Page 46 of Jealous Stalker

Their voices overlap—danger,obsession,run—and the certainty I’d been holding so tightly begins to fray. I remember the hood shadowing his face, the mask hiding scars I’ve only imagined, the tremor in his voice when he said he wasn’t ready.

What if Jules is right? What if I’ve been living in a story that only feels safe inside my head?

When the call ends, the apartment is too quiet. His last note sits on my nightstand.

Don’t wait for me. I’m not ready to be seen.

My thumb hovers, then—impulse—delete. The digital page goes blank. Regret hits a heartbeat later. Why does erasing his words feel like erasing the best parts of myself?

I try his number. Straight to voicemail.

Gone.

Maybe it was always a fantasy. Maybe I should finally let it be.

I open a browser, fingers shaking, and book a solo flight to Cancún. Fly out tomorrow. White-sand beaches, bright sun, a place where no one knows the girl who invited a shadow inside.

Confirmation email pings my inbox. My chest is hollow, weightless.

If Caleb can’t step into the light…then I’ll leave the shadows behind.

S.t.a.l.k.e.r

I usedto think loneliness was a room with no doors. Now I know it’s a room where the only door leads back to her—and I’m the one too afraid to walk through.

She asked to see my face. I said no. I watched the light fade in her eyes and called it mercy, when really it was fear—an old wound I wrapped in leather and steel.

You kept her in shadows, Huntsman. Now she’s walking toward the sun without you.

I pace my apartment, every paper-thin wall echoing with memories:

•Reset alarms at 11:43 p.m.so she’d wake on time.

•Folded blanketsonly I ever touched.

•Held her pinkie in a coffee shopbecause I couldn’t trust myself with more.

•Whisperedmineinto the hush of her breathing—too cowardly to let her see why I cling so hard.

None of it required me to be whole. None of it demanded I bare the half-healed ruin of my face.

But love—real love—always asks for what you’re most desperate to hide.

I press my palm over the scar that splits my left cheek. It’s warm, pulsing with every thunderous beat of my heart.Half a man,I called myself. Yet when she laid her hand on the mask, I felt more alive than any battlefield adrenaline ever gave me.

She is the safe house I never believed in—and the battlefield I’d fight a thousand wars to cross.

I pick up the phone. Open our thread. Her last message is gone, replaced by silence thick as blood. She deleted it; I feel the loss like a rip through bone.

I can survive a blast.

I can survive silence.

But I don’t know if I can survive a future where she no longer looks for me in the dark.

My thumb hovers over her name, then falls away. I’m not ready to speak. Not yet. But I’m closer than I’ve ever been.

Because losing her would be the final amputation—and this time there’d be no prosthetic brave enough to make me whole.

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