Chapter 14: The Keycard

I got him inside and shut the door.

I locked it.

Then I locked it again, because he was watching me and I knew he needed to see it.

"Sit," I said.

He didn't sit.

He went to the windows and checked every latch in the living room, one after another, the way he did every night.

They were all locked.

They'd been locked all night.

【Okay, this is the creepiest chapter so far and nobody's even died.】

【It's him. He wrote it himself to scare her into staying close.】

【Babe, he's checking windows with his hands shaking. Read the room.】

I called Marge.

"Don't touch it," she said before I'd finished. "I'm coming."

I called my guard.

He was in the lobby in ten minutes, out of breath, his western jammed in his coat pocket.

"Kid," he said. "I'm sorry. I was home. I should've been in the car."

"You were supposed to be home. I was inside."

"That's what bothers me."

Lucas came back from the windows.

He'd put on a sweater.

His face had gone very smooth.

"Section nine," he said.

I knew what he meant.

He wanted the guard inside the apartment. He wanted a second one in the vestibule. He wanted me off the street until this was done.

I waited for him to say it.

He didn't.

He took a breath and let it out.

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

It was the hardest question I'd ever seen a man ask.

"I want the building's logs," I said. "Right now."

"Then let's go get them."

The building manager met us in a security office behind the mail room.

He was a careful man in a cardigan, and he looked like he wanted to resign.

Marge arrived as he was pulling up the elevator records, a coffee in each hand.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Stand-In Wife and His Only Obsession from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.