Page 113 of Can't Stop Watching

"It's actually something else," she says quietly. "Something different that keeps circling in my head."

My chest tightens. The monitor beside me betrays my heart rate with a quickened beep. There's only one thing that would make her look at me like that, like she's seeing me for the first time and doesn't recognize what she's found.

"Brian told me something before I..." She swallows. "Before I killed him."

The moment hangs between us, crystalline and sharp-edged. I could lie. Could deny everything. But we're past that now—past the point where pretty fictions can paper over ugly truths.

"He said you had cameras in my apartment." Her eyes meet mine, searching. "That you've been watching me. Stalking me from the start."

The silence that follows feels like its own entity, heavy and accusatory. My throat dries up, words deserting me when I need them most. What the fuck do you say when your darkest impulses are dragged into the light?

"Is it true?" she whispers.

I've faced death without flinching, but her question terrifies me. The irony isn't lost on me. I survived being shot three times only to die here, in this antiseptic room, under the weight of her gaze.

"Yes." The word falls from my lips like a stone. "It's true."

Her face doesn't crumple like I expected. Instead, she goes completely still, like prey that's just spotted a predator but hasn't decided whether to run yet.

"Why?" The simplicity of the question makes it impossible to dodge.

"Because I'm broken," I say, brutal honesty the only currency I have left. "Because watching you felt like breathing when I'd been drowning for so long. Because I wanted to protect you."

I don't say: Because I'm my father's son after all. Because the darkness was always there, waiting for the right moment to surface.

"From the moment I saw you at the bar, I recognized something." I swallow, my throat desert-dry. "The sadness in your eyes. Like you were carrying something heavy, something that hollowed you out the same way I've been hollowed. I wanted to know you. Really know you."

The monitor betrays my heartbeat again, racing as I expose the twisted logic that seemed so reasonable in the dark.

"I installed them that night after you rejected me. Told myself I was protecting you." A bitter laugh escapes me. "Such bullshit, right? The sad thing is I halfway believed it."

Her face remains impossibly still, like she's looking at a stranger wearing my skin.

"I was going to take them down after our first night together. I swear to God, Lila." The desperation in my voice disgusts me. "But then everything with Langford..."

She turns away, and Christ, the disappointment in her eyes cuts deeper than I thought possible. More sadness there now than when we first met, and I put it there. Another broken thing I've broken further.

"You know what the worst part is?" she whispers. "I actually believe you. That you think that makes it better somehow."

The truth is a loaded gun, and I've finally turned it on myself. "You're right. It doesn't."

Silence stretches between us, thick with all the things we can't take back.

"I'm not who you thought I was," I finally say. "I'm not the hero who saves the girl. I'm the monster who watches from the shadows. I've spent my whole life running from what my father was, only to become something just as fucked up in my own way."

She stands slowly, gathering her jacket. "I need time."

"I know." I don't beg her to stay. Don't have the right.

At the door, she pauses. "Did you mean it? What you said about me being the first light that didn’t blind you?"

"Every word," I answer, my voice barely audible. "That's the cruelest joke of all."

37

LILA

Istare at the curtains, feeling like they're watching me back. Tessa throws the bug detector onto the sofa with a curse that would make her Upper East Side mother disown her.