Page 12 of Hunting Brooklyn (Stalkers in the Woods #5)

Chapter Six

Slade

L ast night.

At two a.m., even the sleepless are bored or dead, and I am neither. Anticipation curls in my gut.

Just need to see her… that’s all.

It hasn’t even been that long since I helped her on the trail, but watching her from afar wasn’t fucking cutting it anymore. I need to taste her. To be inside her. To feel her pussy clench around me as I took what I wanted, returning it in kind.

I park four blocks away, on a side street with a line of jacarandas coughing purple ghosts onto the curb.

I dress for the occasion: navy trousers, latex gloves under black tactical, a hoodie that pulls up to keep me obscured from her lobby cameras.

The backpack is light, just the bare essentials—a set of keys, my phone, a compact toolkit in matte titanium, a box the size of an engagement ring.

The weight of need is heavier, and there’s no way I can hold out until she boards her plane to Cape Town tomorrow for some business meeting she needs to attend.

That is when the real plan begins, but I need her now. I need her tonight.

I approach her apartment building by the back entrance.

Three doors, two cameras, one biometric.

The card reader is supposed to be unbreakable, but I know the service intervals, the lazy Monday night resets, the way the on-site tech swaps in a duplicate reader and leaves the old one patched with a single strip of electrical tape.

They always think no one notices the cut corners. I do.

The building’s outer doors are a joke. I slide the card, hear the soft click, and step inside.

I ghost the CCTV blind spot, pass the maintenance closet, and enter the elevator lobby.

There’s no one in sight. I could have worn a clown suit, and still nobody would see me.

That’s the problem with Sandton: the money is all in security, and the value is all in not giving a fuck.

They hire lazy fucks who could care less.

Inside the elevator, my heart beats faster. Tonight’s the night I taste that sweet cunt. I can still see the print she left hours ago on the panel. I overlay my own finger atop it, a perfect match, and smile.

At her floor, I count the steps to her door.

I already know she is asleep: she takes a sedative with her last cup of chamomile, always after midnight, always before the third glass of water.

I know because I have watched her do it, every night for the past sixteen days.

She will be out, oblivious to what I’m going to do to that wretchedly perfect body.

I pause at the door. There is a heartbeat in my palm, a slow throb that has nothing to do with fear.

I could break in a thousand ways, but the key is more elegant.

The copy is perfect—laser-cut from a blank, the edges still sharp enough to bite.

I slide it in, turn, and the deadbolt yields with a sigh. I savor the sound.

Inside, the air is different. Warmer, charged.

I close the door behind me and lock it. I move through the kitchen, then pause in the living room, letting my eyes adjust. The couch is a battlefield of blankets and books, the coffee table a graveyard of tea mugs and receipts.

I count the mugs, the titles, the disorder.

I am the only order in this place, and I like the contrast.

I cross the floor, each step mapped in advance.

After my close call, I learned which floorboards squeak and which don’t.

Unfortunately, the quiet path goes to a haphazard mess of shoes.

Stepping carefully, I manage to make it over the pile without tripping.

I have not come this far to fuck it up with a squeak of rubber on tile.

Her bedroom door is open, because she doesn’t believe in monsters.

I stand in the doorway and watch her sleep.

The room is dim, but not dark; the curtains are only half-drawn, and the moon carves a white arc across the bed.

She is sprawled on her back, one arm over her eyes, the other hand tangled in the sheet.

Her platinum hair fans across the pillow, glowing in the low light.

I catalog the details: the rise and fall of her chest, the way her lips part with each breath, the faint pulse at the base of her neck.

The light snores. It’s so fucking adorable, it makes my cock hard just listening to her.

I don’t move for a full minute. I just stand there, drinking it in, the way a man starves himself for days so that his first bite is perfect.

I have watched her like this before, but almost always through glass, always at a distance.

The thrill of proximity is almost narcotic.

I breathe it in, let it fill my lungs, let it settle behind my eyes.

