ERROR: OBSESSED

Chapter Two - The Man Behind 19B

"Some people knock on your door. Others find a way into your head and make themselves impossible to evict."

~

REX

At 7:12 a.m., I made three important discoveries.

One: my Wi-Fi was working.

Two: my coffee machine was broken.

Three: the man living in apartment 19B had somehow managed to occupy approximately forty percent of my thoughts despite our entire relationship consisting of one mildly humiliating late-night interaction.

Forty percent.

I knew because I had spent the last twenty minutes trying to debug a problem that did not exist, and every time I looked at my laptop, I saw dark hair, an annoyingly defined jawline, and a pair of eyes that looked like they had personally witnessed the downfall of several governments.

This was unacceptable.

I was a cybersecurity engineer. I identified vulnerabilities, prevented unauthorized access, and had a healthy professional relationship with firewalls.

I did not develop an emotional attachment to my neighbours because they happened to look like sin in expensive clothing.

Especially not neighbours who barely spoke.

Especially not neighbours who had laughed at my jokes.

Actually, scratch that last one.

A man who laughed at my jokes was a serious threat to national security.

I took a long sip of coffee.

It tasted like burnt disappointment.

“Wonderful,” I muttered.

My phone vibrated beside my laptop.

MAYA: Are you alive?

ME: Unfortunately.

MAYA: Did you fix your internet?

ME: Yes.

MAYA: Did you meet the hot neighbour?

I stared at the screen.

Then I stared at the ceiling, as if God might have an explanation for why I had friends who treated my personal life like a reality television series.

ME: Define meet.

The reply arrived immediately.

MAYA: OH MY GOD.

ME: I knocked on his door. He helped me with the Wi-Fi. Nobody got married. Calm down.

MAYA: Did he have a shirt on?

I hesitated.

That was my first mistake.

MAYA: HE DIDN'T, DID HE?

ME: I'm blocking you.

MAYA: WAS HE HOT?

ME: I'm calling the police.

MAYA: WAS. HE. HOT.

I dropped my phone face down on the desk.

My phone vibrated again.

I ignored it.

It vibrated a third time.

I turned it off.

There. Problem solved.

This was why I preferred computers. Computers did exactly what you told them to do, provided you knew what you were doing and hadn't accidentally deleted something important.

People, on the other hand, were walking disasters with complicated feelings and terrible timing.

I opened my work dashboard and pulled up the security audit I had been reviewing the night before. The project had been completed months ago, but our team still maintained a monitoring system for unusual activity. A few old access requests had been flagged for review.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing urgent.

Just another Monday morning.

I clicked through the logs, scanning timestamps and authorization records while my coffee slowly became colder than my enthusiasm for corporate life.

Then I noticed something strange.

A request had been routed through a legacy authentication service that should have been disabled.

I frowned.

The service had been retired after our last major update. It wasn't supposed to accept new requests, much less process financial transaction metadata.

I checked the timestamp.

Three days ago.

I leaned closer to the screen.

That was odd.

Not necessarily dangerous, but odd enough to deserve a second look.

I opened the audit trail, traced the request back through the system, and found that the originating credentials had been masked.

Not encrypted.

Masked.

There was a difference.

Encryption protected information through a process that required the appropriate key to reverse. Masking concealed information from view, often leaving enough behind for authorized users to understand what they were looking at.

Someone had used the wrong term in the internal documentation, or someone had deliberately made the activity harder to investigate.

I saved the record to a separate review folder.

Then my phone buzzed back to life.

MAYA: I AM COMING OVER AFTER WORK.

I sighed.

The day had barely started, and already I wanted to move to a cabin in the woods.

Preferably one without neighbours.

Preferably one without Wi-Fi.

Actually, no. That was ridiculous.

I needed Wi-Fi.

And apparently, I also needed to stop thinking about apartment 19B.

I returned to my audit.

For approximately eleven seconds, I succeeded.

Then I remembered his smile.

I shut my laptop.

“Absolutely not,” I told the empty room.

The empty room, unlike my friends, had the decency not to respond.

KANE

Luca arrived at 8:03 a.m. carrying two coffees and the expression of a man who had already decided to irritate me.

He didn't knock.

He had a key.

I had given it to him three years ago, before I disappeared from the life I had been born into and adopted a name that was supposed to make me difficult to find.

Apparently, I had forgotten to revoke his access to my apartment.

Another failure of security.

