Charles – POV
He felt it before he saw it.
That tickling tightness at the base of the skull. The whisper behind the teeth that said, Move. Run. You're too exposed.
He must have gotten overconfident. His mother had always told him he was too cocky, too arrogant. A few days, weeks in the attic would fix that. He would be begging by the end, for food, for anything, other than the aching loneliness of the attic.
He wondered if she was still there, as he had left her, in his childhood home. He owned the place and had hired a company to maintain the outside. He paid his property taxes. They had no reason to notice the nondescript bungalow, no reason to go into the attic. She'd been nothing but bones in a white dress when he'd left the place.
Charles Collins sat in the driver's seat of his second van, parked six blocks from Zane's building. New plates. No trace. Every screw in place. Still, the chill in his spine told him what logic couldn't:
They were closing in.
He hadn't seen it coming. Not like this. He thought he had more time. Zane might've been powerful, but Charles had counted on Zane's sense of invincibility to buy him another week. Maybe two. He hadn't expected him to kick it in to high gear from the start, like some vigilante crime fighter from a comic book.
Charles had watched the two of them using binoculars, in a building across the street, in his rented office. No one questioned him. He was moonlighting as a private investigator, a very believable story.
He had been able to see the details of what they were looking at, and they were getting close. Too close. The photo on the security report. The timestamp. The archived blueprints.
He felt it, that crawling sensation in his skin. Not fear, he didn't feel fear. Just urgency. An undeniable instinct told him to disappear before the net finished closing.
They found the file. They found his name. The moment Harris made the call for an "aggressive background search," Charles caught it on one of the wireless feeds he'd been tapping from a nearby rooftop. The audio wasn't perfect, but the tone said everything.
Zane wasn't reacting anymore.
He was hunting.
Charles's lips twitched at the irony. The predator becoming prey. If he wasn't so furious, he might have been impressed.
He hadn't expected Taryn to get involved in the investigation either. But she had. Her fingerprints were all over this. Her memory of his face. That damn instinct of hers. She wasn't just hiding anymore.
She was fighting back.
That stung more than it should have. She'd already betrayed him the night she should have been his. When he'd had to take Riley instead. Even now, he couldn't see it as a fair trade. Taryn was his, and he would make sure she had her moment. Taryn was special.
He'd admired her because she saw danger and survived it. She wasn't like the others, those women who stumbled into his path. She was sharp, deliberate, watchful. He was disgusted by what she was becoming under the influence of that vile man.
Now she was hiding behind Zane like a child behind her father's coat. Letting him do the heavy lifting. Letting herself feel safe. Trusting him. That trust was the betrayal that finally broke something in Charles.
He shoved his notes into a burn bag, tore down the corkboard that had taken months to assemble. The photos. The strings. The sketches. All of it, crumpled and jammed into black garbage bags like corpses.
He didn't bother with fire. That was too flashy. Too traceable. He would vanish the old-fashioned way.
He would rent a storage with his fake identification papers. A different part of the city where no one remembered names. A hotel room by the airport.
He needed to put in for a transfer at work. He hadn't planned for that. But it wouldn't be a problem, as long as he had been at his job. Just across town. He didn't need a reason, not with his status.
He would let them suffer in silence. No more messages. No more watching. Not until they forgot. He'd done it before, many times. If you could disappear long enough, even the best hunters lost interest. They got complacent. And that's when you really owned them.
Charles sat down at his small kitchen table. The room was too quiet without the constant hum of radio scanners or the tap of his notes. He stared at the sealed box that held Taryn's things- her hair tie, her perfume sample, the lipstick tube she'd dropped outside the club on a rainy night.
He ran his fingers over the box like a coffin lid. "I'll be back for you," he whispered.
But not now. Now he had to become no one.
He rose, locked the box, and slipped it under the floorboards beneath his bed. The hiding spot he hadn't used in years. The one he'd saved for something special.
As he finished packing the last of his gear, he stopped by the bathroom mirror.
He didn't like what he saw. He looked too much like himself. He grabbed a pair of scissors from the drawer and sheared his hair off in jagged tufts until his reflection looked like a stranger. Then, he picked up a straight razor.
An hour later, he walked out of the apartment a ghost in janitor's coveralls, clean-shaven, buzz-cut, no trace of Charles Collins left behind.
Only the box under the floorboards, waiting, and a promise that one day, he would return, when they least expected it. When the smiles came back. When she started feeling safe.
No more taunting. No more games. For now, he would vanish again, just long enough to make them believe they were safe. Long enough for her to start smiling again.
Predators didn't strike when you were running. They struck when you finally stopped looking over your shoulder.