Make my heart malt, p.19
Sutures and Secrets, page 19
Just Alex.
“I’ve never told anyone all of that,” she murmured against my shirt.
“I know.”
She looked up again. “You’re not scared off?”
I shook my head, brushing a stray piece of hair from her forehead. “Not even close.”
A pause. Then: “You make me feel like I’m not broken.”
God.
I leaned down, kissed her forehead gently. “That’s because you’re not. You're just someone who's survived more than she should've had to.”
Her eyes fluttered closed. She exhaled—deep, like maybe it was the first time she fully believed it.
Outside, the last of the sun sank below the buildings. The room dimmed, the edges of everything blurred by shadows and warm lamplight. The world, for just this one evening, felt held.
And in the silence, we stayed like that—her resting on me, me holding her. Neither of us trying to rush it. Neither of us needing more than what we already had in that moment.
Safe. Together. Home.
Chapter 14
Under the Skin
Alex
The sun was too bright for what was waiting.
I had a coffee in one hand, Chloe’s in the other, and a quiet sort of ache in my chest from how safe the night before had felt. The walk from the car to the clinic was familiar, even comforting. We joked about Princess Peach refusing to pee in the rain and Bowser being stoic as always. It was normal. Good.
Then Chloe stopped walking.
She didn’t say anything—just went rigid beside me, and I followed her gaze.
The front of the clinic.
Spray-painted in red, ugly, slanted letters across the beige brick just above the reception windows:
ALEX IS A KILLER
I froze. My mouth went dry.
My first instinct was disbelief. Like maybe I’d read it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t about me. Maybe someone else—
But no. It was my name. In all caps. Shouted in red across the place I felt safest outside of our apartment.
“I—I don’t…” The words wouldn’t come. My chest tightened.
Chloe stepped in front of me. Protective. Angry. Her jaw set, her fists clenched.
“Don’t look at it,” she said lowly, trying to guide me toward the door. “Come inside.”
But I couldn’t move.
My coffee hit the sidewalk. I didn’t even notice it falling.
Alene’s car pulled in just then, and Willow jumped out before it even came to a stop. Their laughter faded when they saw the wall. Willow’s face darkened in a heartbeat.
“Jesus,” she said. “Who the hell—?”
I wanted to disappear.
“I didn’t think it would get like this,” I whispered. My throat felt scraped raw.
Chloe turned to me. “It’s not your fault.”
But it felt like my fault. Like everything in my past was catching up to me, and dragging everyone I loved into the crossfire.
The clinic door opened from inside. Dr. Evans, the weekend relief vet, stepped halfway out, squinting at the wall.
“We’ve already called the police,” she said, voice tight. “They’re sending someone over. I didn’t want to disturb you last night.”
“Thanks,” Chloe replied sharply, eyes never leaving me.
I felt Willow slide an arm around my back.
“Come inside, Alex,” she said softly. “Let’s not give whoever did this the satisfaction of seeing you fall apart.”
But I already was.
Because deep down, I knew—this wasn’t random. It wasn’t just cruel vandalism.
This was him.
The clinic door clicked shut behind us, muting the sound of the street and Willow’s clipped voice as she paced outside on her phone, likely already coordinating cleanup or planning to find whoever was responsible. Alene gave us a gentle nod and disappeared into the treatment area, giving us space.
Inside, everything felt too bright and sterile. The fluorescent lights hummed like they always did, the coffee machine burbled in the break room, and Princess Peach's bed sat in the corner where Chloe had insisted it belong—just another day, on the surface.
But I felt splintered.
Chloe guided me to the break room without a word. The second the door swung closed behind us, I sank onto the bench beneath the window. My hands were trembling and my knees barely held me. I felt cracked open in front of her, and hated that this was again something she'd have to protect me from.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Chloe set her coffee down hard. “Alex. Don’t.”
“I didn’t mean for any of this to follow me. I thought… if I didn’t talk about Sarah, if I just kept everything buried—”
“Then it would disappear?” Her voice wasn’t unkind. Just painfully honest.
I nodded, wiping under my eyes with the sleeve of my scrub top. “I didn’t want to bring that mess into your world. Into here. This clinic matters to you. Your reputation—”
“You matter to me.” Chloe knelt in front of me, her voice low but unshakable. “Alex, I don’t give a damn about reputation right now. You’re being stalked, threatened, and now publicly humiliated, and your first instinct is to blame yourself?”
I couldn’t look at her. I stared at my knees, the small blood stain on my scrub pants that I hadn’t noticed until now.
“I thought I had moved on,” I said. “But it’s like... like he’s trying to drag me back into that nightmare. Piece by piece.”
Chloe reached for my hands, wrapping hers around them firmly. “We’re not letting him. I’m not.”
“I feel like I’m dragging you down.”
“You’re not.” Her grip tightened. “But you have to let me help you, Alex. Really help. Not just with cameras or locks or loading a gun. I need you to let me into this too—the fear, the self-doubt, the scars that still hurt when you breathe. You don’t have to carry that weight alone.”
I looked up at her finally. Her eyes were full of fire and ache. And something else—something warmer, steadier.
