The first time I hear him swear, it’s not in one of my fantasies.
It’s through the paper-thin wall we share, a low, vicious mutter that rips through the steady metronome of his routine.
“Don’t you walk this block, princess,” he growls—except he isn’t talking to me. He can’t be. I haven’t even left for work yet.
I freeze halfway through tying my shoe, my fingers tangled in the laces. The cheap blinds rattle in a faint breeze from the cracked window. The hallway fluorescent outside my door buzzes like something dying.
For two years, he has been footsteps and keys and doors closing. The clink of bottles sometimes. A television turned low. A presence. A shape I’ve filled with whatever I needed that day—chef, artist, assassin with a conscience.
He has never been a voice.
My pulse spikes, sharp and sudden. I stare at the door across the hall through the peephole, even though I know I can’t see through wood.
Maybe he’s on the phone, I tell myself. People talk to other people. Normal people do that.
The voice comes again, closer this time, threaded with something dangerous. “Yeah, I see you.”
The intercom crackles overhead, a burst of static from the lobby. I flinch. For a moment the sounds blur together—his growl, the building’s death rattle, my heart trying to punch its way through my ribs.
I blow out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, check my reflection in the front door’s painted-over glass. Pale cheeks, dark circles, brown hair scraped into a bun because it’s easier that way. Mira Dalton: queen of quietly existing.
“Okay,” I whisper to myself. “You’re going to work. Same as always.”
I sling my bag over my shoulder, open my door, and step into the dim hallway.
His door is closed. It always is. Apartment 4B. One metal peephole, a deadbolt scarred from years of use, and no name on the mailbox downstairs. Just RIVERS in block letters someone else wrote years ago.
I double-lock my door, habit ingrained deep enough to do half-asleep, and start toward the stairs.
The air smells like fried onions from Mrs. Alvarez’s place and something sour from the overflowing trash chute. The building’s bones creak around me. This should be comforting. Familiar.
Today, though, the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.
Halfway down the stairs, I hear it—the heavy, measured tread I’ve cataloged a hundred times without ever admitting it to anyone.
4B.
His door opens behind me with a soft, decisive click. I don’t have to turn around to know. The air shifts, weighted.
“Dalton.”
He says my name like he owns it.
My foot misses the next step. I catch myself on the rail, grip so tight my knuckles blanch. For a heartbeat, I consider pretending I didn’t hear him.
But that would make me insane, not just mildly socially incompetent.
I turn.
Jaxon Rivers stands at the top of the stairs, one hand on the banister, the other on the knob of his door. He’s bigger than I imagined, broader, the kind of broad that makes the corridor feel suddenly smaller. Dark T-shirt, faded jeans, boots that look like they’ve seen actual war zones, not our cracked sidewalks.
His eyes are the worst part. Not because they’re cold. I’ve seen cold; I commute past it every day on the subway. His are sharp. Clear. Cataloguing.
He has stubble shadowing his jaw, a pale scar that cuts through his right eyebrow, and a stillness that doesn’t fit this building.
He doesn’t look like a chef. Or an artist. Or some romantic savior waiting in the wings.
He looks like trouble that learned how to stand very, very still.
“You shouldn’t walk alone today,” he says.
I blink. “I… excuse me?”
His gaze tracks the movement of my bag, the strap digging into my shoulder. “You walk to the station at eight-oh-five. Same route. Same time. Every day.”
My stomach drops. I manage a weak laugh. “Wow. Okay, that’s not creepy at all.”
One corner of his mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “Patterns are how people get hurt.”
“People also get hurt when strange men announce they’ve been watching them,” I shoot back before I can swallow the words.
His jaw works once. Not angry—measured, like he’s resetting a rhythm. “You have a shadow.”
“I have a what?”
“Guy in a gray hoodie. Ball cap. Has followed you home twice this week.” He says it like he’s listing weather facts. “Waits across the street from Hartwell Financial some nights. Smokes cheap menthols. Doesn’t go inside.”
The stairwell tilts. I grip the railing harder.
There is a cold part of me that isn’t surprised. The way the street has felt lately—like the darkness is thicker. Like eyes ride on the back of my spine when I walk the last two blocks from the train.
“Why are you telling me this?” I manage.
“Because you don’t see him,” Jaxon says. “You keep your head down. That works until it doesn’t.”
