, even bond with him through our love for whatever interests he has, just so I could watch him shatter later. And then I realized mid-breath that I’d misjudged the axis of him.

He was a little brat at first, but the moment those eyes met mine, electricity shot through that perfectly curated posture of his.

Of course it’s men.

It was obvious once I noticed—the lingering attention, the way he adjusted himself around me while pretending not to look. His gaze held mine a second too long before breaking away, lips parting slightly.

This changes things.

Not worse. But better.

New angles have opened up. New leverage. New ways in. Trust is easier when desire does half the work for you. I walked away from that encounter entertained in a way I haven’t been in years.

Attraction makes the mind blind to red flags, thus making my job so much easier.

For example, the way he missed that I slipped a device into the front sleeve of his laptop bag when I slid the strap back onto his shoulder. No one ever uses that part of a laptop bag unless it’s to shove useless slips and notes in that never get taken back out again. Even if Adrian finds the device, he wouldn’t possibly know what it is.

I use high-end equipment sourced straight from the dark web—the same kind my employer uses, so I know it’s top-of-the-line.

Useful in more ways than one, and that’s exactly how I am hearing every word that is being said in his apartment right now.

I’m stationed in my sleek black Jeep Wrangler, neatly tucked away in the darkness across his apartment building, under a tree that leans just enough to break the outline and far from the streetlamp’s honest glow. Other cars line the curb here and there, and I become one of them.

Adrian’s apartment sits on the second floor, a corner unit giving me the perfect sightline. Architects are so generous when they don’t know who they’re designing for.

The curtains might be drawn, but the light puts every shape into images: the edge of his desk, the way he hunches over his laptop, the nervous way his hand rubs at his jaw when he’s thinking too hard, and the way it reaches for his neck when he seems to get nervous.

Time stretches, but I don’t check it. I don’t need to. This is the part I like, the quiet surveillance as the world reduces to a rectangle of fabric and the shadow behind it.

Adrian has his phone on loudspeaker. He’s bickering with a friend, someone with a loud, irritating voice that scratches against my eardrums. Must be Lucas, that bit of information I found freely over social media. Adrian doesn’t have any personal social platforms, interesting enough, but his friends do. He shies away from most of them, but he’s there, and that’s all I need.

Said friend is begging Adrian to join him for drinks at a local bar this coming Friday night, but he is refusing.

He jumps up from his chair, listening to all the reasons why it is good for him to get out of his hiding hole as he moves towards the window. He peeks out, like a child checking for monsters while pretending not to believe in them. The curtain shifts just enough. His face doesn’t appear, only the suggestion of it.