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

Chapter Two

Slade

I start the day before the sun does. Five-twenty AM, two hours before Brooklyn’s first alarm.

I know this because I’ve been watching her for the last few days.

My hotel suite is twenty-four stories up, a glass coffin floating above Sandton’s richest kilometer.

From here, the city is beautiful. It’s angry and sprawling, day and night, it never sleeps.

I lay out my kit on the balcony: a spotting scope, digital single lens camera with remote wireless, parabolic mic, three battery packs, one tablet, two notebooks.

Calibration is everything. Sight lines, check.

Power, check. Refraction on the outer window is minimal at this altitude, but I polish the glass anyway.

The target window—her window—is a rectangle of anonymity above a facade of faceless rectangles.

The penthouse suite. Because rich girls always get the best of everything.

By seven AM, it will reflect the sun’s first rays and briefly blind the entire east quarter, but I know the pattern by now and time my observations accordingly.

I record the ambient temperature, the wind direction, the number of visible security cameras on the building’s perimeter.

Two new units appeared overnight and the guard patrol more than doubled.

Brooklyn did not install them; the maintenance record doesn’t match her building’s digital logs.

That means private contractors, likely the goons who are now milling around the building looking like a bunch of idiots.

I sit. I breathe. I wait for her.

At six-twelve, the curtain moves. Just a fraction—a twitch of fabric, almost nothing, but enough to confirm she’s awake.

I write: “Awake: 0612.” Next, the light comes on.

Warm, soft, LED. Not the compact fluorescents they installed when the building was built a couple of years ago.

She swapped the bulbs herself, or she asked building management to do it. She likes yellow light, morning shade.

Six-sixteen, she appears. The glass is coated against UV, but I don’t need the color to see the shape of her: thick arms, hips wide as the chair she stands behind, hair platinum and loose.

She’s wearing an oversize t-shirt that she thinks hides her belly, her big, full tits, and the lush curves of her hips.

It doesn’t, but it does make her look frumpy.

Something I will have to change when I get my hands on her.

She does not look like her father, not at all, but the set of her jaw and the way she holds her chin mark her as his. That’s not why I watch her.

She crosses the living room, opens the sliding door to the balcony, steps out and stands in the chill. She doesn’t smoke, but she cradles her mug as if it’s more than coffee inside. She raises it to her lips and stares straight ahead, not into the city, but above it—at nothing, or at everything.

I zoom in. The scope’s clarity is impeccable.

Courtesy of Kairo for this little mission he put me on.

Fortunately, it came in handy twice, so it was worth the hefty price tag.

I can see the print on her mug: a stack of books saying “Dark Romance Addict”.

I note the pattern and the way she cradles the cup, right hand wrapped over left, thumb tapping the ceramic as if to count her heartbeats.

The steam rises in a brief, delicate plume before dissolving.

A few minutes later, she sets the mug down, ties her hair back. The way she does it is precise: gather, twist, single elastic, three loops. No stray hairs escape. She is practiced at containment.

She leans over the railing, breathing in.

She does this every day, never skipping even when it rains.

She lifts her phone, types something, then pockets it.

I log the duration—sixteen seconds—and flag the action for later digital retrieval.

Most likely: checking messages, perhaps the news.

She reads the news selectively, filters it for keywords that never appear in her own story.

At six-thirty, she goes back inside. She draws the curtain, this time to its full length.

There will be a thirty minute gap before she returns to the living room, fully dressed, ready for the commute.

I use this interval to scan for anomalies.

Is there movement on the floor below? Any changes in exterior lighting, changes in her building’s entrance camera feed? There is nothing.

The sky shifts. Gold creeps up behind the blue and stains the city in incremental degrees. I feel the sensation, not in my eyes, but in the pit behind my sternum—a kind of hunger. I wait for her to reappear.

At six-fifty-four, she returns. Now it’s business. She’s dressed in a skirt and blouse, tights underneath, no doubt with the tummy control shit judging by the way she keeps fiddling with the waistband. God, does she not know how fucking beautiful she is? I’m going to have my work cut out for me.