“Morning, sunshine,” he said, walking into my kitchen.

“Leave.”

“You look terrible.”

“Then leave faster.”

He placed a coffee on the counter and examined me with exaggerated concern.

“Didn't sleep?”

“I slept.”

“How much?”

“Enough.”

“So, no.”

I took the coffee. Luca grinned.

He was one of the few people who could get away with irritating me repeatedly without experiencing any consequences. He had been my friend long before my family became a collection of liars, traitors, and men who mistook fear for respect.

He knew my real name.

He knew what I had lost.

And he knew that the man standing in this apartment was not simply Kane Vale, a quiet tenant with a respectable lease and an unremarkable professional history.

I was Kane Vescari.

The missing heir to a family whose name opened doors in some places and got people killed in others.

My father had been dead for eight months.

The official story was that he had been killed during a robbery.

The official story was a lie.

My father had been careful. Paranoid, even. He trusted very few people, and he trusted technology less than he trusted most politicians.

Yet the transaction records associated with his final weeks had vanished.

Someone had erased the money trail.

Someone had made it look as if a series of transfers had never existed.

And someone inside the family had helped them do it.

I had spent eight months following the money through shell companies, private accounts, and intermediaries who were suddenly too busy to answer their phones.

Every trail ended at a wall.

Every wall had a crack.

I intended to find it.

Luca leaned against the kitchen island.

“Any progress?”

“Maybe.”

His expression sharpened. “On the accounts?”

I nodded and pulled up the files on my laptop.

A set of transaction identifiers appeared on the screen. Several had been routed through a financial intermediary linked to one of my father's businesses. The intermediary had since been dissolved, its records supposedly archived.

Supposedly.

“I found another cluster of transfers,” I said. “The timestamps line up with the week before he died.”

“And?”

“The records were cleaned.”

“By whom?”

“That's the problem.”

I enlarged the metadata.

A third-party platform had processed several of the records before they entered the financial system. The platform was legitimate. Widely used. Designed to protect sensitive data and manage secure exchanges between systems.

But the version listed in the logs was an older build.

One that should no longer have been active.

Luca swore quietly.

“Can you trace it?”

“Not yet.”

“Do we know who had access?”

“Not yet.”

“That's a lot of not yets, Kane.”

I turned my head slowly.

He raised both hands.

“I'm just saying.”

“Then say less.”

Luca studied the screen again. “The platform has a name?”

I told him.

He searched it on his phone.

“Looks like a cybersecurity company developed it.”

“Several companies contributed to the original architecture. One of the engineers was involved in the initial authentication framework.”

“Can we talk to them?”

“Not without alerting whoever is monitoring the records.”

He looked at me.

“You think someone is watching?”

“I think someone has gone to considerable trouble to make these transactions disappear. I don't intend to announce that I've found them.”

Luca nodded.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Then his gaze shifted to the apartment door.

I knew that look.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Luca.”

“Your neighbour.”

I stared at him.

“What about her?”

He smiled.

It was the sort of smile that made me consider whether prison might be preferable to friendship.

“She's pretty.”

I closed the laptop.

“That's your contribution to the investigation?”

“My contribution is noticing that you spent the first five minutes of this conversation looking toward the hallway.”

“I was looking at the door.”

“Right.”

“Because you walked through it without knocking.”

“Of course.”

I stood and carried my coffee to the sink.

Luca followed me with his eyes.

“What's her name?”

“Rex.”

“Rex?”

“That's what she said.”

“Interesting.”

“No, it isn't.”

“Is she always like that?”

I paused.

I had been wondering the same thing.

The woman in apartment 19C was not like the people I usually encountered. She spoke without appearing to consider whether her words might inconvenience someone. She looked directly at me, unafraid of what she might find.

Most people either wanted something from me or wanted me to believe they didn't.

Rex had wanted her Wi-Fi fixed.

Then she'd threatened to change my password to something involving cats.

I had almost smiled again thinking about it.

Almost.

“She's loud,” I said.

Luca laughed. “You like her.”

“I met her ten hours ago.”

“That's not a denial.”

“It's a statement of fact.”

“Those can be the same thing.”

I turned toward him.

“Do you have anything useful to do today?”

“Several things.”

“Wonderful. Do them somewhere else.”

He grabbed his coffee, still smiling.

At the door, he stopped.

“One more thing.”

“If this is about Rex, I'm throwing you down the stairs.”

“I'm serious.”

Something in his voice made me look at him properly.

