Fucking Gala.
I should have known she wouldn’t keep that close to her vest.
“Let’s not,” I said, changing tactics. I knew better than even to try to lie to Smith. And, besides the fact that he was a human fucking lie detector, I respected him too much for that.
“Alright,” he agreed, shrugging. “Just making sure you’re head is on straight.”
And that right there was why Smith was my second-in-command. A lot of men in power had prides too inflated to allow anyone to question them. Me, I was glad I had someone around that would hold me accountable for questionable actions or decisions. The choices might be mine to make, but I was glad to know I had Smith to tell me if I was being an idiot.
“I have a feeling this is going to be creep fucking central,” Smith declared, pushing open the door.
The heady combination of dust, must, and dirty dishes smacked us in the face as soon as we moved in, speaking of a closed space for days.
It was the first bit of proof that we had the right place.
Not that we needed it once our eyes adjusted to the low light inside, though.
Because Smith was right.
Creep fucking central.
Before us was an open floor plan with a small kitchen to the left, the tile on the countertops cracked, the cabinets stained from cooking on the stove. Beside the kitchen were two doors to – one would imagine – the bedroom and the bathroom. To the right and forward was the living space with thick dirt-brown mohair carpet, a red and brown plaid couch with a coffee table, and simple room darkening blinds on the windows, no curtains. A man’s space. No frills. No feminine touches at all.
I might have worried about Gunner’s intel about the woman.
Except once you looked past the carpet, tile, and furniture, all you saw was Aven.
Her face was staring back from the walls – smiling, bitch-facing, mid-laugh. There was a whole collage of her car breaking down outside of her work, snapshots of her head hung, of her raking her hands through her hair, of her bent over the hood, trying to figure out what was wrong, on her cell, talking to the man who had interrupted our kiss outside She’s Bean around.
“Christ, he even has this shit on the ceiling,” Smith said, head angled up, making me do so as well, seeing her face staring down at me.
The scary shit wasn’t just the mass of pictures. Stalkers stalked. They took pictures. That was, in essence, normal.
But there were pictures of her driving her car with California plates, unloading boxes into one of the mid-price-level apartment buildings in town.
“What the fuck?” I hissed, moving closer to that particular set. “Why did it take so long to progress if he’s been following her for years?” I asked, not expecting a response. Because there didn’t seem to be one. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit the profile.
“Hey, though,” Smith said, moving beside me. “Look at that angle.”
“What about it?” I asked, looking at a picture of Aven carting around a box of kitchen supplies, a handle of a saucepan resting on her cheek as she lifted it out of her car.
“He’s taking it from inside her old apartment building,” he told me. And if maybe I hadn’t been so distracted, I would have noticed that myself.
That, at least, helped the whole start of the obsession make sense. He probably spotted her, or she said hey to him in the hallway, something benign to her, but something that meant something deeper to his twisted little mind.
I suddenly understood how he got so close to her so often without her getting suspicious. He was a neighbor. Him being around wouldn’t have been unusual.
And, given it was a pretty sizable complex, I could see how she didn’t recognize him when he started showing up at her house. She was new to the building. He was one of hundreds of faces.
Smith moved away from me, and I could hear rifling through drawers, shocking me out of my stupor finally as I moved through to the bedroom, flicking on the light, watching as the specks of dust fluttered around the stale air before my eyes fell on another collage of photos on the wall that the full-sized bed was butted up against.
“Fuck,” I hissed, closing the bedroom door, not wanting Smith to walk in on this.
Because this guy – whoever he was – liked to keep a set of different pictures by his bed. Where he could look at them at night and jerk off.
There was one of Aven at her old place still, in a white tee in a downpour, the perfect outline of her breasts on display. Then there were ones from right after she moved in, before she got the curtains on her windows. Back when she didn’t know any better, when she maybe thought that the fact that her bedroom windows butted up against the woods was enough reason not to worry about anyone seeing her when she changed in her bedroom.