“I’m careful.” The protest sounds small even to me.
“Careful doesn’t change his intent.”
“Maybe he just lives nearby,” I say. “Maybe we’re on the same schedule.”
He studies me for a long beat. “Is that a risk you want to test with your body?”
Heat rushes to my face at the phrasing, humiliation and anger colliding. “You don’t get to talk about my body.”
His eyes flick down, once, in a way so fast and clinical it feels like a scanner. Then back to my face. “I’m talking about harm, Dalton. Not ownership.” His voice softens a fraction, rough edges sanding down. “You work in a glass building with cameras and security downstairs. He doesn’t get close there. He waits until you’re on streets no one bothers to watch.”
This is insane. My neighbor, who I’ve never seen, somehow knows my schedule, my job, the type of building I work in, and the mood of the streets around me.
Also, apparently, my name.
“How do you know where I work?” I ask.
He lifts his chin toward the flimsy mailboxes two floors down. “Your manager likes sending certified mail. The cards stick out.”
Right. Evelyn and her obsession with paper trails.
“I appreciate the…” I wave a hand because what is this? “Warning. But I can’t just… not go to work. My rent doesn’t pay itself.” I try for breezy, land somewhere near brittle.
“I’ll walk you,” he says.
I choke. “Excuse me?”
“Today.” He steps down one stair, closing the already meager distance. His scent hits me—soap and something metallic under it, like gun oil or old coins. “And until I say it’s clear.”
I laugh. It comes out high and wrong. “You don’t even talk to me for two years and now you want to escort me like some—some package?”
“They didn’t pay me to talk,” he mutters.
The words are soft, almost like a mistake. But they land like a brick in my chest.
“Pay you?” I repeat. “What are you, some kind of… building security?” I glance pointedly at the peeling paint, the broken elevator with the OUT OF ORDER sign that’s been there since I moved in. “Because if so, you’re due for a performance review.”
His mouth does that not-quite smile again, quick and flickering. “I’m off-duty.” He reaches back into his apartment without looking and comes up with a dark hoodie, shrugging it on in one efficient motion. “But I know what a surveillance pattern looks like.”
“And you just… happened to notice mine.” The words feel like walking barefoot over glass.
The hallway hums around us. Someone’s TV blares a game show two floors up. A child laughs, a wild burst quickly shushed.
His gaze settles on me, unflinching. “I notice this floor.”
The implication hangs between us, heavier than the stale air.
For two years, my fantasy man across the hall has been anything but real. An empty doorway I draped in stories because it was easier than admitting I was afraid to walk my own block.
Now he’s watching me, counting my steps, assigning risk levels to my commute.
“You can say no,” he adds after a beat. “You probably should. I’m not… the comforting choice here.”
The honesty stings more than anything else.
I should say no. I should march down the stairs, out onto the street, and pretend my skin doesn’t feel like it’s buzzing with the knowledge that someone has been tailing me. That my neighbor is a stranger with a scarred eyebrow and eyes like searchlights.
But there’s a gray hoodie in my peripheral memory. Twice this week, maybe. Once by the bodega, once at the corner light that never changes when it should.
“I don’t even know your name,” I say.
“Jaxon.” A pause. “Rivers.”
My breath hitches. I swallow. “Right. Well. Jaxon Rivers, in case you’ve missed the news, strange men offering to walk women to work is not a universally comforting gesture.”
He nods, as if I’ve just given him a tactical report. “You carry your keys between your fingers when you walk at night. You cross the street twice in the last three blocks to break line of sight. You watch reflections in car windows instead of turning around. You know enough not to trust easily.”
Something in my chest both tightens and loosens at once. “Are you… mocking me?”
His eyes actually warm a degree. “No. I’m saying your instincts are good. But whoever he is? He’s not a drunk, he’s not random. He’s patient. That’s worse.”
He shouldn’t be making sense. But he is.
“Give me five minutes,” he says. “Grab your things, send whatever text you need to tell someone you’re not dead in a ditch, and I’ll be at the front door.”
“You assume I have someone to text,” I murmur.
Something flickers across his face—a shadow, quick and almost guilty. “You do now.”
He disappears back into 4B before I can decide if that was a joke.
I don’t go back into my apartment. If I cross that threshold again, I might lock myself in and never leave.
