Page 75 of The Villain We Tempt

Are you fucking KIDDING me?!

I blow through the door to my room like a hurricane.

“Furious” is the first word that comes to mind to describe my current emotional state. But it goes deeper than that.

I feel lied to.

Fucked with.

It’s not like The Ghost Prince and I set up “rules” per se—well, aside from my whole awkwardly blurted “no sex” one. Butstill.

It should go without saying that you don’tplant fucking bugsin people's bedrooms.

Or…does it, for a man like him?

I’ve always assumed when watching his videos that he’s like me. As in, he’s just apersonwho makes content for a specific niche of social media viewer, and he leans into that vibe to please his fans.

It’s not like any of the guys doing the MaskTok stuff areactuallywalking around shirtless in Halloween masks, brandishing baseball bats and breaking into girls’ homes to tie them up, delve into their darkest fantasies, and shower them with orgasms. In real life, I'm sure these guys have regular jobs and families. They pay their taxes and make plans to watch the game with their friends.

And I think that’s what’s freaking me out the most. I’ve been assuming that The Ghost Prince, same as these other guys, is aperformerputting on a show.

But maybe he’s not pretending.

Maybe he’s not playing games.

Maybe I’ve accidentally become entangled with anactual lunaticin a mask with zero sense of personal boundaries or the line between fantasy and reality.

I slump against the door behind me, trying not to think about what happened tonight before he accidentally let it slip that he’d been spying on me. Heat creeps up my face, and my thighs press together as the memory of his tongue between them bleeds through my thoughts.

His hands on my skin. His groans rumbling in my core as I shattered?—

No. I amnotgoing to sit here fantasizing about this weirdo just because he happened to make me come.

“Fuckingpsycho!” I hiss aloud through clenched teeth.

A jolt stabs into me.

Oh, right.

He’s spying on me.

He probably heard that.

“Isaid,” I yell loudly, “fucking psycho!!”

I shove away from the door.

This ends now.

In the movies, they always have some sort of high-tech gadget to find the surveillance bugs that “the bad guy” is using to listen in. But I'm not James Bond, and I don’t have any of that at my disposal. So I just start tearing my room apart.

I check behind framed pictures on the wall, in the folds of my drapes, under my bed, between the leaves of the avocado plant I’ve been trying to grow in my window. I dig through my closet and crawl under my desk, which only results in whacking my head against the underside of it when I get back up too fast.

It also results in the lamp on my desk knocking over, shattering the light bulb. But when it does, something falls off the edge of the desk to skitter across the floor.

What the actual fuck…

I frown, rubbing the bump on my head and gingerly standing. My eyes are trained on the little black thing on the floor as I walk over and pick it up. I'm holding a small plastic device, with a hair-thin wire dangling from it and a tiny glass circle on the front…