By the time the knock comes, I’ve memorized the cracks in my ceiling.
There’s one that looks like a lightning bolt above my bed, another like a question mark over the door. I stare up at them from the couch, bare feet tucked under me, laptop open but abandoned. My phone face-down on the coffee table still buzzes occasionally, a wasp trapped under glass.
The knock is soft, controlled. Three raps, evenly spaced. Not a delivery guy. Not a neighbor. Not the kind of pounding that says, “Internet mob here to drag you in person,” either.
I sit up too fast anyway, heart lurching. The room tilts for a second before it settles.
“Emma?” a voice calls through the door. Male. Low. Calm like still water over something sharp. “It’s Jonah Creed. Marcus sent me.”
My fingers go cold.
I stand there in the middle of my living room, clutching my own elbows, the way I’ve been half-hugging myself for days. I’ve seen his name in the emails. The contract my lawyer forwarded. The NDA. The bullet points: full-time protection, undercover arrangement, temporary cohabitation.
Move in.
Undercover boyfriend.
It all sounded abstract until that voice slid under my door.
I cross to the peephole on legs that feel like they belong to someone else. Outside, the hallway light is dim, flickering at the far end. He’s standing squarely in front of my door, back to the opposite wall. Not crowding the frame, but filling it anyway.
Everything about him is angles—jaw, cheekbones, the cut of his coat. Dark hair, clipped close. No smile. His eyes are what stop me: pale, unnervingly focused, like he’s already cataloging bolt locks and sightlines through a fisheye lens.
He has one hand on a black duffel at his feet, the strap looped through his fingers. The other is loose at his side, relaxed in a way that feels intentional.
He knows I’m looking.
“Can you say the code word?” I call, wincing at how thin my voice sounds.
There’s a pause. Then, flatly, “Marcus doesn’t do code words. But he told me to tell you you didn’t bill him for the last consult and that annoyed him more than your current crisis.”
That… is depressingly accurate.
I undo the chain, slide back the deadbolt, and open the door halfway, keeping my body in the gap.
He’s taller up close, or maybe my apartment shrank. Broad shoulders beneath a charcoal henley and a worn, dark jacket. He smells faintly like the outside air—cool, metallic, November—and something warmer underneath. Soap, maybe. Or just him.
For some reason, I’d expected tactical gear and a taciturn growl. He’s in black jeans and boots and looks like the kind of guy who could be heading to a late movie or to break someone’s wrist, depending on whether he smiled.
He is not smiling.
“Ms. Vale.” His gaze tracks over my face, down to the hand still on the door, up again. Not lingering. Assessing. “Can I come in?”
I feel suddenly conscious of everything: my oversized sweatshirt, the mess of takeout containers on the counter, the string of hate notifications pulsing on the face-down phone like a living thing.
I start to say yes. What comes out is, “Do you always introduce yourself like a tax audit?”
One corner of his mouth twitches, the ghost of something that might be amusement. Or irritation. Hard to tell.
“Usually I get hired before I knock,” he says. “Can I…?” He tips his head toward the apartment.
Right. Let the security expert in so he can do his job. So he can pretend to be your boyfriend. So he can see how you live and how little space there is between your life and the screen that’s eating it.
I open the door wider. “Come in.”
He steps past me without brushing against me, even though the entryway is narrow. It’s an absence of contact I feel like a touch.
Up close, he moves like someone who’s used to controlling every inch of their body, every direction it occupies. The duffel drops with a muted thud beside the couch.
There’s a mirror above the shoe rack. In it, we look like we’ve been cut and pasted from different shows. He belongs in a noir thriller; I’m a limited-series disaster.
He does a slow turn in the living room, eyes flicking to the windows, the fire escape, the hallway to my bedroom. His attention lands on the laptop, the closed curtains, the taped-over webcam.
His shoulders ease by a fraction. “Good.”
“Good?” I repeat.
“Taped camera. Curtains closed.” He nods to the laptop. “You’ve been going through your digital footprint?”
The question scrapes along a nerve. “Trying to.”
He bends, picks up my phone from the coffee table, flips it over. The lock screen is a flood of banners: Lena Cross fans with usernames like @lenasarmy and @crosscrusader, calling me a liar, a jealous nobody, worse.
On top of those: the new messages. Unknown numbers. No profile pictures. Just grey message icons and previews.
Saw that quote on your wall. Cute.
Nice red mug. Shame if it broke.
You should really moisturize your hands, babe.
He studies the screen for exactly two seconds, then looks at me. “He’s been inside?”
The way he says he. Firm. Singular. Not ‘they’ or ‘trolls’ or ‘internet.’ A person. A specific one.
I swallow. “Once for sure. Maybe twice.”
His gaze sharpens. “Show me.”
I lead him down the short hall toward my bedroom. The floor creaks in familiar spots; his steps avoid them without him looking down. He’s mapping the place in his head. Counting exits. Building scenarios.
My bedroom is small, the queen bed taking up most of the space. Desk under the window, bookshelves by the closet, a full-length mirror I now regret buying. The mess is subtle: picture frames angled wrong, the stack of notebooks on my desk shuffled, the closet door slightly ajar.