Instead, I sit on the stairs and thumb open my phone. No new notifications. No missed calls. Tessa won’t be in yet—she usually rolls in five minutes late with coffee and conspiracy theories about our boss’s dry-cleaning bills.
I type: Running a little late, but I’ll be there. If I get murdered on the way in, clear my browser history.
She sends back three knife emojis and a skull within seconds.
Comforting.
“Ready?”
I look up.
Jaxon stands at the bottom of the stairs now, like he teleported. Black hoodie zipped, hands empty. No bag, no briefcase. Just him.
“Do you even work?” It slips out.
“Today? Yes.” His mouth does that almost thing again. “Unfortunately.”
“In what?” I press.
He ignores that, just pushes open the heavy front door and holds it, waiting for me to pass.
The street hits me full-force—exhaust and yesterday’s trash and the sweetness of somebody’s bakery three blocks over fighting to survive. The sky is a low concrete lid. A bus rumbles past, spewing fumes.
Jaxon steps out beside me, close enough that I feel the heat off his body, but not touching. His eyes flick everywhere in a smooth, constant rhythm I’ve only seen in movies.
“I usually go left,” I say, gesturing.
He nods, falls into step half a pace behind and to the side of me. It should feel weird, but instead it feels… like he’s a wall, edging me away from the curb, from the alley mouths and doorways.
“You’re not talking,” I say after a block.
“Did you want me to?”
I think about that. “I don’t know.”
He glances down at me. “Silence isn’t hostile by default, Dalton.”
“My name is Mira.” The correction comes sharper than intended.
He holds my gaze for a second. “Mira.” He says it carefully, like he’s trying it out. It sounds different in his mouth—less like something mumbled at Starbucks, more like a word that means something. “You want me to fill the quiet with small talk?”
“Most people do.”
“Most people are uncomfortable when they’re forced to listen to themselves think.”
“Are you saying I’m not most people?” I ask.
“I’m saying you’ve lived on that floor two years and you’ve never once propped your door open for a breeze.” His tone doesn’t change, but the observation feels… intimate. “You like controlled spaces.”
“You don’t know what I like.” My throat goes dry. “You know what I do to avoid getting attacked on my way home.”
“Those can be related.” His gaze shifts past me, to the opposite side of the street.
My skin prickles. “What?”
“Don’t look.” His voice drops, low and deadly calm. “Gray hoodie. Ball cap. Across from the laundromat, leaning on the newspaper stand. Same as Tuesday.”
My whole body wants to spin around and stare. Instead, my feet stutter, then keep walking, like they’re glued to some invisible track.
“He’s not smoking,” I whisper.
“No.” Jaxon’s hand hovers at my back, not touching, but close enough that I feel its ghost. “Hands in his pockets. Shoulders relaxed. Facing traffic, not you. He’s learning.”
Nausea swirls, thick and hot. “Learning what?”
“How you react when you see him. Except you never do.” A beat. “Until now.”
The sidewalk narrows where a construction barrier forces us closer together. Jaxon shifts, putting his body between me and the street, and the move is so instinctive, so practiced, it steals the air from my lungs.
“Keep your pace,” he murmurs. “He’s clocking your stride. Don’t give him a tell.”
“Are we… are we pretending we don’t see him?”
“We acknowledge his presence without rewarding his focus.” His head barely moves as he talks. “He wants you scared and erratic. Predictable fear is still predictable.”
“That is the least comforting sentence I’ve ever heard,” I say.
“You’re still walking,” he points out.
Fair.
We cross at the next light. I can feel the weight of someone’s gaze on the side of my face, like a hot coin pressed to skin.
“Is he still—”
“Yes.” Jaxon’s jaw tightens. “He just cut across mid-block. Gaining position on the next corner.”
A horn blares somewhere behind us. A dog barks from a third-floor balcony. I focus on the chipped white lines of the crosswalk.
“What do you do?” I ask. “For work.”
“This is it.” He scans the intersection, eyes narrowing. “I watch. I walk. I intervene when necessary.”
“That’s not a job description.”
“It’s mine.”
“So you’re… what? A bodyguard?” The word feels ridiculous in my mouth. Glamorous and far-fetched and wrong against the backdrop of our sagging neighborhood.
Close to my shoulder, his breath shifts. “Not anymore.”
“Anymore,” I repeat. “Meaning you were.”