She hesitates at the door. There’s an internal battle, visible only if you know what to look for.

I do. She checks her phone again, then runs a finger along the seam of her jacket.

Her face is scrubbed, no makeup, but her eyes are red from lack of sleep.

She did not sleep well last night. I watched her toss and turn for two hours, then finally succumb, limbs sprawled across her cheap cotton sheets.

Her body is not designed for that bed. No, she needs me beside her, rubbing the tension from her body in slow strokes, easing her mind before I fuck her senseless.

I write it all down. Every movement, every pause, every tell. Her routines are as steady as the clock—until they’re not. That is when she’ll be most interesting.

Losing sight of her as she leaves is annoying as fuck. I want eyes on her at all times but I haven’t hacked the hallway cams yet. Maybe later.

She exits the building. I track her across the courtyard, past the manicured hedges, down to the arterial street where the shuttle picks her up at exactly seven-eleven.

There are three other people at the stop; she stands apart from them, at least two meters distance, even when the wind kicks up.

She never makes small talk. I have checked the shuttle’s video feeds; she is always silent.

I note the arrival time, the trajectory.

The shuttle will take her south, to the university, where she attends two classes back-to-back on Mondays.

She will spend the remainder of her day in the library archives, returning home only after dark.

She never dines out, except when absolutely forced by circumstance.

It is all so... predictable. It should be boring, but it’s not. I could watch her for years.

As she disappears into the van’s tinted darkness, I exhale for the first time in several minutes.

My pulse has spiked by four beats per minute, and it has everything to do with that little fox disappearing from view.

I adjust the focus back to her empty apartment.

There is nothing more to see until tonight.

Turning from the balcony, I leave everything set up. It’s easier than taking it down and putting it up everyday, as I have been thus far.

As I close the curtain and turn away, I permit myself a single moment of anticipation.

Not excitement—not yet—but the promise of it.

I know her now. She is mapped and measured, her days partitioned into manageable pieces.

It’s only a matter of time before she notices me. That is when the real work begins.

Until then, I will hunt her, patiently, willfully.

Some things are worth waiting for.

Johannesburg is a city built for forgetting faces.

Everyone is busy, everyone is in a hurry, and no one wants to remember anything that isn’t strictly their business.

The crowds on Oxford Road bleed together: students with sun-bleached hair and battered backpacks, housekeepers in worn uniforms, businessmen so addicted to their own urgency that they don’t see the world outside their screens.

Parking my truck, I hop out, knowing exactly the route she is going.

I wear a tan shirt and carry a battered messenger bag—anonymous, invisible.

The tablet in my hand is skinned to look like a cheap e-reader, but the display is pure military-grade.

I watch the blue dot, her dot, as it glides through the city’s arteries.

A tracker I digitally placed when I cloned her phone as she sat crying in her father’s office.

It was easy work, just needed proximity and a strong enough bug. In her grief she hadn’t noticed the malware being installed and by the time she left, it was done.

The shuttle drops her at the west entrance of the university.

She doesn’t linger; she moves with a deliberateness most people never achieve, even when trying to be deliberate.

Left at the stone arch, through the student quad, up the ramp that smells of rotting leaves and burnt coffee.

I know the path, because it’s the one she takes every day.

People think they have free will. They don’t. They have habit.

She stops for a flat white at the corner café—always the same place, always at exactly seven thirty-three.

I watch from a table in the back, face shielded by a local tabloid.

She orders at the counter, leans forward, says something to the barista that makes him smile, but she does not smile back.

She picks up her drink and walks to the window seat, pulls out her phone, and vanishes into it.

She never sits with her back to the room. I log the detail.

After seven minutes, she leaves. I let her go first, then follow after a count of fifteen. Never less, never more. Too soon and she might notice. Too late and the gap widens; you lose the thread, the scent.