“Words like violence / Break the silence / Come crashing in / Into my little world”

— “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode

The Fear is everywhere. It’s in my throat, in my chest, behind my eyes, crawling and sliding and oozing over every exposed inch of skin.

But I’m still breathing.

And if I’m still breathing, I can think.

So I think. I stop thrashing and biting at leather. I go still against the wall and I force my brain to do what it does best: Observe. Analyze. Ask questions.

I am a reporter. This is what I do.

I breathe in through my nose, and when I exhale, I take The Fear and I shove it back into its room and I slam the door.

The intruder’s hand is still over my mouth. I wait, and after a few seconds, he eases the pressure just enough for me to speak.

“Who are you?” I ask through a throat shredded raw by all the screams I didn’t let out.

Nothing.

“What do you want?”

Nothing.

Acting on an inkling of an urge, I toss out, “Is this about the Lazarev story?”

He doesn’t answer any of it. Instead, he says, “Kneel.”

“What?”

“On the ground. Face the wall. Hands behind your head.”

I don’t move.

“We’re going to talk,” he assures me in that raspy purr. “But not like this. Kneel, Ms. Pierce. You can do it on your own, or I can make you. The choice is ultimately yours. But one way or another, you will kneel.”

My brain is running on three tracks at once. Track one: He knows about the Lazarevs. Well, to be specific, he didn’t deny it, but neither did he react at all, which is its own kind of answer. I don’t know exactly what to make of that yet, but I file it away for the time being.

Track two: He called me by my name, which means he knows me, or knows of me, or has been watching me long enough to learn that little detail. None of those options are good. I do true crime for a living, so I don’t exactly seek it out as entertainment in my spare time. My day job is so full of dark shit that I just don’t have much of an appetite for it once night falls. But other people do, of course—my best friend Rae being one of them—so, through her, I know enough about the psychology of intruders to understand that obsession is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

That being said, he hasn’t hurt me. Not really. The wall slam seemed rough, objectively, but now that I think about it, he kind of cradled my head with his other hand as he did it, like he’d rather take the brunt of the damage than let me feel a bit of it. Now, he’s talking to me, giving me options, using full sentences. That’s not the behavior of someone who broke in out of some lurid desire to assault and violate me.

Track three: If I don’t kneel, he’s going to force me down, and I believe that threat instinctively. Men who speak like that, with that much authority and certainty in their voice, don’t make idle threats. They certainly don’t break into women’s homes, throw them up against a wall, and clamp gloved hands over said women’s mouths if they don’t intend on following through with whatever they came here to do.

So I kneel.

I lower myself to the floor, slowly, and turn to face the wall. My knees press into the cold hardwood. I lace my fingers behind my head.

As I go through all those motions and my mind whirs in three-plus separate directions simultaneously, I’m feeling all the usual suspects.

Fear, that ever-present feminine terror that comes from living in a world full of rough, violent men.

Anger, that this is happening here, in my home, my safe space.

Panic, in a what can/should/must I do to get out of this sort of way.

Regret, that my Taser is in my bedside table next to the vibrators instead of in my hand where it might actually be useful.

Beneath all that, though, in a place that doesn’t operate with words or logic…

… there’s something else.

It’s a hot something. A dark something. A liquid something. A primal something. It’s a shapeless flame that’s surging along pathways I haven’t felt in a long, long time.

It shows itself in some obvious ways. Flushed skin. Accelerated pulse. Trembling fingers. Weak knees. That could all be easily explained away as byproducts of The Fear, if it weren’t for that subtle, nonverbal certainty, low in my belly, that it has nothing to do with fear at all.

Because this thing is desire.

Something is deeply, profoundly wrong with me.

I settle into the kneeling position, like he ordered. “There? Happy?” I ask, unable to stop myself from sounding pissed-off, even if that’s a pretty unwise move, all things considered.