Love.
I swallowed hard. “Okay.”
It wasn’t a grand promise. It was barely a whisper. But it was real.
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead to mine. “Good,” she murmured. “Because I’m all in, Alex. For whatever this fight looks like.”
I closed my eyes and breathed her in.
Even inside this building, with cruel words still wet on the wall outside, I felt something hold.
Safety. Trust. Her.
Us.
Chloe
The scent of garlic and peppers filled the air, as I mixed the stir fry, letting the wooden spoon scrape along the bottom of the pan. My body moved through the motions—cook, simmer, taste—but my brain was elsewhere. On Alex. On the stalker. On the constant thrum of fear that hadn’t gone away, even when the days seemed calm.
I looked over at her, standing by the window with Bowser. His big head leaned into her leg, his nose twitching at the evening breeze. She looked so still. Tired, distant. I’d seen that look in the mirror too many times not to recognize it.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded, but it wasn’t real. “Yeah. Just… tired.”
I didn’t push. We were both always tired now, and rest never seemed to fix anything.
I turned back to the stove, but something in the air shifted—quiet, electric. When I looked again, she wasn’t at the window anymore. She was crouched by the bookshelf, one hand reaching behind the row of vet med textbooks we always joked about organizing.
“Chloe,” she said. Her voice was small, tight.
I was there in two strides.
She pulled something out—small, black, unfamiliar. She placed it in my palm like it burned her.
A camera.
Motion-activated.
The red light blinked.
My stomach bottomed out. I turned it over, heart pounding harder with every second.
This wasn’t cheap junk. Whoever planted this knew what they were doing.
“How long has that been there?” Alex asked. Her voice wavered.
I shook my head, jaw clenched. “I don’t know. But this wasn’t done by some amateur.”
She looked around the room like she was seeing it for the first time. Like the walls were watching her.
“They were here,” she whispered. “Inside.”
Bowser whimpered low and leaned into her leg. My grip on the device tightened. Everything in me screamed to find the person who did this and make sure they never touched her life again.
“I feel sick,” she added, barely audible.
I reached for her, but she pulled back—just slightly. Not from me. From the violation.
From the truth of it.
“We’re calling the police,” I said, my voice flat. Cold. “Then we’re tearing this place apart.”
I didn’t care what they found.
I was going to make sure this apartment was ours again. Safe again.
I was going to make someone regret the moment they decided to come for her.
Alex doubled over before I could stop her, one hand bracing on the counter, the other clamped over her mouth.
“Alex—” I started toward her just as she dropped to her knees and vomited into the sink. The sound of it—raw, helpless—cut through me like glass. I was already beside her, crouching, one hand holding her hair back, the other gripping the cold edge of the sink to keep myself grounded.
“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. Breathe,” I murmured.
But she couldn’t. Her body convulsed again. Her whole frame trembled like something inside her had finally snapped. I didn’t need her to say it—I knew what that camera meant to her. To us.
When she finally stopped, she slumped to the floor, head against the cabinet, face pale and streaked with tears. Bowser nosed in beside her, whining, protective. I stroked her hair once more, kissed her temple, then stood.
I didn’t hesitate. My fingers found my phone like muscle memory, dialing 911 before fear could choke me too.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“This is Dr. Chloe Cohen. I’m at my residence and we’ve discovered a hidden surveillance device. We believe it’s related to an ongoing stalking case. We need an officer here immediately.”
The dispatcher’s voice was calm, professional. But mine? I barely recognized it. It was too calm. Too cold. Like something old and military had snapped back into place.
I gave the address. Confirmed the situation. Hung up. And then stood there, phone still in hand, staring at the blinking light on the device like it was a live grenade.
I turned the kitchen upside down while we waited. Every cabinet. Every drawer. Every shelf. I stripped the bookshelf, flipped cushions, even pulled the vent covers. I wanted to burn the whole place down just to make sure it was clean.
Alex didn’t say much from the floor. Just sat there, knees pulled to her chest, eyes glassy and distant.
When the knock came, I answered the door with my badge clipped to my jeans and the camera in a Ziploc.
The officer—young, alert, with a sharpness in his eyes I recognized—stepped in and got to work immediately. Another followed. I gave them the camera. Walked them through what we’d found. Showed them the entry points. Talked about the history. The threats. The dogs. The paint on the clinic wall. Everything.
Alex couldn’t talk yet, so I did it for both of us.
I had always been a soldier. A doctor. A protector.
But tonight, I was hers. And I would not stop until I burned the darkness out of our lives, one camera, one bastard, one secret at a time.
The officer—Detective Hall, he’d introduced himself—nodded to his partner and slipped on a pair of gloves. “We’re going to do a full sweep,” he said. “If there’s one device, there’s likely more.”
I nodded tightly, my arms crossed over my chest. Alex hadn’t moved from the kitchen floor, still clutching Bowser like he was the only thing anchoring her to the planet. I wanted to be that anchor too, but I also needed to watch. To know. To make sure we found every damn thing this bastard left behind.
