Ding!

The elevator arrived at the second-last floor with a soft chime that sounded far too innocent for the crime scene currently unfolding inside Evy’s conscience.

The doors slid open, and she stepped into the hallway with her phone in one hand and her dignity limping somewhere several floors above. Warm golden lights stretched along the polished corridor, gliding over the walls in mellow bands, while the expensive carpet swallowed the sound of her heels with the professional discretion of a luxury that had clearly seen worse things than celebrities sneaking around like morally flexible raccoons.

None of it helped; the lighting, the scent of polished wood and faint perfume neither did the soft, ridiculous wealth of the hallway.

Her mind remained upstairs.

Because somehow—somehow that idiot had actually managed to call her exactly what she had been doing.

A stalker.

The word still sat in her chest like a tiny legal document with teeth.

Evy’s brows drew together as she walked, irritation curling through her like smoke:

Was she angry because he had said it? Or because he had said it so accurately that her soul had briefly filed a complaint?

That was the real problem, wasn’t it? False accusations were easy to reject. Accurate ones, however, were rude.

There was no need for truth to be that direct.

’Truth could learn manners like everyone else.’

She unlocked her phone again and the second picture filled the screen and that somehow that made her irritation softened at once.

’Ah, worth it. Completely worth it.’

The photo looked unfairly good.

No. Calling it good felt insulting, like calling a dragon "a large lizard with wings and confidence issues."

The man looked ridiculous, offensively ridiculous.

The lights of the elevator burned behind him in soft halos, even glassware had accepted its role in the composition, and in the first picture, the glow brushed across his face while the night wrapped around him like custom-made scenery.

They did not look like a stolen pictures but as if like the official poster for some obscenely expensive drama where the male lead emotionally destroys viewers every Sunday night and then wins awards for breathing near windows.

And annoyingly enough?

She had captured him perfectly.

Evy’s lips curved in quiet victory.

Honestly, if secret photography inside celebrity stalking were an Olympic sport, she deserved medals. Gold, preferably. Maybe several; the committee could pretend to be shocked, but art required sacrifice, and in this case the sacrifice was apparently her moral reputation.

A tragic but acceptable loss.

"EVY!"

The shout shattered her peace with all the elegance of a brick through a cathedral window.

Evy barely had time to look up before a woman came rushing down the hallway toward her, looking seconds away from collapsing on a spiritual level.

The poor assistant skidded to a stop in front of her, breathing heavily, one hand pressed to her chest as if she had just survived a war, a marathon, and Evy’s career choices in the same ten minutes.

Her hair had escaped its neat style in several places. Her eyes were wide while the expression she wore carried the particular despair of someone whose job involved managing beauty, fame, schedules, scandals, and one woman with the survival instincts of a glamorous housecat near traffic.

The moment she caught enough breath to speak, the questions attacked.

"Where did you go?!"

"You disappeared again!"

"Do you have any idea how insane your manager is going right now?"

"Why is your phone on silent?!"

"What if something happened?!"

"I turn around for five minutes and suddenly the girl I’m supposed to be managing vanishes into the night like an emotionally unstable fairy!"

She went on for more while Evy stood there and endured the scolding with the serene patience of someone who had disappointed overworked assistants professionally for years.

Honestly, the woman deserved more than a salary at this point. Hazard pay, therapy and a government-issued medal.

’Perhaps a small shrine in the staff room where future assistants could kneel and whisper, "May we survive our Eny with our blood pressure intact."’ She laughed at her own thoughts.

The assistant kept going for a while, which was understandable.

’Panic, once given oxygen, tended to develop ambition.’ So... Evy let her finish.

Mostly.

When the barrage finally slowed enough for human conversation to crawl out from the rubble, Evy calmly lifted her phone and held the screen toward the woman’s face.

"Find information about this man."

The assistant froze completely.

The change was so sudden it became almost funny and even her frustration vanished first before her breathing stopped too and her eyes widened by a fraction, and the entire air around her shifted from exhausted panic to stunned disbelief.

Slowly, very slowly, she leaned closer to the screen.

Evy watched her.

’Interesting.’

The woman’s expression was not the ordinary recognition one gave to a handsome stranger. That would have been simple. This was deeper. Stranger. A flash of awe mixed with dread, like she had accidentally opened a drawer and found a holy relic, a murder weapon, and a tax notice from the underworld sitting neatly beside one another.

"...Where," the assistant asked carefully, "did you get this picture?"

Evy blinked. ’Very interesting.’

"You know him?"

The assistant nodded immediately, eyes still fixed on the phone.

Evy lowered the screen slightly.

That reaction was wrong.

Not bad, exactly.

Just wrong in a way that made curiosity sharpen behind her irritation.

How exactly did her assistant know the Handsome Stalker? Because from that expression alone, this was not some casual "oh, I’ve seen him online" situation.

This was the look people gave impossible things. Or dangerous things. Or rich men whose family trees probably required security clearance and a priest.

Evy tilted her head.

"Who is he?"

The assistant did not answer right away.

That alone made Evy’s fingers tighten slightly around the phone.

Instead, the woman looked at the picture again, then back at Evy, and her expression became even more complicated. Not fear exactly but caution and careful kind.

The kind people used around names that carried consequences.

Evy did not like that.

Naturally, she began explaining what had happened upstairs.

Or rather, she explained a highly edited version of what had happened upstairs.

A refined version; which was dignified version with the illegal parts trimmed off and buried quietly in a shallow grave the woman would never dig them.

For example, she completely skipped the part where she had hidden against a wall like a criminally attractive raccoon and secretly taken pictures of him.

’That information would die with her.’

If archaeologists discovered her bones someday, they could dig around and find nothing. She would take the secret into the afterlife and deny everything in front of the gods.

She also softened the rooftop details.

Removed the suspicious pauses, the part where she had absolutely lingered when she should have left and the tiny, irrelevant fact that she had saved the pictures with the speed of a woman committing both art and felony.

By the time she finished, the story sounded almost reasonable.

Almost.

A brave little word doing its best under impossible conditions.

Even with the heavily sanitized version, the assistant’s expression grew stranger the longer Evy spoke:

Her eyes narrowed at certain parts. Her mouth tightened at others. But the most concerning reaction came when Evy mentioned the stalker accusation.

The assistant stared at her.

Just stared.

It was not comforting.

By the end, the woman wore the deeply troubled expression of someone trying to calculate how badly a situation had already spiralled and discovering that the answer had brought friends.

Unfortunately for Evy, this woman knew her too well.

Far too well.

Which meant she saw through the missing pieces almost immediately. The convenient gaps, altered details, the suspiciously clean timeline, the way Evy’s voice became just a little too casual around the parts where she was obviously guilty.

Truly unfair.

’Loyalty is supposed to make people easier to deceive, not better at detecting your nonsense.’

The assistant inhaled slowly.

Then, very cautiously, like someone approaching an unexploded bomb wearing expensive lipstick, she asked, "...You didn’t offend him, did you?"

Evy frowned at once.

"No. Why would I—"