He was no longer smiling.

“The name associated with the latest transfer isn't one of the usual intermediaries,” he said. “I checked the company registration. It's connected to someone your father trusted.”

The room seemed to grow quieter.

“Who?”

Luca told me.

For a second, I couldn't move.

The name belonged to a man who had attended my father's funeral and stood beside me with tears in his eyes. A man who had told me he would find whoever was responsible.

A man who had helped convince the world that I was dead.

I looked back at the transaction records.

The old platform.

The masked credentials.

The missing money.

Someone had been cleaning up after my father's murder.

And now I had a name.

“Don't contact him,” I said.

Luca nodded. “What are you going to do?”

I closed the file.

“Find out what he thinks I know.”

“And the engineer?”

I glanced toward the wall separating my apartment from Rex's.

I didn't know why I did it.

Perhaps because I had spent the night listening to the quiet sounds of someone moving around next door. Perhaps because her voice had cut through the silence in a way I hadn't expected.

Or perhaps because her name had appeared in the back of my mind the moment Luca mentioned the cybersecurity platform.

Rex Thompson.

I had no reason to suspect her.

No reason to involve her.

No reason to think about her at all.

“Leave the engineer alone,” I said.

Luca's eyebrows rose.

“Wasn't planning on doing anything.”

“Good.”

He opened the door.

“Try not to fall in love before lunch.”

I threw a dish towel at him.

He dodged it, laughing, and disappeared into the hallway.

I waited until the door shut.

Then I turned back to my laptop.

I had spent eight months learning to recognize patterns, and one thing had become painfully clear: the closer I came to the truth, the more ordinary things began to look suspicious.

A missing record.

An old authentication service.

A name that appeared where it shouldn't.

I wasn't going to make the mistake of treating coincidence as evidence.

And I wasn't going to drag an innocent woman into my father's murder simply because she had worked on a piece of software someone might have misused.

Still, I made a note to examine the platform's old architecture more closely.

Then I deleted the note.

I didn't need to write down what I already knew.

I needed to find the truth.

Everything else could wait.

REX

At 6:41 p.m., I discovered that my neighbour had a talent for appearing precisely when I was least prepared to look normal.

I was standing outside the elevator, holding a grocery bag in one hand and a paper container of noodles in the other. My hair was tied into a messy bun, my oversized hoodie had a suspicious stain near the pocket, and I was arguing with my phone because the grocery delivery app had charged me for avocados I had specifically asked them not to include.

“I said no avocados,” I told the screen. “That is not a complicated request. I could explain it to a toddler.”

The elevator doors opened.

Kane stepped out.

Of course he did.

He wore a black shirt with the sleeves pushed to his forearms and dark trousers that probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget.

His expression was calm.

His eyes moved from my phone to my face, then to the grocery bag.

“Having a difficult day?”

I lowered my phone.

“No. I'm having a wonderful day. I'm just threatening a multinational corporation over fruit.”

He glanced at the bag.

“Avocados?”

“Don't make jokes. I'm vulnerable right now.”

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“You're getting better at sarcasm.”

“I'm learning from the best.”

That was unfair.

That was deeply, profoundly unfair.

I had been preparing myself for a perfectly reasonable conversation with a perfectly reasonable neighbour, and instead he had apparently decided to develop a personality.

I adjusted the grocery bag.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Very informative. Thank you.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

He looked at the apartment door behind me.

“Also informative.”

“Look at us. Two conversational geniuses.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

I caught it.

“Was that almost a smile?”

“No.”

“Interesting. It looked like a smile.”

“You should get your eyes checked.”

I gasped.

“Okay. So we insult each other now? That's the relationship we're building?”

The word relationship seemed to hang in the air for half a second longer than it should have.

Kane's gaze settled on mine.

I suddenly became very aware of the fact that we were standing close enough for me to notice the faint scent of his cologne.

Something clean and dark, with a hint of cedar.

My brain, which had never once failed me during a professional crisis, abandoned its duties entirely.

I cleared my throat.

“Anyway. I'm going inside before my noodles become a science experiment.”

I reached for my keys.

One of them slipped from my hand and landed on the floor.

Naturally.

I closed my eyes.

“Don't.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

“Thinking what?”

“That I'm a disaster.”

Kane bent down, picked up the key, and held it out to me.

“I was thinking you have a lot of keys.”

I took it from him.

“That's because I'm a responsible adult.”

“How many locks do you have?”