Slipping off my shoes, I just watch her.

There is a moment—a pure, unbroken moment—when I could walk away. I could leave her as she is, untouched, unaware, a perfect equation with no unknowns. But that would not be honest. The world is built on the tension between want and need, and I have never pretended otherwise.

Moving into the room, my eyes never leave her form.

My feet are silent on the hardwood. I stand at the foot of the bed, watching, always watching.

Her chest rises. Falls. I watch the tendon in her throat quiver, the flutter of a REM dream behind her eyelids.

I want to see what she is dreaming. I want to be inside it, to slip between the folds and taste the flavor of her fear.

I move to the side of the bed. The moonlight cuts a silver ribbon across her collarbone, her shoulder, the dip between her breasts.

She sleeps in a thin tank top and shorts, no bra, and the fabric does little to hide the swell of her body.

She is softness and geometry, a contradiction that makes me want to destroy her just to see if she will break.

My hand reaches out of it’s own accord before I draw it back and pull off the gloves, sliding them into my pocket.

I want to touch her, but my hand stops an inch from her skin.

The heat radiates up to meet me, a promise or a warning.

I twirl a strand of her hair between my fingers, gentle, reverent.

It is softer than I imagined, almost weightless.

She doesn’t stir, but a small sound escapes her—half sigh, half whimper. It reverberates through my chest.

I am a monster, but for her, I’ll be whatever she wants me to be.

This isn’t just for pleasure, not exactly.

It is about control, the beauty of knowing exactly how a thing will unfold before it does.

But with her, the control is different. It slips, just a little, every time I am near her.

I want to blame her for that, but I know it is my own flaw.

What would she do if she woke now, saw me standing over her like a wraith. Would she scream? Would she fight? I hope not. I want her to surrender, to accept the inevitability of what comes next. I want her to trust me, even as I break her.

My plans involve taking her back to the cabin, hunting her, slicing into that milky skin so I can taste all of her, soothing the ache and fucking her until she can’t walk.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, this is all I have until tomorrow, so I’ll take it to tide me over because if I don’t I’ll fuck up, make a mistake and then land my ass in a South African prison.

Which is exactly what I don’t want.

The line between desire and decision is thin. Tonight, it is nothing. A hair, cut clean by the weight of need.

She groans and moves to sleep on her side, facing the wall.

Her tank top has twisted, exposing the soft curve of her shoulder, the edge of one pale breast. Her underwear is wedged in between her ass, legs tangled in the blanket, as if she fought herself in her dreams and lost. I watch her for another minute, just to be sure.

Then I reach for the covers.

I peel them back inch by inch, slow enough to avoid friction, slow enough that time feels like molasses.

Her body is luminous in the moonlight—white and gold and the palest blue, mapped in shadows.

I see the shape of her, the places where her skin creases, the points where her flesh yields to gravity and her own weight.

She is beautiful and imperfect, and I desire her for both.

With more care than I’ve ever had in my fucking life, I sit on the edge of the bed, careful, gentle. She doesn’t stir. I let my hand lightly trail over her hip, feeling the softness of her, the delicate shudder of each breath. My pulse is a hammer. I could rupture with wanting.

For the first time in my fucking life, I felt it. The spark . I’m not even in control anymore as my hands take on a life of their own.

At first, just the outside of her thigh, running my palm up over the thickness, squeezing and kneading, and down again letting the pressure go until it’s a feather.

I watch for a response: the flex of a tendon, the twitch of her toes.

Nothing. I grow bolder, tracing the line from her hip to the bulge of her waist, circling her navel, letting my fingers linger just long enough to make her skin pebble with goosebumps.

Her body shivers, but she does not wake.

I brush her hair aside and lean down, inhaling the scent of her scalp. There is a sweetness, a hint of sweat, the residue of clean sheets and cheap detergent. I want to bury my face in it, to lose myself, but I force patience. There is pleasure in the denial.