My eyes are closed, but I can practically feel his nod, his pleased smirk. “Good girl,” he says.

“Do not call me that,” I snap.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not your good anything. I’m a woman kneeling on her own floor because some psychotic fucking lunatic broke into her apartment. That doesn’t make me good and it sure as hell doesn’t make me yours.”

“No,” he agrees, perfectly reasonable. “Not yet, at least.”

His scent announces his proximity. He smells like fire. Cinnamon, spicy in an alluring way. Sandalwood. Musk. It’s all so hot and greedy that, when the heat of his body tells me he’s moved even closer still, I almost sigh in relief, like this is how things are supposed to be.

Then I snap myself out of it. The fuck they are! Things are not how they’re supposed to be. Things are extremely fucked-up right now, as a matter of fact, and you need to get your sex-starved mind out of the gutter and back in the situation, or your skull is going to end up on this man’s mantel.

“So,” I say to the wall, “are we going to talk, or are you just going to stand there breathing on me?”

“If you’d like to talk,” he replies, “we can talk.”

“Great. You first. Who are you?”

He clucks his tongue in mild disappointment. “That’s not how this works.”

“Oh, there are rules now? You break into my apartment, manhandle me, and there are rules?”

“There are always rules, little fox.”

“Don’t call me that, either.”

Again, I get that feeling that he’s grinning. My forehead is resting against the cold plaster of my wall and my eyes are closed, but his grin, his sick, twisted pleasure, is a third occupant in the room with us.

My knees are already starting to ache against the hardwood. “What do you want?” I croak.

“To have a conversation.”

“Most people just send a text.”

“I’m not most people.”

“Y’know, I gathered that from the whole home-invasion thing. Really sets you apart from the pack.” I gulp, then ask, “How did you even get in here?”

“Your deadbolt is a Schlage B60N,” he says. “Single-cylinder, five-pin tumbler. It took me about ninety seconds to dismantle the whole thing.”

“Cool. Love that. Very reassuring. And the lights? I assume you cut the breaker?”

“I did.”

“And my phone?”

“Okay. So you planned this. This wasn’t spontaneous.”

His amusement deepens. “No, little fox, it was not.”

“How long have you been planning it?”

No answer to that one.

“Were you on the R train this morning?”

A long pause. Then he asks, “You noticed me?”

“Kinda hard not to. You were doing that whole brooding serial-killer-chic thing. Very popular nowadays, but pretty conspicuous for someone who’s trying to be covert.”

“I wanted to see what you’d do.”

“And? What did I do?”

I stiffen as, with no warning, a gloved fingertip strokes the side of my neck. Leather on skin. He brushes a strand of hair away from my throat, slow and tender, tucking it behind my ear.

A shudder runs through me, starting at that epicenter of contact and radiating outward in every direction. I’m glad for the dark, because I’ve always been cursed with pale skin, and he’d see instantly that I’m flushed from head to toe.

My stomach clenches and my thighs press together, involuntary and damning. There is absolutely no mistaking what it is that’s igniting within me.

I’m actually turned on by this sick freak.

I squeeze my eyes tighter shut. My breathing has gone ragged. I can feel the goosebumps racing up my arms, prickling under the worn cotton of my sweatshirt.

“It’s what you didn’t do that interests me, Ms. Pierce.” His breath is warm against my ear. “You didn’t tell a living soul.”

I feel sick—because he’s right. I didn’t. I almost told Weston at lunch, and then I decided it was nothing. I swallowed it down and moved on with my day. I didn’t call the cops, or text Rae, or mention it to Doug. I just… let it go.

“Even if that is true, so what?” I say.

“So that tells me something about you.”

“It tells you I thought you were just another creep on the subway. Congratulations. You blended in with the rest of them.”

