Page 77 of Boardroom Mask

But I guess it’s a good thing that at least one person in this building has a healthy survival instinct. It sure as hell ain’t me.

Sighing, I let myself into my apartment, drop my bag by the door, and kick off my shoes.

Then I stop.

Something is off.

It’s not a person, I don’t think. I don’t feel that telltale,you’re not aloneprickle at the back of my neck.But there’s something else, a wrongness I can’t name, a detail nudging at the edge of my awareness like a word on the tip of my tongue.

I stand in the middle of my living room and turn in a slow circle. Unlike last time I had this feeling, my kitchen is clean and normal. On the table, my laptop is closed and my chair pushed in. Living room: couch cushions straight, throw blanket folded, remote on the armrest.

Everything looks exactly the way I left it.

So why does my gut keep insisting otherwise?

I walk into the kitchen and open the fridge, like there might be a sexy masked stalker guy hiding in there. Sadly, it is only a variety of half-expired dairy items and a suspiciously green loaf of bread.

I check the window above the fire escape. Locked, latch secure. I check the front door deadbolt. Engaged.

I drift into the bedroom, but as with the rest of the house, nothing in here looks out of place. I’m about to write off the whole thing as sleep-deprived paranoia when my eyes finally snag on the wrongness.

The air vent. The rectangular metal grate near the ceiling, above my bedroom closet door. I’ve looked at that vent a thousand times without seeing it. It’s one of those things that’s justthere, part of the architecture, part of the background noise.

But right now, in the dim morning light filtering through my curtains, there’s a tiny red dot blinking behind the slats.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

A small LED. Unmistakable once you notice it, but invisible if you’re not looking.

I drag my vanity chair over to the closet and step up on it. My face is level with the vent now. I press my eye close to the metal slats and peer through.

There it is. A small black device, no bigger than a thumb drive, wedged into the ductwork just behind the grate. A pinhole lens the size of a pencil tip. The little red light pulses beside it.

It’s a camera.

There is a fucking camera in my bedroom vent.

I step down off the chair and stand there for a long moment, stunned. My brain runs through the list of suspects, which is a very short list, because only one person has had unsupervised access to my apartment on multiple occasions. Only one person would plant a camera in my bedroom. Only one person would want to watch me when he’s not here.

Oh, this motherfucker.

30

KIR

“Every breath you take / Every move you make / Every bond you break / Every step you take / I’ll be watching you”

— “Every Breath You Take” by The Police

She didn’t come home last night.

I know because I was watching. I sat at my desk with the camera feed open in a browser tab, and I watched her empty bedroom for hours. The bed stayed made. The lamp stayed off. The coffee mug on the windowsill didn’t move.

I know where she was, of course, because I cloned her phone’s location services with a simple remote install she’d never detect, and when I checked, I saw the dot that represented my little fox safely ensconced at Rae Everett’s apartment in Brooklyn all night long. That’s the only thing that kept me from flying off the fucking handle—because if I thought she’d been at another man’s house, I might’ve committed a mass murder. What I did to her scrawny little neighbor would look like mercy compared to what I’d do if I found her in the arms of another man.