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“You’re disturbingly calm,” I said.
“I’m not calm.”
“You look calm.”
“That’s because panicking doesn’t solve problems.”
He stood, and the shift from relaxed-guy-on-my-couch to something far more dangerous happened so smoothly it almost gave me whiplash. Kalon crossed the room and checked the lock on my door. Then the window. Then the hallway outside with a quick glance that lasted half a second. Every movement efficient. When he came back, his expression had settled into something more guarded.
“If someone left that message for you,” he said quietly, nodding toward my phone, “they’re making a statement.”
My throat tightened. “That’s comforting.”
His gaze met mine. Something hard flashed there. “Anyone who comes near you,” he said, “is going to have a bad night.”
My heart did a weird little flip. I refused to analyze it. “Wow,” I said. “That almost sounded romantic.”
His mouth twitched. “Don’t get used to it.”
He stayed another twenty minutes after that. Checked the back lock twice. Made me drink half my terrible coffee. Told me to call him if anything felt wrong, then stood in the doorway like he didn’t want to leave me there.
That should have been the moment I realized I preferred safety. Instead, when the door shut behind him, my eyes went straight to the rose.
I stood there in the quiet, phone still heavy in my hand, the image of that body burned behind my eyes and Kalon’s warmth fading from my couch.
The safe choice had left through the front door. The dangerous one had left a flower. I moved to the kitchen and opened my junk drawer, digging around until I found the tiny glitter packet Mandi had given me last winter after she declared every woman needed emergency crafting supplies. I was not, in fact, a crafter, but tonight my hobbies were expanding to include forensic nonsense.
I sprinkled the finest layer over the outside edge of my windowsill, then another near the back door, invisible unless someone knew where to look. Black glitter. It caught light only when the angle shifted.
“If you’re going to break into my apartment,” I said to the empty room, “you’re leaving sparkly little footprints.” I sat down, opened my book, and waited. If Lux’s boogeyman wanted into my life, he could start leaving evidence. And if the worst part of me thrilled at that, I’d deal with that later.
Chapter 9
Lux
The feeds came in clean and sharp and intimate, every angle stitched together into a neat little web around Liv’s life, and I sat at my desk with blood still under my nails from earlier in the day and stared at the wall of screens of my new religion—and the altar was a one-bedroom apartment on Harlow Street.
I should have felt guilt.
I did feel guilt.
It lasted about three seconds. Then I got distracted by the fact that I could zoom. I could see the faint crease between her brows when she read something on her phone and tried to pretend it didn’t bother her, I could see the way she angled her body when she sat on the couch like she was trained to take up less space, and none of that information was useful for running a city, which meant it was only useful for the thing I was absolutely not doing.
Obsessing.
The worst part wasn’t the cameras.
It was how quickly my brain adjusted to them, how fast the feeds became normal, how the sight of her moving through her own apartment started to feel like something I was entitled to, like the world had always included this access and I’d been an idiot for living without it.
My work tonight had been thorough.
My mental stability had not.
Vale would call this a problem.
Vale called everything I enjoyed a problem, which was unfair, because sometimes I enjoyed things that didn’t involve threats or corpses, like reorganizing an entire district’s supply chain in one afternoon or watching the city lights from the tower windows while I drank coffee that wasn’t cold and bitter or—apparently—committing several felonies from my office chair.
I flipped through camera angles like I was browsing channels.