“No.” That word comes out in a twist of anger that sends a chill rippling along the same paths that the heat just went. He doesn’t like being told he’s just like the others, apparently, indistinguishable from every subway masturbator and construction site leerer that New York has ever produced. He wants to be different. God only knows why. “It tells me you’re used to being afraid. You’ve been afraid for so long that, when something actually dangerous showed up, you couldn’t distinguish it from the background noise.” He pauses again and draws in a slow, almost tortured breath. “You’re going to wish you had told someone, though. By the time the night is over, you’ll be regretting that choice quite a bit.”

Every hair on my body stands up. “How sure are you that I didn’t?”

“Very, very sure.”

Something in his confidence makes me believe him. “You were watching me? All day?”

He brushes my cheek with a single knuckle. “All day,” he confirms.

I grit my teeth so hard I’m surprised they don’t crack. “Is this about the Lazarev story?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because you broke into my apartment the same week that my source on a story about a very dangerous family went missing, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“You’re a clever thing, little fox.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It wasn’t meant to be one.”

“Okay.” My fingers are still laced behind my head, but they’re starting to droop as my arms get tired. “Is Giovanni Ochoa alive?”

Quiet.

“Did you do something to him?”

More quiet.

“If you hurt him⁠—”

“Tell me something,” he interrupts. “Do you sleep with the lights on?”

I freeze. “What?”

“At night, when you’re alone, with nothing between the cool sheets and your bare skin to keep you safe… when you’re naked in your bed and there is no one in the world to protect you from the monsters in the shadows… Do you leave the lights on?”

My whole body goes cold, then hot, then cold again, all in rapid succession, like someone is flipping a switch inside me.

My stomach churns and my throat constricts. I can feel my pulse in my temples and my wrists, in the soft hollow at the base of my throat where his sweet, cinnamon-scented breath keeps pluming. Every nerve ending I have is firing at once, sending contradictory signals—run, stay, scream, be silent, claw his face off, submit—until I’m paralyzed by the sheer, overwhelming volume of it all.

I feel like that girl in the comment section from this morning. i think my fight or flight is malfunctioning. That’s me in a nutshell right now.

Still, I try to fight for some kind of control. “How is that relevant to⁠—”

He cuts in, “Answer me.”

“No,” I spit, “I don’t sleep with the fucking lights on. I’m a grown woman.”

That provokes another lash of his anger, hot and ready. “Do not lie to me, little fox,” he snarls as he rears back to tower above me.

I turn around and look up before I realize he explicitly told me not to do that.

The apartment is almost completely dark, but not completely completely dark. A thin seam of streetlight leaks through the gap between my curtains, just enough to carve out vague, ominous shapes from the blackness.

He’s tall as he looms over me, tall enough that I have to crane my neck back to find where his face should be.

But when my eyes reach that height, I see only a mask. It’s black and covers everything from the bridge of his nose down to his jaw. Not a surgical mask, not an N95 like this morning. This one is fitted, tight against his skin, molded to the contours of his face. Above it, his eyes catch the faint streetlight. They’re pale, but I can’t tell what color.

“Fine,” I whisper as I let my eyes fall to the ground, where I see the faint suggestion of rugged black boots standing on my floor. “Yes. I sleep with the lights on. Are you happy?”

He takes his time calming down again. That’s another thing to add to my scant list of things I know about this man: He wants to stand out from the crowd, he doesn’t like being lied to, and he smells extremely good. Can’t wait to run straight to NYPD with that airtight description, assuming I make it out of here alive.

Slowly, he sinks and joins me in kneeling on the floor. He touches a finger under my chin and tilts my face up until I’m meeting his eyes. Half his face is blotted out fully by the darkness. Shadows pool in the pits of his eyes, so all I can see is the mask-covered ridge of his proud nose and the cruel slash of his mouth.

“Who are you?” I whisper.

“Someone who pays attention.”

“You broke into my apartment to let me know that you’re paying attention?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head with what is—improbably, unbelievably, but, yes, undeniably—sadness. “I broke into your apartment to kill you.”

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