The Alpha's Only Cure

Something off

Chapter 5:

Evelyn's POV

"You had visitors today."

I stopped on the second step.

Mrs. Adler was standing in the ground floor corridor with a shopping bag in each hand, waiting.

"Two men in black suits. They came in around ten, left around eleven thirty. I thought it was building management but they didn't go to the super's office." She paused. "They went straight up to your floor."

My hand was on the banister. I kept it there.

"Did they say anything?" I asked.

"Not to me," she said. "I called out, but they kept walking."

"Thank you, Mrs. Adler."

I took the rest of the stairs one at a time.

---

My door was locked. Both locks, the way I always left it.

I stood in front of it for a moment before I put the key in. Then I pushed it open and stepped inside. I stood in the hallway and looked at everything without touching anything.

Coat on the hook. Shoes by the door. Kitchen counter with the same mug I had left this morning. Everything looked exactly how I left it except for the mug.

The mug was centered on the kitchen island.

I never left it centered. I left it two inches from the edge of the kitchen island, handle facing right, because that was where my hand put it every morning after taking a glass of water. Two years of the same habit. I did not even notice I was doing it anymore.

But someone had moved it. And then put it back. Just not exactly right.

I walked slowly into the kitchen and opened the drawer beside the sink. My patch case was there, closed and latched. I stared at it for a moment before clicking it open.The twenty-one patches lay in two neat rows. But the second patch in the left row was facing the wrong direction.

I closed the case, placed it back, and shut the drawer.

I stood at the counter and pressed both hands flat against the surface and breathed. My heart was already racing at this point.

Someone had opened that case. They had picked up my patches, looked at them and put them back wrong. For years, I had been making those patches myself. They were the only reason I was still standing here, still free, still breathing in a world that would not hesitate for a second if it found out what I was. The thought of that alone made my chest tight.

I turned away from the counter and moved through the apartment slowly. I looked under the desk, behind the radiator, along the window frames. My hands were running over surfaces and checking behind things and the whole time, I couldn't stop my heart from racing. But I found nothing.

I made dinner I did not want and ate half of it standing because I could not bring myself to sit down. I washed the plates and put them away. I tried to relax a bit but I couldn't, there was something off about my apartment. So I moved around the rooms again and every single time I passed the bookshelf, something pulled my eyes to it.

I stopped in front of it.

The books were straight. All of them, perfectly aligned. They were never straight. I pulled them in and out constantly and never once bothered to line them up.

But tonight, every book was perfectly level and I stood there looking at it and felt the hair on my arms rise.

I reached behind the second shelf slowly. Fingers trailing along the back wall behind the row of books.

Then I felt something almost immediately.

It was small, pressed flat against the wall.

I pulled the books forward one by one until I saw it.

A camera.

Small and black, barely bigger than my thumbnail, a lens pointed directly at the center of my living room. I crouched down until I was level with it. I looked at it and the full weight of what I was looking at landed on me all at once.

He had sent men into my home. While I was sitting twenty feet from his office trying to be invisible, trying to be forgettable, trying to be the most unremarkable person in his building, he had sent two men in suits into my apartment to install this thing against the wall behind my bookshelf.

I stood up slowly. My legs felt strange, my hands were not shaking but they wanted to. I pressed them flat against my thighs and looked at the camera and thought about everything it had seen today. My empty apartment in the morning light, my kitchen, my bookshelf, and now me, tonight, coming home and moving through my own space like a woman who already knew something was wrong and was just waiting to find out how wrong.

He had watched all of it.

I went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. When I came back, I crouched down in front of the camera one more time and looked directly into the lens. I held it for a long moment. Long enough that if he was watching right now he would see my face clearly and know exactly what I was about to do.

I ripped it off the wall and dropped it into the glass of water.The small indicator light on the side flickered once and went dark. I watched it sink to the bottom and settle. I put the glass on the counter and stood there, staring at it.

Then I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I changed my patch in the dark. My back flat against the cold wall, one hand pressed to my collarbone, counting to eleven in complete silence the way I had been doing since I was nineteen years old.

I came out of the bathroom, stood in the middle of my living room and looked at the glass on the counter with the drowned camera at the bottom of it and I thought for just one moment, that the watching was finished and the advantage was mine now.

I held onto that feeling while I turned off the lights.

I got into bed, pulled the covers up and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling.

My eyes were open in the dark and my chest was very still. I couldn't stop thinking about everything that happened tonight.

I couldn't bring myself to sleep, so I sat up slowly.

One camera, that was what I had found. One camera in an apartment that two professional men had spent an hour and a half inside.

My mouth went dry.

I lay back down. The silence in my apartment felt different now, it felt heavier. It was the kind of silence that wasn't empty, but full of something I could not see, name, or point to.I had found the obvious one. The thought settled heavily into my chest.

I closed my eyes, and the darkness behind them did not feel like mine anymore.