Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Deadly Obsession: Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

CHAPTER 61CASSIAN The venue smelled like floor polish, perfume, and too many people who had been standing in line since morning. Staff kept moving through the hall with clipboards and bottled water, security checked bags at two separate points, and Maya walked beside me giving instructions I had already heard twice because that was her job and because she knew my brain stopped holding details the second the first fan started crying.“You have three hours,” she said, checking her watch. “Sign, smile, photo if they already paid for the photo line. Do not promise anyone a second item. If someone gets emotional, you let them talk for ten seconds and then you pass them along. Rafael stays at your left. I stay at your right. Clear?”“Clear.”“And drink the water. You always forget.”“I won’t forget.”Rafael didn’t add anything. He just took his place at my left shoulder when they opened the side door and the sound of the hall rolled over us, hundreds of voices rising at once when they saw

CHAPTER 63CASSIAN I was still shaking when Rafael put me in the car.My hands would not stay still against my thighs. Every time I blinked I saw the bear hit the floor again, the red smear under the studio lights, the card with those words written like they had been waiting for me all day. Maya tried to talk from the front seat and I heard her voice without holding any of the sentences. Rafael drove. He did not tell me to calm down. He just kept one eye on the road and the other on the mirrors like the gift might follow us home.Maya turned in her seat. “The studio is pulling the footage. Police are already there. You don’t have to talk to anyone tonight.”“They sent it to the interview,” I said again, because my mouth could not find a different sentence. “They knew where I would be.”Rafael’s hands tightened on the wheel. “We’re going home.”The house looked the same as it always did, which felt wrong. A place that ordinary should not have been waiting after a threat like that. Raf

CHAPTER 65CASSIAN A week later I had started checking doorways before I smiled at them.That was the part I hated most. The fan-sign had been full of people who waited for hours and cried because a movie had helped them, and now every public doorway carried the possibility that she would be in it again, coat buttoned too high, stack of things in her hands, looking at me like we had an agreement I had never signed. Maya called her the repeat visitor in meetings. Security called her the subject. I still did not like giving her a shape bigger than she already had.She was outside the pharmacy on Tuesday.I had only gone in for toothpaste and a bottle of water because the house was out of both and I refused to live like I needed an escort to buy mint. Rafael was two steps behind me anyway. When we came out she was on the sidewalk with a small wrapped box and a smile that tried to look shy and did not.“I knew you’d come here,” she said. “You posted a story with this street in the backgr

I had the movie on more for the noise than the plot, a bowl of popcorn balanced against my stomach and my legs stretched across the couch because the house had been too tight all day and I needed something ordinary to stare at. Rafael passed through the living room on his way to the kitchen without a shirt, hair still damp from a shower, the line of his back and the dark ink over his shoulders catching the lamp light like the film had never been the point of sitting there at all. I forgot the scene on the screen. I licked salt off my lower lip before I realized I had done it.He stopped. “Stop staring.”“I’m watching the movie.”“You’re watching my back.”“That’s because you walked through the frame shirtless like you don’t live here with another person.” I set the bowl aside so I would not spill it. “You could’ve put on a shirt.”“I was going to get water.”“Then get water. I’m still going to look.”He shook his head once, the smallest show of irritation, and came back from the kitch

CHAPTER 69CASSIANWe came through the front door tired in that heavy, emptied-out way that made even putting the keys down feel like work. The house was quiet after the bookstore, after the paper with my name on it, after Maya’s voice still echoing from the car, and I stood in the entryway with my jacket half off because my hands had started shaking again and I could not make them finish the simple job of getting undressed. Rafael locked the door behind us, checked the hallway out of habit, and then just waited, as if he already knew I was going to ask for something I had never asked for this plainly.“Can I hug you?” I said.I expected a look, a pause, the usual distance he put between comfort and duty. Instead he opened his arms. The surprise of it knocked the last of the performance out of me. I walked into him and he closed around me without comment, one hand between my shoulder blades, the other steady at the back of my head, and I clung to him like the day might take another sw