Page 147 of My Unhinged Alphas
Then it does.
Lena makes a small sound beside me.
The room is lined with photographs. Not framed. Not arranged with any normal person’s taste or order. Just pinned up across one whole wall and spilling onto another. Dozens of them. Maybe more. Lena leaving the café. Lena carrying groceries. Lena unlocking her apartment building. Lena in line somewhere with coffee in her hand. Lena laughing with two women I assume are her friends. Lena on her fire escape. Lena in her kitchen.
Lena sleeping.
My stomach turns cold.
Some of the pictures are close enough to feel intimate. Too intimate. Shot from angles no stranger should have had. Through glass. Through narrow openings. Across streets. From inside places he should never have been.
Havoc’s smile disappears.
Vale goes absolutely still.
Lena doesn’t say anything at first. She just stares, face draining slowly, eyes moving from one picture to the next like her mind is refusing to catch up because catching up would mean admitting this is real.
Voss steps past us and reaches for the desk. “There’s more,” he says. He opens a folder and lays out a single page on the desk surface.
It takes me one glance to understand what I’m looking at.
A contract. Her name typed clearly. Descriptors. A photo clipped to the front. Terms. Amount. Conditions.
Vale is the one who says it out loud. “Jesus.”
Lena looks at the page, then at me. “What is that?”
Havoc answers, but there’s no humor left in him now. “It’s a kill order.”
Her face changes in a way I’ve never seen before. Not just fear. Something deeper than that. The human mind realizing it has been downgraded to an objective.
She takes a step back. “No,” she says. “No.”
Voss reaches again, this time for a monitor tucked into the far side of the desk. The screen is black until he wakes it. Then a grid appears.
Camera feeds.
The room gets smaller around us.
Lena sees it at the same time I do and stops breathing for a second.
Her apartment. Different angles. Different rooms. The front door. The kitchen. The hall.
The bedroom.
There’s one pointed right at her bed.
No one speaks. The image just sits there on the screen, cold and grainy and unforgivable.
Lena makes a strangled, disbelieving sound, one hand flying to her mouth. Vale turns toward her immediately, but she doesn’t seem to notice him. She’s staring at the monitor like if she looks long enough it will rearrange itself into something less monstrous.
It doesn’t.
Havoc says, very quietly, “How long?”
Voss’s face is hard as stone. “Long enough.”
I look from the contract to the wall of photographs to the live proof that someone has been inside her home, watching her sleep, and something old and violent in me locks into place.
