"This is what happens when you try to take away what is ours," he whispered into my ear, causing me to shiver. "We'll strip you down, tie you up, and never let you go. You're our perfect little slave, aren't you?"
...
*Before I took my break, I was in the middle of editing the next chapters, but I never got that far, and the next chapter for the edits were not written. So a little recap. Emma was supposed to go to a nightclub with Kevin and Thomas, and planned on smoking out the stalker. Once there, she was going to pretend to drink (got to keep a clear mind!) and find a man to dance with to make the stalker jealous and show himself. Instead, he realized what she was doing. After Thomas went for a smoke and hadn't come back, Emma and Kevin went out searching for him, and found him bleeding and bruised. Emma got a text from the stalker letting her know she was the reason for Thomas being beaten. Thomas told Kevin and Emma he only saw a man in a mask.
Unfortunately, because I never got farther with the edits, this tidbit is excluded from the rest of the chapters. And because I never got to the editing, I chose to draft the last chapter where Emma contacted Kevin to ask him out to the nightclub.
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This week had been absolutely horrible. Aside from the lovely and thoughtful presents I'd gotten from the guys, nothing else had managed to bring a genuine smile to my lips. I had run into Malika again a couple of days ago, and I was just as distant as I'd been when we went out for coffee together. She was understanding though, but it still made me feel like a shitty friend. And speaking of being a shitty friend, I'd blown off Kevin when he tried to reach out to me too many times to count, knowing with a hundred percent certainty that if I talked to him, then he would instantly know something was wrong with me—he knew me that well. That didn't feel good either, constantly avoiding him. I hadn't spoken to him or seen him in ten days, since the incident with Oliver, which was a record seeing as we used to see each other practically every day when we used to work together. Now that school had started, and he had graduated, we didn't work the same shifts anymore.
Everything was changing, and I loathed the change. Each day was more dreadful than the previous one, and I could feel my mental health hanging on a thin fucking thread. When practically everything around you was negative, it was no wonder that my mind would turn negative as well. Sometimes, it felt like I was in a spider's web, without help and unable to move as the spider got closer and closer. It made me almost claustrophobic, and I just wanted to tear at my skin—to do anything—to escape it.
I was getting dressed for school when my intercom buzzed. It was a sound that my body immediately recognized, and part dread and part excitement hummed beneath my skin. My men usually sent me gift via delivery, but my stalker was also known to send stuff through delivery from time to time too. My mind turned to what I'd gotten from him yesterday, and I shuddered.
Taking a deep breath, I let the scent of my apartment ground me. The entire place smelt of plants, since apparently Mateo had taken a note from Callan's book and contacted Kevin for help, and he in turn had let Mateo know how much I adored anything greenery. I now had three gorgeous plants fitted around my tiny place, along with pots for each of them. They made my shitty apartment feel livelier, and the scent helped calm me, which I desperately needed. The only reason I hadn't gotten any for myself since I moved in was because it was an expense I hadn't prioritized as a broke student; turned out, houseplants were actually expensive.