I point to the bookshelf. “That frame was facing the door. He turned it toward the bed.”
It’s a candid photo Sofia took at some office party I’d forgotten. I’m laughing at something off-camera, head tipped back, unaware. He picked that one up, turned it, set it down.
I wrap my arms around myself again.
“Did you touch anything when you noticed?” Jonah asks.
“Just to… put some of it back. I know, I probably messed up…”
“You reacted like a human.” He’s already wearing thin black gloves, and I don’t remember seeing him put them on. “You live here, not a lab.”
The words shouldn’t comfort me and somehow they do.
He steps closer to the desk. My deodorant and perfume bottles are in their usual spot. My journal is in the drawer, locked. The window latch is intact.
He angles toward the closet. “May I?”
I nod. My face is hot, and I’m suddenly worried about the state of my clothes, my shoes, the private chaos of my life laid open.
He slides the door aside. Everything looks normal. Hanging clothes, laundry basket on the floor, the old suitcase I never use.
He crouches, running a gloved hand along the baseboard. He doesn’t rifle through my things; he’s reading the room, not my secrets.
“You said maybe twice,” he prompts.
“The first time… I thought it was just me.” My throat tightens. “You know how you put something down and can’t remember if you moved it yourself? I work from home most days, I don’t have a… rhythm. So I ignored it.”
“Until?” His voice has softened by a degree.
“Until the coffee mug.”
I take him back to the kitchen. The red mug sits upside down on the counter, perfectly centered on a napkin.
“I always put it in the drying rack,” I say. “Always. But that morning it was like this. And the photo came a minute later.”
His attention snaps to me. “Photo?”
I grab my laptop, pull up the email. It’s burned into my brain, but my hands still shake as I scroll.
From: anonymous
Subject: cute mug
The attached photo is my kitchen counter. The mug upside down, same napkin, same shadow. Time-stamped two minutes before my alarm.
“He was here while you were sleeping,” Jonah says quietly.
The room tilts again. I nod, because if I try to talk I’m afraid what will come out will be a sound I don’t want him to hear.
He looks at me for a beat. Not at the mess of dishes or my unwashed hair. At me, like I’m another crime scene, except his expression shifts—tension at his jaw softening, something almost like apology in the set of his mouth.
“I’m sorry you were alone for that,” he says. “You’re not anymore.”
The words land harder than they should. I exhale shakily.
Then his posture changes. Steel again. “Here’s how this works, Ms. Vale—”
“Emma.” It slips out. “Please.”
He nods once. “Emma. From this moment on, the only people who enter or leave this apartment do it with my knowledge or say-so. We’re going to lock down your devices, your routes, your habits. If someone sends you a message, you forward it to me. You don’t respond, you don’t block, you don’t delete.”
“I clean up people’s messes for a living,” I blurt. “Deleting is… sort of my thing.”
His mouth does that not-quite-smile again. “You hired me to be a different kind of delete key.”
I didn’t hire him, technically. My lawyer did, after the police shrugged and the platform reports generated automated “we’ll look into it” replies.
“What about my job?” I ask, because the word hired makes the hollow in my chest flare. “I can’t just vanish. That’s half of what’s fueling this, that I dared to… exist where people could see me.”
My voice cracks on the last word. I hate it. I’m good at being small and managed and apologetically competent. I’m not good at sounding like I want anything.
His gaze goes sharp again, but not unkind. “You’ll keep going to work. With me. We’ll adjust your schedule, limit your exposure, but I’m not here to put you in a bunker. I’m here to keep you alive in your life.”
The sentence presses on something I didn’t know was bruised. Keep you alive in your life.
“And the… undercover part?” I ask. It feels ridiculous said out loud in my tiny kitchen. “The fake boyfriend?”
He leans a hip against the counter, crossing his arms. It does problematic things to the line of his chest.
“That was Marcus’s suggestion,” he says. “He’s right that the more normal our proximity looks, the less room your stalker has to escalate without drawing attention. If people think I’m your partner, me being around you twenty-four seven reads as personal, not tactical.”
“You say partner like you’re allergic to it.”
He blinks slowly. “I’m not here to be your actual boyfriend, Emma.”
Heat rises under my skin, a mix of shame and something pricklier. “You made that sound like the worst idea you’ve heard all week.”
His jaw shifts. “It would be the worst idea I’ve heard in years.”
There it is. A sting sharp enough to cut through fear. I look away, focusing on the water stain on the ceiling, the hum of the refrigerator.
“Okay,” I say tightly. “Message received. Strictly professional fake boyfriend.”
Silence stretches. I hear him exhale, a long, measured breath.
“I’m not saying that because of you,” he says finally, quieter. “I’m saying that because of me.”
I don’t know what to do with that. With the way his eyes, when I force myself to meet them, look briefly older than his face. Tired around the edges. Like he’s replaying something I’m not in.
“So what do we do?” I ask, aiming for brisk and mostly hitting brittle. “Stage a soft-launch Instagram? Make matching playlists?”
The side of his mouth curves, properly this time, almost despite himself. The room shifts with it, like someone opened a window.