“None of your business.”

“Reasonable.”

I studied him for a moment.

There was something strange about the way he carried himself. He didn't seem arrogant, exactly, but he was always aware of his surroundings. When the elevator chimed behind him, his eyes moved toward it before the doors had fully opened.

It was subtle.

Most people wouldn't notice.

I noticed.

It was the sort of habit you developed when you spent too much time anticipating problems.

I knew something about that.

“Do you work in security?” I asked.

His expression didn't change.

“Why?”

“You're observant.”

“Is that a crime?”

“Depends on what you're observing.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he said, “What do you do?”

I smiled.

“Cybersecurity.”

His eyes sharpened.

Only for a second.

But I saw it.

“Interesting,” he said.

“That's what people say when they have no idea what cybersecurity is.”

“I know what it is.”

“Everyone says that, too.”

“What does it mean to you?”

The question caught me off guard.

Usually, people asked what I did because they wanted a job title they could repeat later. They wanted a quick explanation that made sense at dinner parties.

Kane sounded as though he actually wanted an answer.

I shifted the grocery bag to my other hand.

“It means figuring out how people break things before they do. Finding the holes in a system. Understanding how someone might get in, what they could access, and how to stop them.”

“And if you can't stop them?”

“Then you figure out how to limit the damage.”

His gaze remained on mine.

“Can every system be broken?”

I considered the question.

“Eventually? Probably. But that's not really the point.”

“What is?”

“The point is making it difficult enough that the person trying to break it gives up and finds something easier.”

Something flickered across his face.

It wasn't amusement this time.

It was recognition.

As if I had said something he understood in a way I couldn't possibly know.

“And people?” he asked.

I tilted my head.

“What about them?”

“Can people be broken?”

The question was so unexpected that my smile faded.

For the first time since meeting him, I didn't have an immediate joke.

I studied his face, looking for some indication that he was messing with me.

There wasn't one.

“People aren't systems,” I said eventually. “You can't run a diagnostic and decide what's wrong with them.”

“No?”

“No. And even if someone has been through something terrible, that doesn't mean they're broken.”

His eyes held mine.

“Sometimes they are.”

“Sometimes they're hurt,” I corrected. “There's a difference.”

Silence settled between us.

It was no longer awkward.

It was something heavier.

I had the strange sensation that I had accidentally walked into a room I hadn't known existed. A room inside this quiet, beautiful, deeply suspicious man that he kept locked for a reason.

Then he looked away.

“You should get your noodles inside,” he said.

I blinked.

“Right. Yes. Noodles. The most important thing in my life.”

I unlocked my door.

Before I stepped inside, I turned back.

“Hey, Kane?”

He looked at me.

“If you're asking because something happened to you, you don't have to tell me. I'm not going to interrogate you.”

His expression became unreadable.

“Good.”

“But if you ever need someone to tell you that you're not broken, I charge reasonable rates.”

For a second, I thought he might laugh.

Instead, he looked at me with an intensity that made my stomach tighten.

“And if I don't believe you?”

I shrugged.

“Then I'll send you an invoice until you do.”

This time, he smiled.

Not almost.

Actually smiled.

It changed his face completely. Made him look younger, almost boyish, as if the man who lived behind those guarded eyes had briefly forgotten to hide.

My heart did something embarrassing.

Something I intended to deny under oath.

“Goodnight, Rex,” he said.

“Goodnight, neighbour.”

I went inside and shut the door.

Then I leaned against it.

“Oh, we're in trouble,” I whispered.

My phone buzzed.

MAYA: On my way. I have wine.

I stared at the message.

Then I looked at the wall separating my apartment from Kane's.

“No,” I told myself firmly. “Absolutely not.”

I put the noodles in the microwave.

I unpacked the groceries.

I washed my hands.

I opened my laptop.

And then, because apparently I had learned nothing from the previous twenty-four hours, I opened the building's public tenant directory.

Kane Vale.

Apartment 19B.

No middle name listed.

No professional details beyond a generic consulting firm.

No social media links.

No photograph.

Nothing particularly suspicious on its own.

Plenty of people preferred privacy.

I preferred privacy.

But I also preferred knowing whether my neighbour was secretly a serial killer before I started developing a crush on him.

I searched the consulting firm.

The website was clean, minimal, and almost aggressively uninformative. A registered business address. A telephone number. A short description of its services.

No staff page.

No client list.

No useful history.

I leaned back in my chair.

