For weeks, you had been telling yourself you were imagining it.

The footsteps that seemed to follow you for half a block before disappearing. The same unfamiliar car appearing twice in places it shouldn't have been. The messages from numbers you didn't recognize that never said enough to prove anything, but somehow always arrived at moments when you were alone.

Then things inside your apartment started feeling wrong.

A kitchen drawer left slightly open. The balcony door unlocked when you could have sworn you'd locked it. Once, the unmistakable smell of men's cologne lingering in your bedroom even though nobody had been invited inside.

You changed the locks.

For three days, nothing happened.

On the fourth night, you opened your front door and finally learned that paranoia had never been the problem.

There was a man standing in the centre of your living room.

Emmett Larkin.

You recognized him only vaguely at first—the handsome stranger you'd seen at the same coffee shop several times, the man who had once smiled at you across the produce aisle, who introduced himself politely, someone ordinary enough that you'd never bothered looking too closely at him.

Emmett's voice was almost gentle, which somehow made the command worse. He stood between you and the hallway, watching you with the exhausted frustration of a man who believed he'd been waiting far too long for something he deserved.

His expression tightened when you moved.

The warning lost its softness.

Emmett took a single step toward you.

From somewhere deeper inside the apartment came a slow, unimpressed sigh.

Emmett froze.

So did everything else.

Levin Vandry stepped casually out of the darkened hallway leading from your bedroom, dressed entirely in black and looking less like a man who had just discovered an intruder than someone whose evening had been mildly inconvenienced.

Emmett stared at him.

Levin glanced at you first, his dark eyes moving over you quickly as if checking for injuries, before settling back on Emmett.

Emmett's face changed.

Levin's didn't.

For the first time, Levin looked almost amused.

He tilted his head.

The silence that followed was fucking absurd.

Emmett looked from Levin to you, apparently struggling with the realization that the woman he'd been obsessively watching had somehow acquired another obsessive man without his knowledge.

Levin's mouth twitched.

Emmett moved toward you.

Levin's entire demeanor changed.

There was no humor in that word.

Levin stepped between you and him with the calm certainty of someone who had already considered every possible way this confrontation could end.

Emmett stared at him.

Levin took another step forward.

Emmett's confidence finally cracked.

What followed was fast and ugly rather than theatrical. Emmett lunged, Levin intercepted him, and within seconds the confrontation ended with Emmett on the floor and Levin standing over him with considerably less patience than he'd started with.

Levin crouched beside him.

Emmett laughed breathlessly.

Levin's answer came immediately.

Sirens sounded faintly somewhere in the distance, and Levin straightened as Emmett used the distraction to scramble toward the open balcony exit. Levin could have followed.

He didn't.

His attention had already returned to you.

For nearly a year, Levin Vandry had known what time you woke up, which coffee you bought, which window belonged to your bedroom and exactly how often you forgot to lock the balcony door.

You had never known his name.

Until tonight.

Levin adjusted the cuff of his sleeve and looked around the apartment as though assessing damage to property he had absolutely no fucking right to feel territorial about.

His gaze returned to yours.

Not even a flicker of shame.

Levin reached into his pocket, removed your missing spare key and placed it carefully on the table between you.

His expression stayed maddeningly composed.

A beat passed.