“We’ll get to the cover,” he says. “First we secure the ground.” He pushes off the counter. “I’m moving in tonight. I’ll take the couch.”
“The couch folds out,” I say automatically. “It’s not great, but—”
“It’s fine.” He scans the living room again. “We’ll rearrange a few things. You’ll send a group text to whoever would plausibly know if you started dating someone. We’ll set expectations.”
I flinch. “People. Right. I’ll text… Sofia.” My singular friend, my PR conscience, the one who told me exposing Lena was “career Russian roulette” then bought me coffee while the internet lit the match.
He doesn’t comment on the lack of plural.
“I know this feels invasive,” he says, and his voice has that low, steady quality again, the one that vibrates somewhere under my ribs. “But from this moment, your life and mine are merged. Shared space, shared information, shared schedule. If that’s going to work, we need rules.”
“Ground rules,” I echo faintly.
He nods. “Rule one: you don’t lie to me about your safety. If you feel watched, if something’s moved, if you have a bad dream and wake up convinced someone was in the room, you tell me.”
“That seems… dramatic.”
“Alive is dramatic,” he says. “Rule two: I don’t lie to you about risk. If I tell you to move, you move. If I say no to something, I explain why. You don’t get handled. You get informed.”
That pricks my attention. “Most people in your line of work… don’t do that.”
“I’m not most people.” His gaze holds mine a second too long. “Rule three: whatever cover we build, we don’t let it confuse what this is. I protect you. You’re my client. That’s all.”
Something in my chest folds in on itself, a tiny, stunned crumple. The matter-of-factness of it shouldn’t hurt. It does.
“Crystal,” I say, aiming for light. It comes out hoarse. “No confusion.”
He watches me, and I have the unnerving sense he can see the exact degree to which that sentence landed.
“I read your file,” he says abruptly.
My stomach drops. “I have a file?”
“Background. Work history. Public footprints.” He gestures loosely. “You keep other people’s stories from exploding. You’re good at making yourself invisible.”
Invisible. My default setting.
“Your current problem,” he goes on, “is that someone picked you out of the background and decided you don’t get to vanish anymore. You shook the tree.”
“I posted a side-by-side of Lena’s ‘original’ clips and the videos she lifted them from,” I say. “That’s not shaking. That’s… basic integrity.”
“And for that,” he says, “the mob came for you, and a predator slipped into the crowd.”
Predator. The word slides a layer of ice over my skin and settles there.
“I’m not saying this to scare you,” he adds, echoing a thought I didn’t say out loud. “I’m saying it because minimizing him won’t make him disappear.”
He sees threats in everything, the file had said, paraphrased by my lawyer. He reads people like patterns, like angles of entry.
“Do you always talk like a profiler?” I ask, because the room is pressing in and deflection is oxygen.
His lips tilt. “Do you always deflect when you’re scared?”
The question is so precise it steals the air from my lungs. I stare at him, heat crawling up my neck at being seen so cleanly.
He doesn’t push. He just nods, like he’s filing the reaction away alongside window locks and route maps.
“Text your friend,” he says quietly. “Tell her you’re seeing someone. Soft, casual. I’ll start on your devices.”
I blow out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding and retreat to the bedroom with my phone, leaning against the closed door as if that could keep all of this on the other side.
My fingers hover over Sofia’s name.
I type: So… don’t freak out. I might be kind of, sort of, seeing someone.
The dots appear almost instantly.
Sofia: SEEING SOMEONE??? Spill. Immediately. Is he real or a therapeutic hallucination??
I glance at the door. Through it, I can hear faint taps—Jonah’s fingers on my keyboard. The low murmur of him talking to himself, maybe, or to Marcus on the phone. His presence is a new gravity in the apartment, shifting where everything falls.
I type back: He’s… moving in.
Another beat. Then:
Sofia:
Moving. In.
I wince.
Sofia: Emma Vale, if you do not send me a photo of this man within the hour, I will assume you have finally joined a cult.
My gaze catches on the mirror opposite the bed. My reflection: oversized sweatshirt, leggings, hair scraped into a knot that could qualify as a cry for help.
Behind me, through the crack of the door, I see the edge of him in the living room. Just his shoulder, the line of his back as he leans over my laptop, the intensity of his focus like a physical thing.
The man who’s now going to be in my space when I wake up from nightmares I don’t admit I have. Who already knows more about how afraid I am than I’ve let anyone see.
I lift my phone, frame the shot so he’s only a blur in the background, my face in the foreground, eyes wider than I want them to be.
I snap the photo, thumb hovering over send for a heartbeat.
Then I hit send—just as my phone buzzes with a new notification sliding over the top of the screen.
Unknown: Cute new roommate. Hope he lasts longer than the mug.
For a second, all I can hear is the blood in my ears.
Jonah’s voice cuts through the fog from the living room, sharp and alert. “Emma? What just came through?”
I stare at the message, at the timestamp, at the fact that someone out there knew he was here almost as soon as I did.
I open the door, the words lodging in my throat as our eyes meet across the small, suddenly too-bright room.
Because whoever is watching us… just got a whole new game piece.
