Page 35 of XOXO, Little Butterfly (The Storyteller’s Bodyguard #2)
Birdie
My heart leaps. I’m standing next to Tristan now. He works buttons and shifts angles until he captures it. A blurry figure in all black. Head down, hood up, mid-stride outside the decoy cabin on Martha’s Vineyard.
My eyes must be the size of dinner plates. I study the frozen image, the man who is supposed to be my stalker, Butterfly Man, who has been terrorizing me awake and asleep. The man who, according to the traps we’ve set and this image, must be Jacob Torrance.
Everything inside me screams no . “That could be anyone. Can you zoom in?”
Tristan glares at me sideways as he enlarges the footage as much as possible.
“You won’t see the truth if it looks you straight in the eye.
We told no one that cabin was where we’d be except the police.
Look.” He points at the shot we have. “It’s from the side, but it’s clear that he’s wearing a hoodie and a mask. What more proof do you need?”
When I baited the stalker, part of me didn’t think I’d actually catch him. And I didn’t think it would be Jacob. Not the gentleman who cares. Not the person who looks at me like I’m more than just the wreckage of something that could be cut to pieces for sale.
“It just doesn’t make sense.” But it does. That’s the worst part; it fits too well.
“What exactly doesn’t make sense?” he asks incredulously.
I turn back to the screen, the blurry shape frozen mid-step. The curve of the jaw. The angle of the shoulders. My stomach twists. It could be Jacob.
But it can’t be right. “Jacob isn’t Butterfly Man. I can’t be that stupid.”
Tristan doesn’t look away from me. “You’re not stupid, Birdie.
You set those traps, and now we got him because of you.
This was all your plan, and it paid off.
We found out who your stalker is. You just didn’t want it to be him, but deep down you knew.
It’s the detective.” He points at the image again. “Jacob Torrance is your stalker.”
I shake my head hard. “No. No, this is too easy. Why would he let himself get caught on camera? The man who was in my bedroom that night was so smart. He would never…”
“He had no access to you. It made him crazy, and he made a mistake. That’s what you were counting on, remember?
Think about it, Birdie. He transfers from God knows where around the same time you started getting those notes.
He shows up to your fucking date with flowers your favorite colors, the real ones, not what you feed the fans, picks your favorite restaurant, owns dog-eared copies of your books with annotations and NSFW drawings of every spicy scene, memorizes their fucking page numbers, allegedly, in the span of a few days, who does that? ”
An obsessive maniac.
“And if that’s not enough, think back to the time of Saldana’s murder investigation,” he continues, eagerly, too eagerly. “You suspected someone in the police was involved, someone who could manipulate evidence, right?”
I nod once.
“And then the radio incident, the only logical way the stalker could have tracked our movements without a trace to know exactly when to strike.”
“But…but…”
“No buts. We got him, Birdie.”
I stare at the screen again, this time longer, like if I just keep looking, it will change.
Like the pixels will rearrange themselves and reveal evidence that points to a different person, not the one who has made me laugh with dumb puns, and for the briefest moments, has made me look forward to the future.
“If Jacob was Butterfly Man, he would be on his way to Miami.” I jab the screen with my index finger. “What is he still doing there?”
“How is this not obvious to you?” Tristan’s jaw is clenched so hard it tics. His fists twitch at his sides. His whole body vibrates like a machine powered by rage. “He’s making sure you’re not bluffing, Birdie. He wants to know if you really left the island to wait for him for your date in Miami.”
I stop in my tracks. “Miami, the school… Did you get that list?”
“Yes.”
My heartbeat thunders in my ears. “Is Jacob’s name on it?”
“I haven’t had a chance to go through all the names yet, but—”
“Give it to me.”
“Sure, but what difference does it make now? We already got him.”
“No. Not until his relationship to the school is established and validated.”
“Are you serious? After all this glaring evidence, you need to see his name on a list to believe?”
“You and I figured out Butterfly Man was someone who knew me from the school. How else would he have found out about Aaron and the people involved in the cover-up and murdered all of them? If Jacob’s name isn’t on that list,” my eyes flicker at the masked man in the black hoodie, “then he is not that person. He is not Butterfly Man.”