Even if I had, how had he found me online? He must have known my name and what I looked like if he was able to pick me out of his comments because I’d told no one, absolutely no one, about my mask kink IRL, and I wasn’t friends or following anyone I knew personally on my account either.

What happened after he found me? How had he gone from figuring out who I was to learning where I lived?

Most importantly, how did he get in here last night? None of my windows were broken or unlocked, I didn’t have a chimney for him to slither down, and my back door had a deadbolt that I kept locked from the inside. As far as I knew, he would have had to break it to get in. I’d checked last night, and there were no signs of forced entry. So that left the front door.

The power had cut off sometime during the night. Had he somehow triggered it and used the cover of darkness to sneak inside? No. It must have been a coincidence. He’d have to be a top-notch hacker to pull something like that off.

And to figure out everything else he had about me, now that I thought about it.

My phone was sitting face up on the table beside me. I eyed it warily. Was he somehow watching me through it even now? I shoved it behind my napkin holder, out of sight, just to be safe. I was in way over my head. I’d taken a few programming courses in high school and college. Enough to realize that a job in one of the computer science fields wasn’t for me. I had no idea what skills were needed to hack my phone or if it was even possible.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t Tyler’s roommate a computer genius? Could he answer my questions? Things might have been over between me and Tyler, but it wasn’t like it was ever serious between us or ended badly. I’d seen him at the gym the other afternoon, and he’d been nice enough, waving to me across the weight room and giving me a thumbs up when I hit a new max on my deadlift. Would it be weird to ask him if he would talk to his roommate for me? How would I even explain what I needed?

Hey, Tyler. It’s Aly. Don’t worry, I’m not still into you or anything. I just need your roommate to track down the man from that thirst trap I sent you.

I rolled my eyes. Yeah. That would go over well.

Maybe I’d be okay if I kept it vague and offered to pay the guy. I’d only met Josh once, so it wasn’t like he’d have any reason to do it out of friendship or the goodness of his heart.

My thoughts wandered back to that one meeting. The only details Tyler had told me about Josh were that he was a recluse with a fancy cybersecurity job. I’d expected him to be some reed-thin short guy with glasses, and yes, I was aware that meant I’d fallen for the Hollywood stereotype of what a “geek” looked like.

Josh taught me better. Because he was huge, at least 6’4”, and though he’d been wearing baggy gym pants and a sweatshirt the morning I bumped into him in their kitchen, there was no hiding the fact that the man was yoked. I’d only caught a glance at his profile – strong jaw, aquiline nose, the kind of thick, long lashes most women would kill for – but that one glimpse was enough to tell me Josh had heartbreaker-level good looks. He must have had Mediterranean blood in him because his skin had some olive in it, and his hair was just as dark as mine. Mom would have taken one look at him and said something inappropriate about him being a man who could give her strong Italian grandchildren.

He’d made me stand up straighter, instantly aware of the fact that I was wearing his roommate’s t-shirt, and he’d probably heard me fucking Tyler just a few hours earlier because we hadn’t been as quiet as we should have after splitting a bottle of wine over dinner.

None of that mattered because I didn’t need Josh for his looks; I needed him for his brain. Would paying him be enough incentive to get him to help? And how much would I have to tell him about what I needed? Could I simply ask him to find someone for me without going into too much detail?

I needed Google to answer all these questions.

My fingers strayed toward my phone, but I hesitated, not trusting myself not to pull up my DMs again and obsess over the video the Faceless Man had sent me. Instead, I set my coffee down and went in search of my laptop.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 6Josh

Aly was Googling what information a hacker needed to find someone for her.

This could be a problem.

I watched her through her laptop camera as she read the article, her dark eyes filled with focus, a small divot appearing between her brows as she started to frown. Her hair was in a messy bun, she had no makeup on, and her clothes were rumpled like she’d just rolled out of bed. Something inside me softened at the sight. I’d been so fixated on playing out a fantasy with her that I hadn’t stopped to consider what reality might look like.

I closed my eyes and pictured myself sitting across from her at the dining table, watching her sip coffee as she woke up, her hair wild and lips bruised from what I’d done to them the night before. I nearly groaned at the thought. It’d been so long since I’d shared a bed with someone for more than just a quick hookup. When was the last time I’d woken to a woman splayed across my chest as she slept, using me for body heat? The fact that I couldn’t remember probably wasn’t a good thing.

Tyler regularly called me a recluse, but up until now, I hadn’t given it a second thought. So what if I was one? My aversion to leaving the apartment building was warranted, considering my past and the fallout of being recognized. But picturing myself inside a simple slice-of-life scene with Aly had me questioning my choices. How much was I missing out on by locking myself away from the rest of the world? Was it still necessary to guard myself from people and vice versa? I was twenty-six years old, and so far, I’d gone all this time without hurting anyone.

Did that mean I might never hurt someone?

Dad had committed his first assault as a young teen. The podcasts that examined his case loved talking about how an early childhood filled with abuse and a couple of head wounds had started him down his dark path. He’d passed the pain on to me before Mom managed to get us away from him for good, but at least I’d been lucky enough to escape suffering a traumatic brain injury.

The MacDonald triad was an outdated but sometimes eerily accurate prediction of violent tendencies in a person. The first point of the triangle was fire-starting. Burning shit down had never appealed to me. The second was bed-wetting. I’d had an iron bladder even from an early age, and I’d never pissed the sheets. The third was the one I’d always worried about because I’d never wanted to test myself – animal cruelty – but since I hadn’t hurt Fred the other night or was even tempted to, I was starting to feel more confident than I had in a long time that I wasn’t going to snap one day and turn into my father.

Bro, you are literally stalking Aly right now, I reminded myself.

Yeah, there was that. Okay, so I might not be a danger to the public, but I had some traits most people – my therapist included, if I ever confessed what I was doing to her – would call problematic. At least I wasn’t watching Aly because I wanted to chain her up in my hypothetical basement or anything. I just needed to figure out whether or not she was into what I’d done, and then I’d stop.

I rolled my eyes. Unfortunately, I was too self-aware to believe my own bullshit.

I wasn’t going to fucking stop.

Aly sat forward in her seat and started typing.

Can someone watch me through my laptop camera?

Uh-oh.

Her eyes flashed wide as she read the results, then jerked to the top of the screen, looking straight at me.

“Hello, gorgeous,” I said, wishing she could hear me so I could watch the blood drain from her face in fear.