Was she shameless, or was he somehow even more shameless than she could ever hope to become in her entire life?

Honestly, considering she had stood there watching the whole scene play out; watching the ridiculously handsome boy she’d accused of stalking walk away from her with more dignity in his stride than she currently possessed in her entire moral inventory; — Evy was beginning to suspect that she might actually be the worse person between them.

Which was deeply and structurally offensive.

"Well," she muttered to herself, walking through the quiet upper hallways with the soft click of expensive heels on polished marble, "I’m apparently a stalker now. Congratulations, Evy. Really outdoing yourself tonight."

The glow from her phone reflected softly across her face as she walked, painting her features beneath shifting shades of blue and silver while the lights dimmed around her in luxurious evening ambiance.

The hallway was empty and Evy moved through the silence with the unhurried stride learning how to look unbothered in corridors while her brain imploded behind her eyes.

The scene, honestly, looked unfairly beautiful.

Evy already possessed the kind of face specifically designed to make people emotionally irresponsible, the kind of face that launched not ships but very poor decisions, that made grown men forget their wives’ names and teenage boys walk into glass doors and women in bathrooms lean toward mirrors and think, with quiet honest despair, well, I’ve been doing my best.

But beneath the soft phone light, her small round face somehow became even more doll-like.

Her porcelain skin appeared almost too smooth, too soft, too unreasonably flawless to belong to an actual human being who ate food and slept and presumably experienced stress like a mortal person rather than absorbing it through osmosis and converting it into cheekbone definition.

Then there was her hair; the multicolored strands fell around her shoulders combined with the shifting hallway lights and the cold blue reflection from her screen to make her look less like a celebrity and more like some teenage goddess who had wandered accidentally into modern civilization after escaping whatever mythology she’d been stored in.

Well... she was.

Sort of.

Looking down at her phone again, Evy stared at the picture currently displayed there.

A picture of Phei.

One didn’t even have to ask where she’d gotten it from. Photography happened to be one of her specialties outside her actual career — a hobby that had, across the years, evolved into a genuinely frightening skill set involving discreet angles, imperceptible shutter timing, and the kind of steady hands that would have made a surgeon weep with professional envy.

’Occupational hazard.’

She’d taken the photo on the rooftop. Sometime between the moment he’d set his wine glass down and the moment he’d walked away from her with that maddeningly unhurried stride, she had — without conscious decision, without permission from the part of her brain that handled ethics and impulse control — raised her phone and captured him.

The result was, objectively, criminal.

Not the act of photographing a stranger without consent — though that was also criminal, and she was choosing not to think about it; but he results itself, the picture.

Because the man in it looked like something a bored deity had sculpted at three in the morning while drunk on their own talent, amethyst eyes catching the rooftop light, jaw sharp enough to make geometry feel inadequate, and an expression on his face — mid-turn, half-profile, the wind in his dark hair — that radiated the specific energy of a man who was better than you and had decided not to mention it.

"...That’s literally the only reason I took it," she muttered defensively to herself, despite absolutely nobody accusing her of anything. "That shameless stalker might show up again. I need information. For safety. This is a safety measure."

The logic sounded flawless inside her own head.

Mostly flawless in her mind.

Okay, maybe slightly criminal-sounding.

It was more of the kind of logic a detective would pick apart in under three seconds and a jury would convict in under five.

But Evy was not currently on trial — she was walking through a hotel hallway looking at a stolen photograph of a beautiful man and telling herself it was for security purposes, and that was the version of events she intended to carry to her grave.

She continued toward the elevators that would take her down to the floor where her entire management team was probably already losing their collective minds trying to figure out where she’d disappeared to this time.

She’d run off without warning. Again...

Honestly, at this point her management team aged in dog years because of her — every unannounced vanishing act adding approximately seven years to their collective cardiovascular decline.

Yet halfway toward the elevators —

Evy stopped walking; she physically froze, then did perhaps the most suspicious thing possible under the circumstances: she pressed herself flat against the wall in an attempt to hide.

