Her Obsession. Chapter 12

I can’t get the damn image of her out of my mind. Even now, hours later, her eyes still burn behind mine, piercing, focused, deliberate. The bottom half of her face hidden beneath that black mask, but it doesn’t matter. My imagination’s working overtime, filling in the blanks with soft curves and sharp teeth, with lips that probably taste like secrets and danger. She’d opened a can of worms reaching out like that… Giving me that intel, looking straight down the lens like she knew what it would do to me. I should’ve been furious. Should’ve shut it all down, cut the feed, burned the cables. But instead, I gave her exactly what she wanted. Hell, I put the cameras back. Every damn one. Now here I was, hunched over Nico’s desk, red-eyed and wired on bitter coffee and obsession, sorting through the encrypted files she dumped into our system. Layers upon layers of data, names, routes, bank transfers, some connected to me and some to people I hadn’t thought about in years. It was a goldmine… and a loaded gun and she gave it to me. Not Nico. Not the crew. Just me.

“Jesus,” Nico muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “She practically handed you the blueprint to a war.”

I nodded slowly, eyes locked to the screen, but my mind was spinning. Who the hell was she? What’s her name? Have I met her before? What would her voice sound like without the mask of distortion? Why the fuck was she looking out for me? How was she so good at what she does? Why me? I didn’t have answers. Just more questions, and a heat building in my chest that wasn’t anger. Footsteps echoed down the hall. Liam strolled in, yawning, coffee in hand, looking like he’d slept through the apocalypse.

“Hey,” he said casually, glancing between me and Nico. “What’re you guys up to? Looks like hell in here.”

Nico shot me a look, waiting for the go-ahead. I gave him a single nod. Out of everyone, Liam was the one I trusted most. My second. My brother in everything but blood. He already knew almost everything there was to know about my little ghost, how she’d been watching me for years, how she seemed to always show up right before the bodies hit the ground. What he didn’t know? She spoke to me now. Directly. Boldly.

“She reached out,” I said, voice low.

Liam froze mid-sip. “She? You mean...”

“Yeah.”

“The ghost?”

I nodded again, and Liam lowered the cup. “You talk back?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then I looked up at him, heart thudding slow but hard. “And now I can’t stop.”

Liam whistled, dragging a chair over. “Alright, tell me everything.”

I leaned back in the chair, stretching out muscles that were knotted from hours hunched over Nico’s desk. The caffeine was buzzing through my blood, but beneath it, there was something else. Something heavier. The need to talk. To get this out. I looked at Liam. He wasn’t just waiting, he was ready. That steady kind of calm he always carried, the one that said you can drop the weight here. So I did.

“She hijacked Nico’s system,” I started, watching his brows shoot up.

“Hijacked?” he echoed, glancing at Nico, who just shrugged like it was almost impressive.

“She took over the rig like she built it herself. Got in, cleaned up the mess we were sorting through, and then...” I hesitated, that image of her flashing behind my eyes again, all shadow and poise, all fire behind the mask. “She showed up on screen.”

Liam blinked. “She showed you her face?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Not her full face. She still wore the mask. Still had the hood up. But it was her. Her voice came through the speakers like smoke. Said my name like she’d been whispering it for years.”

Liam sat forward, like he could see it too. “And what did she want?”

“To warn me,” I said, jaw tightening. “Someone’s in our system. Watching me. Tracking movement, calls, heat signatures. And it’s not her. She said if it was her, I never would’ve noticed.”

“And you believe her?” Liam asked carefully.

I didn’t answer right away. I rubbed my hand over my face, then looked him dead in the eye. “Yeah. I do.”

He nodded once, accepting that without question. That’s why I trusted him.

“She gave us files,” I went on, waving toward the screen Nico was still combing through. “Names, accounts, transfers. She’s been tracking our rat from the outside. Found trails we didn’t even know to look for. She’s been watching me, Liam. Not just this week. Not just this year. For a long time.”

Liam frowned. “How long?”

I shook my head. “No clue. But the way she talked to me, the way she knew me… It wasn’t new. It wasn’t surface-level either. She knows my habits. My fucking expressions. The angle of my jaw when I’m mad. She knew exactly when I was about to cut the feed, she beat me to it.”

“She said anything about who she is?” Liam asked, quiet now. This part mattered.

“No,” I murmured. “But I’ve been playing her voice back in my head. Every word, every intonation. There’s something familiar about it, Liam. Like I’ve heard it before. Or maybe dreamed it. I don’t know. But it’s not a stranger’s voice. Not to me.”

Liam’s brows furrowed. “Think you knew her once?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I just should’ve. Either way… she’s in this now. She made contact. That changes everything.”

“She said anything else?” Liam asked, though I could already see the gears turning in his head.

I hesitated. Then smirked faintly, because I couldn’t not hear her in my ears again.

“She told me to put her cameras back.”

Liam blinked. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

“You put them back?”

“Every last one.”

He let out a low whistle. “You’re in deep, brother.”

“I’ve been in deep,” I said quietly. “But now? Now I think I might be drowning.”