His Chubby Obsession

Chapter Twenty-Five: Who Let Him In

I didn't sleep that night either.

I lay in the dark beside Charlotte, listening to her breathe, running through every person who'd been inside that house over the past week, turning each of them over in my mind like stones I was checking for something crawling underneath.

The club member who'd dropped off coloring books. The girlfriend who'd brought the beading kit. Harold, Papa Niel's driver, who'd only ever been on the porch, never inside, as far as I knew. Even Diane, who I'd only met days ago and trusted almost entirely on instinct and desperation.

I hated that my mind kept circling back to Sofia, too, even though I knew — I believed — that she'd fought Vincent off with everything she had, that her bruised jaw and split eyebrow weren't the marks of someone playing both sides. But trust didn't work the way I wanted it to work anymore. It didn't switch back on clean just because I wanted it to. Five years with Bruce had taught my body a lesson my mind was still catching up to: that closeness and safety weren't actually the same thing, no matter how badly I wanted them to be.

I found Enzo in the kitchen near dawn, unable to lie still any longer, and he looked up at me with the particular exhausted alertness of a man who also hadn't slept.

"You've been thinking about the photo," he said. Not a question.

"I can't stop." I sat down across from him. "Enzo, someone let him in. Or gave him something — a code, a schedule, a moment. I keep running through everyone who's been near this house and I hate every version of the answer I come up with."

"I know." His jaw was tight. "I've been doing the same thing all night."

"Do you think it's someone in the club?"

"I don't want to think that." He rubbed a hand over his face, tired in a way that went beyond one sleepless night. "But I'd be lying if I said I hadn't already started making a list. Prospects who've been around the longest. Anyone who might've had money troubles I didn't know about. Anyone Vincent might have had leverage on before this ever started."

"That's an awful list to have to make about people you trust."

"Yeah." He met my eyes. "Welcome to leadership. Most of it's just this. Loving people and doubting them in the same breath, because the alternative is being blind to something that could get someone killed."

I sat with that a long moment, feeling something in my own chest settle into a similar shape — the uncomfortable, necessary coexistence of love and vigilance, the thing I was going to have to learn to hold for the rest of my life if I wanted to keep Charlotte safe in a world that had already proven, more than once, that safety was never as solid as it looked.

"I'm done being hunted," I said quietly, surprising myself with how steady it came out. "I mean it, Enzo. I spent five years being something that happened to. Then six days being someone running from something. I don't want to keep being the person things happen to anymore."

"What do you want to be instead?"

"Someone who hunts back." I said it plainly, without flourish, because it wasn't a dramatic decision, not really — it was just the next true thing, arriving the way true things had started arriving to me all week, quiet and absolute. "I have a lawyer. I have documented evidence now. I have people who care what happens to me, whatever else is true about which of them I can fully trust yet. I'm not going to sit in this house waiting to see what Bruce does next. I'm going to start building something he can't undo with a phone call to my mother or a threat in a garden."

Enzo studied me a long moment, something shifting in his expression that looked almost like pride, though there was worry threaded through it too.

"Where do you want to start?"

"I don't know yet." I stood, restless with a kind of energy I hadn't felt in longer than I could remember, something that wasn't quite hope but was standing close enough to it to borrow some of its warmth. "But I'm going to figure it out. Today."

—

I opened my laptop an hour later, the one Sofia had finally deemed safe enough to reconnect to a network, intending to start drafting a timeline for Diane — every date, every threat, every piece of the last week laid out clean and organized, the way I imagined a woman who hunted back instead of hid would do it.

An email notification blinked in the corner of the screen before I'd even opened a blank document.

New message. Sender unknown. No subject line.

My hand hovered over the mouse a long moment before curiosity, or maybe just the exhaustion of an entire night spent suspecting everyone around me, won out over caution.

I opened it.

I can help you take him down. But you have to trust me first.

— V

I stared at those two letters signed at the bottom, my mind racing through every name they could possibly belong to, and felt the last of the fragile peace I'd built over the past week dissolve entirely into something far more complicated than fear.

Valentina.

Of all the people in this story who might reach out to help me, I had never once imagined it would be her — the woman who'd laughed with Bruce through his office door, who'd called me a cow, who'd counted down the days until she could finally have the life she believed she deserved.

And yet here she was, six days after everything had fallen apart around her too, offering me the one thing I hadn't let myself ask for from anyone since this all began.

Help, from the last person on earth I ever expected to need it from me as much as I apparently needed it from her.