“Huh.”

My professional curiosity stirred.

Then I caught myself.

I wasn't investigating a suspect. I was procrastinating because a handsome man had asked me an unexpectedly profound question in the hallway.

There was a difference.

I closed the browser.

My noodles beeped.

I took them out, sat on the couch, and turned on a show I had already watched twice.

Ten minutes later, my phone buzzed.

An unknown number.

UNKNOWN: You left your umbrella in the hallway.

I looked toward the door.

My umbrella was sitting in the stand beside it.

I frowned.

ME: No, I didn't.

The reply arrived almost immediately.

UNKNOWN: Then I suppose the umbrella in front of 19B belongs to someone else.

I stared at the message.

Then I walked to the peephole and looked out.

An umbrella stood outside Kane's door.

Black.

Expensive-looking.

Completely unfamiliar.

I typed.

ME: Why do you have my number?

Three dots appeared.

Disappeared.

Appeared again.

UNKNOWN: You gave it to me last night when you asked me to send you the network diagnostics.

I froze.

Oh.

Right.

I had, in fact, done that.

I looked at the contact details from our previous exchange.

Kane Vale.

I had saved his number as Neighbour 19B.

Very professional.

Very mature.

ME: Fine. But if you start sending me inspirational quotes, I'm changing my number.

KANE: I'll restrain myself.

ME: And don't steal my umbrella.

KANE: I have my own.

ME: Of course you do. You look like someone who owns an umbrella.

I stared at the message for a second after sending it.

Then I laughed.

Actually laughed.

Alone in my apartment, eating noodles, texting a man I had known for less than a day.

This was how it started, wasn't it?

Not with declarations of love or dramatic kisses in the rain.

With small conversations.

With a smile in a hallway.

With a stranger who asked questions that stayed with you long after he had walked away.

My phone buzzed one final time.

KANE: Goodnight, Rex.

I smiled before I could stop myself.

ME: Try not to let the Wi-Fi keep you awake.

I put my phone down.

Across the wall, I heard a faint sound.

A door closing.

Then silence.

I didn't know that Kane was standing in his kitchen, staring at his own phone with an expression he would never allow anyone else to see.

I didn't know that he had already opened a file containing the transaction records connected to his father's murder.

I didn't know that the software named in those records was connected to work I had once done.

And I certainly didn't know that the man next door was carrying a secret large enough to destroy both our lives.

All I knew was that my neighbour had a dangerous smile.

And I had a terrible habit of wanting to know why.

KANE

At 11:26 p.m., I opened the file again.

The name of the platform sat in the middle of the screen.

I reviewed the records one more time, then opened the archived technical documentation. The authentication framework had been revised twice since its original release, but a small portion of the legacy architecture remained compatible with the newer system.

Someone had exploited that compatibility.

The question was whether they had done so before or after my father's death.

I scrolled to the contributor history.

A list of names appeared.

One caught my attention.

Rex Thompson.

I sat very still.

The name wasn't proof of anything. She had worked on a legitimate project, and the records showed no evidence that she had authorized the transactions or even knew they existed.

I had to remember that.

A name in a file was not a confession.

A technical connection was not guilt.

And the woman next door had spent the evening talking to me about the difference between being broken and being hurt.

I closed the document.

For the first time in eight months, I had a lead that might take me somewhere.

For the first time in eight months, I had a reason to be careful about the next step.

And for the first time in a very long time, there was someone I wanted to keep out of the darkness.

Rex Thompson had no idea who lived behind apartment 19B.

I intended to keep it that way.

For now.

Because if my suspicions were right, someone had used her work to conceal my father's final transactions.

And if that person was still watching the system, they might already know I was looking.

I turned off the screen.

Tomorrow, I would investigate the records.

Tomorrow, I would find out who had used the platform.

Tomorrow, I would take another step toward the truth.

Tonight, I stood by the shared wall and listened to the faint sound of Rex laughing at something on her television.

It was a small sound.

Ordinary.

The kind of sound I had spent eight months forgetting existed.

I rested my hand against the cool plaster.

Then I stepped away.

I had no right to want anything from her.

Not her trust.

Not her time.

Not the bright, chaotic presence she carried into every room.

I had a murder to solve and a family full of enemies.

She had a life that was entirely her own.

I would not let my darkness touch it.

I repeated that promise to myself until it sounded almost believable.

Then I went to bed.

And dreamed of a woman who didn't know my real name.