And somehow — against every law of probability, spatial awareness, and basic human dignity — it actually worked.

Mostly...

Because coming from the opposite direction, heading toward the same elevators, was the Handsome Stalker himself.

Except he wasn’t alone this time.

Three other men walked alongside him, talking loudly enough to completely obliterate whatever elegant atmosphere the hallway had previously maintained.

Two of them had beautiful women practically fused to their sides — one dark-haired girl tucked comfortably against a tall broad guy whose arm was draped around her with the proprietary ease of a man who had recently and thoroughly claimed something, and another stunning girl leaning into a second man whose exhausted smile suggested he had survived something harrowing today and was choosing to process it through physical contact rather than therapy.

A third guy scrolled through his phone with the emotionally detached expression of someone too chronically online to experience life through any medium other than a screen.

And in the middle of them all — the Handsome Stalker. Walking with that same infuriating stride, that same effortless gravity, looking so offensively attractive that Evy briefly considered suing someone on a spiritual level for allowing this man to exist in public without a warning label.

The girl from the rooftop — the one who’d been wearing a jacket, the one Evy had seen him make out with — was tucked against his side and glowing.

And on his other side, another beautiful girl held his hand openly, their fingers interlaced with the casual intimacy of two people who did this all the time and saw no reason to hide it.

Women. Plural. On both arms.

’Mmm... Interesting.’

Evy narrowed her eyes while remaining pressed against the wall with the posture and moral authority of an emotionally compromised raccoon conducting celebrity espionage from behind a dumpster.

She caught fragments of conversation as the group approached.

Something about Maddie. And someone being embarrassed in the club... Again.

Then one of the girls laughed brightly and said something about Phei’s women eventually becoming the death of Marcus, and a chorus of voices erupted in overlapping agreement and contradiction and the specific chaotic energy of rich attractive people who had been together long enough to abandon public shame entirely and were now just existing at full volume in a hallway like they owned it.

Evy continued watching from her wall-adjacent position of moral compromise as the group reached the elevators. The doors opened with a soft chime and they stepped inside together, still talking over one another, still laughing, still being obscenely good-looking in a contained space.

Then —

The guy scrolling through his phone looked up.

Directly toward her.

And froze.

Evy’s entire body went rigid.

’Shit.’

Did he recognize her? Did he know who she was? Had someone seen her after all, had the Handsome Stalker mentioned her, had —

No.

’Worse.’

Had he seen her hiding against the wall while secretly taking another photograph of the Handsome Stalker just now?

Because if so —

"Oh my God," the guy said loudly, staring directly in her direction with the wide-eyed excitement like he had just discovered the most entertaining thing that would happen to him all week. "You guys are not gonna believe this."

Evy’s soul departed her body and briefly visited a higher plane as assessed the situation from a spiritual vantage point and found it catastrophic before she returned reluctantly to her mortal vessel.

"I HAVE A STALKER!"

Silence settled inside the elevator.

Then every person in it burst out laughing.

Evy trembled against the wall.

Not from embarrassment; from offence.

Her? A stalker? Of some random phone-scrolling nobody whose greatest contribution to the evening was spotting a woman standing near a wall and developing a persecution complex about it?

The audacity was unbelievable.

Inside the elevator, the others immediately piled on.

"David, nobody is stalking your ugly ass."

"You wish."

"Bro saw a woman near a hallway and developed delusions immediately."

"Your narcissism needs to be studied."

"I’m telling you she was watching me —"

"David. Genuinely. Seek help."

The elevator doors slid shut and laughter cut off.

And Evy stood alone in the hallway, back still pressed against the wall, phone still in her hand, the stolen photograph of the Handsome Stalker was still glowing on her screen, staring blankly ahead for several long seconds while the silence reassembled itself around her.

Then she scoffed.

Softly. Precisely. With the immaculate contempt after being falsely accused of stalking the wrong man in a group that contained the right one and was now being forced to process the indignity of it all without a single witness to validate her outrage.

"...Wannabe."