“Meaning I’m very good at recognizing when someone has already crossed a line in their head.” He pauses. “He has. He switched from curiosity to fixation five days ago.”
A chill slices down my spine. “How do you know that?”
“I know what it looks like when a man decides someone is his problem to solve.”
The way he says it is too personal, like the words are scraping over a scar inside him.
We reach the busier part of my route—coffee shops, a dry cleaner, actual people. I breathe a little easier.
“Does he follow me all the way to work?” I ask.
“No.” Jaxon’s hand finally, lightly, guides me around a crowd at the corner. His palm barely brushes my elbow, a whisper of contact that sends a confusing rush through me. “He breaks off at the second light. He doesn’t want witnesses who think they matter.”
I glance up. “And you do?”
His eyes cut to mine, steady and oddly gentle. “Everyone matters until they’re boring or dead to men like him.”
There’s a beat where he seems to realize how that sounded, and his mouth twists. “You are not boring.”
It shouldn’t make me flush. It does.
We stop at the crosswalk before Hartwell’s glass facade. The building looms ahead, reflective windows mirroring the sky, the other businesses, our tiny figures on the sidewalk.
My sanctuary. My prison. My eight-to-six life.
“Is he still back there?” I ask.
Jaxon looks over my head, into the shifting crowd. “He stopped half a block ago. Watching. He’ll turn around in twenty seconds.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I would.”
The light changes. People surge forward.
I stand very still.
“So what now?” My voice barely clears my throat. “Do I just… keep living my life and hope my neighbor across the hall keeps acting like a human security camera?”
He takes a slow breath. “I’ll file a report.”
“A report with who?” I ask. “The police barely show up for shootings on our block. They’re not going to care that some guy in a hoodie likes my commute.”
“I’m not talking about local PD.”
I shiver. “Then who?”
He hesitates, just long enough that I notice. “My contact. Off the books. They track patterns like this.”
“‘Off the books’ doesn’t sound better,” I say. “It sounds like the start of a Netflix documentary I’d turn off because it’s too depressing.”
A ghost of a smile. “I’m not asking you to like it. I’m telling you I’m not the only one watching now.”
I should be terrified.
I am.
But under that, a different feeling unfurls—thin and tentative and dangerous.
Relief.
For two years, I’ve told myself I’m alone in this building. Alone on those late walks home. Alone at my desk under Evelyn’s microscope eyes.
Now there’s a man who knows my stride length and the shape of my fear and the color of my mailbox labels.
“And if I say I don’t want you involved?” I ask. “If I tell you to leave it alone?”
He studies me for a heartbeat that feels like a test. “You can tell me not to walk you. You can tell me not to talk to you. But I can’t unknow what I’ve seen, Mira.” My name again, low and steady. “There’s already a line around you in my head. I don’t step over it. I enforce it.”
I swallow, hard. The building’s revolving door whooshes open and closed beside us, people streaming in to start their normal, unexamined days.
“Are you always this… intense?” I ask, because the alternative is admitting that his words make some small, traitorous part of me feel safe for the first time in a long time.
A muscle jumps in his cheek, the first crack in his composure. “This is me trying to dial it down.”
God help me.
“I have to go,” I say, because I do. Evelyn will have my head if I’m more than five minutes late, and right now my life can’t afford any more variables.
“Go.” His gaze scans the street one more time, then returns to me. “I’ll be outside at five forty-five.”
My heart stutters. “That’s my—”
“Usual time,” he finishes. “You can tell me to get lost then, if you want.”
“And if I do?”
He looks away, toward the corner where the gray hoodie disappeared. His voice drops to something almost like a promise. “I’ll be where he can’t see me instead.”
The revolving door hisses again. My security badge digs into my palm.
Neighbors are supposed to borrow sugar, complain about noise, occasionally hold packages.
Mine is planning tactical routes around my stalker.
I step backward toward the doors, eyes still on him. “You’re very sure this isn’t all in your head,” I say.
He meets my gaze, steady, unreadable. It feels like warmth pretending to be distance.
“I’ve been wrong before, Mira,” he says quietly. “People died. I don’t plan on repeating that particular mistake.”
The words land with the weight of a confession, even though I don’t know its story.
For a second, I almost ask.
Instead, I let the door swallow me, his figure shrinking behind the glass as the lobby’s cool air wraps around me—and the hours ahead suddenly feel like the most fragile kind of borrowed time.