They started in the living room. I watched as Hall ran a detector along the picture frames, the TV, the couch, then paused at the outlet behind the entertainment unit. “Something’s off here,” he muttered. He used a flat tool to pop the cover, revealing a black wire running behind the drywall—too new, too clean to belong.
“Can you tell where it leads?” I asked.
His partner followed it with a portable camera scope. “Runs up… through the ceiling—attic crawl space.”
I swore under my breath.
It got worse in the bedroom. Hall lifted the vent grate above our bed and muttered a curse. Hidden just inside the ductwork was a tiny, battery-powered mic. Another one was tucked beneath the dresser, so neatly secured with electrical tape you’d never spot it without a trained eye. The total count was now three devices, plus the suspicious wiring.
And then came the worst discovery.
The back window in the laundry room—painted shut, locked tight—wasn’t actually secure at all. Hall showed me the scrape marks on the sill and where the screen had been cleanly removed and replaced multiple times. “Whoever this is, they’ve been inside, Dr. Cohen. More than once.”
My stomach turned. I glanced at Alex, still in the kitchen, whispering something soft to Bowser. She looked so small. So unaware of how deep this went. Or maybe she knew—which was why she looked like she’d left her body behind.
“Get him,” I said, my voice low and sharp. “Whoever did this. Get him out of our lives.”
Hall gave a grim nod. “We will. But until then… You both need to be very careful.”
We were beyond careful now. We were under siege.
And I was no longer interested in waiting for this monster to come to us.
After the police left, I didn’t sit still.
Alex had finally fallen asleep curled up on the couch, Bowser pressed tight against her side like a knight in furry armor. I watched them for a long moment, her face slack with exhaustion and pain, then turned back toward the dining table where my laptop waited.
I wasn’t a cop. But I’d been in the Army long enough to know how to dig.
I opened a secure browser, bypassed the usual shortcuts. My fingers moved with muscle memory through old systems and forums—half-forgotten tools I’d used in another life. Back when tracking someone meant life or death.
First, I went back through the footage. Our motion-capture logs from the cameras I’d installed a couple of weeks ago—most had been looped or disabled, which made my stomach twist. He’s smarter than we gave him credit for. But there were two devices I’d hidden even from Alex, one embedded in the hallway smoke detector and another built into the light fixture in the spare room.
And one of them had caught something.
At 3:18 AM, two nights before last. A figure, slight, hooded, moving with almost ghostlike calm. They stepped in, not even flinching at the red blinking motion light—because it wasn’t blinking. I realized then that the system had been jammed.
Still, the footage gave me a frame. And from there, I could pull a silhouette. I isolated the walk—the gait was familiar. Off-balance. Left foot slightly turned out. It reminded me of someone. I knew this. I can figure this out
Someone from the past.
I pulled up files from the clinic’s employee roster, old temp staff, even rescue groups we’d worked with. I dug into anyone Alex had reported incidents with, no matter how minor.
It all kept circling back to one name.
Devon Marsh.
He’d been a volunteer tech assistant at a clinic Sarah and Alex once worked at—Alex had mentioned him in passing once. He’d been obsessed with Sarah, and apparently unhinged enough that the rescue stopped sending him out. He vanished a couple of years ago.
And now… he might be back.
I dug deeper. No known current address, but a burner Facebook account tied to a PO box just across the state line. I stared at the screen. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
I didn’t know what I was walking into yet. But I wasn’t going to wait for him to come again.
I glanced back at Alex. She stirred a little in her sleep, murmuring something I couldn’t quite hear.
She was why I would burn the world down if I had to.
Chapter 15
______________________________________________________
Crossfire
I didn’t tell Alex. I kissed her good morning and told her I had to leave for a meeting.
She was still recovering—her body bruised, her mind frayed like the edges of an unraveling thread. She didn’t need to see this part of me.
The part that was willing to become a ghost again.
I double-checked the rounds in the Glock 19 I kept locked in the safe beneath my bed. Standard issue from a past life, modified with a tighter trigger and grip tape I’d worn smooth over years of use. I slipped it into the holster beneath my hoodie and tucked a backup mag into my back pocket.
Then I left.
The address I pulled was nothing more than a rusted-out storage unit complex outside of town, near the edge of a dried-up industrial park. The wind carried grit and the smell of burnt motor oil. It was the kind of place that wanted to be forgotten.
I parked three blocks away and approached on foot. Quiet. Careful.
The unit was padlocked, but poorly. Sloppy.
I crouched by the door, pressed a hand to the corrugated metal, and listened. Movement—barely audible, the shuffling of paper, a low hum like someone muttering to themselves.
But, he wasn’t inside. I didn't have eyes on him, yet.
I felt my pulse slow. I’d trained for this a hundred times. But this time it was personal. I wasn’t a soldier anymore. I wasn’t even sure I was still a doctor right now. I was just a woman who loved another woman enough to become something sharp and unforgiving.
I eased the lock free and pushed the door open an inch. Just enough to peek inside.
Photos lined the walls.
Of Alex.
Not just recent ones—some of them were years old. Her in college, her walking Bowser, one of her asleep through the window of her old apartment.
