Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
But I didn’t. And now I’m in too deep to explain why I kept it to myself.
The thought settles into my gut and stays there. This isn’t random. This isn’t some stranger who spotted her on the subway and decided to fixate. This is someone who was already looking. Someone who found her despite five years of careful anonymity.
I should tell her. Show her what I found, lay out my suspicions, let her decide how to handle whatever past is catching up with her.
But I don’t know how to do that without revealing how deep I’ve dug. She knows I follow her. She’s okay with that. But there’s a difference between protective surveillance and excavating someone’s buried history, and I’ve crossed into territory I’m not sure she’d forgive.
Morning comes too fast. I go to work, run through security protocols with Cole, approve the guest list for next week’s gala. Meetings blur together while my mind keeps circling back to Hailey, to the tattooed stranger, to all the questions I don’t know how to ask.
By 6 p.m. I’m parked outside her building again, an hour early because waiting in my apartment was making me crawl out of my skin.
I scan her window. The street. Every parked car, every passing figure, every shadow that might hide another watcher.
Nothing.
Just the usual evening traffic, neighbors walking dogs, the ordinary rhythm of a Brooklyn block settling into dusk. No stranger lurking on corners. No phantom in the dark.
I pull out my notebook and open to a fresh page.
Someone else is watching you now. I don’t know who he is yet, but I will. Whatever secrets you’re keeping, whoever this other guy is, I’m going to find out. Because I’m in too deep to walk away now.
I stare at the words until they blur. Threat or promise, I’m not sure there’s a difference anymore.
Twenty minutes until I ring her buzzer. Twenty minutes to decide whether I tell her everything tonight or keep digging in silence, protecting her from a danger she doesn’t know exists while I figure out exactly what we’re dealing with.
Her silhouette passes the window. She’s getting ready, probably putting on that dark lipstick, sliding those silver rings onto her fingers. Making herself beautiful for me while I sit in my car with a partial sketch and a growing list of questions.
I wanted simplicity. Dinners and conversations and the slow unwinding of two people learning each other. I wanted to earn her trust the honest way, to wait until she felt safe enough to tell me her secrets on her own terms.
Instead, I’m about to walk up those steps with lies of omission already forming on my tongue, wanting her so badly I can’t think straight, already planning how to hunt down the man who believes he can watch her without consequences.
I will find out who he is. I will find out what Hailey’s running from. And if he’s a threat to her, I will end it.
Whatever it takes.
I get out of the car and head for her door.
Chapter Ten
Hailey
I’ve been dreading tonight all day. Knox texted this morning about a work conflict, some security issue at one of Cole’s properties that needed his attention, and my first thought wasn’t disappointment. It was fear. Because a night without Knox means no one between me and Liam if he follows me again, and after last night, after I saw his face in the streetlight and felt my whole world crack down the middle, I don’t know if I’m ready to face him.
I’m not ready to face him.
My present is finally worth something. I have friends and a career and a man who looks at me like I’m the best thing that ever happened to him. I spent five years building this life from nothing, and I’m not ready to watch it crumble because my past decided to show up on a snowy Brooklyn sidewalk.
But I can’t hide in the studio forever, so I bundle into my coat and start the long walk home, scanning every shadow and doorway like the paranoid ex-criminal I apparently still am underneath all this legitimate jewelry designer polish.
He’s there within two blocks. I feel him before I see him, that familiar prickle at the back of my neck that used to mean safety and now just means trouble. My old training kicks in without permission, instincts I thought I’d buried rising to the surface like bodies in a thaw. I catch his reflection in a storefront window as I pretend to examine a display of vintage ornaments. Half a block back, dark coat, hands in pockets, watching me with that patient focus I used to find so attractive.
I could turn around right now. March up to him and demand to know what he wants, why he’s here, what happened to our agreement. We were supposed to wait ten years before we touched the diamond. Ten years for the heat to die down completely, for the man we stole from to stop looking, for the world to forget that the Snowflake Diamond ever existed. That was the plan. That was our retirement fund, our insurance policy, our ticket to whatever life we wanted once enough time had passed.