Her Obsession (by Sheridan Hartin) novel Chapter 11

Eyes In The Wall.

Conner

The second the feed flickered, I knew. The code on Nico’s screen stuttered, scrambled, then wiped itself clean like it had never been there at all. The lines of code dissolved into black. Then, slowly, deliberately, the screen lit up with a new feed, grainy at first, then sharpened like a knife sliding into focus. Her. Hood up. Mask on. But I’d know that posture anywhere. The tilt of her chin. The way she sat, like her body had long since learned to be a weapon. A shadow -stitched into skin. The ghost. No…my ghost.

“Shit,” Nico muttered. “She’s in. She’s not just in, she’s hijacked the whole damn rig.”

I didn’t answer. I was frozen in place, watching her watching me.

She didn’t speak right away. She just stared, like she was trying to decide how much she could give away. Then her fingers danced across her own keyboard, and her voice, her voice…came through the speakers like a whisper made of smoke and memory. “Hey darling.”

My breath hitched.

“You need to listen to me,” she said. No preamble. No flirting. Just ice and fire, wrapped in urgency.

Nico’s hand hovered over the power switch. “You want me to cut the feed?”

“No,” I said, too fast. Too sharp. She heard it. I saw the flicker in her eyes.

“You’re not safe, Conner,” she continued…a warning, but the way she said my name sounded like heaven. “Someone’s inside your system. Watching you. Tracking movement patterns, heat signatures, even your call logs. It’s not me. I’d never leave that kind of mess behind…There’s a hit on you.”

I leaned in. “Then who is it?”

Her jaw flexed. “I’m working on it… I’ve been…busy.”

Busy. That word sat heavy in my gut, because I could read between the lines. If she’d been busy, it wasn’t filing her nails and watching reruns. It was hunting. Bleeding. Digging through hell for information to keep me alive. I didn’t deserve that kind of loyalty. Not from her. Not from anyone. But I was selfish enough to take it anyway. She tapped a few more keys, and suddenly Nico’s secondary screen flared to life, lines of encrypted data flashing in sharp red, then green. My ghost had done her homework. It wasn’t just intel, it was coordinates, comm logs, voice intercepts, and images stitched together like a

web.

Nico’s jaw dropped as files started flooding into our drive. “Jesus. She’s feeding us a whole goddamn dossier.”

“She always does more than what’s asked,” I murmured.

She looked at me again, directly into the camera like she knew I was talking about her. Like she could hear me even when I didn’t speak. There was something in her stillness, something deliberate. She didn’t need to move to own the room, didn’t need to speak to demand my attention. Every flicker of her fingers across the keyboard, every rise and fall of her breath behind that mask, it all pulled at something buried deep beneath my ribs. I soaked in every goddamn second. Because I didn’t know when she’d vanish again. When her feed would cut and I’d be staring at a black screen, wondering if it was the last time.

I wasn’t ready to let her go. I never was. Then her voice came again, softer this time, like she was standing in the room instead of behind layers of signal and steel.

“Trust me, now?”

It wasn’t a challenge. It wasn’t a plea. It was quiet, steady… heartbreaking. Like she already knew the answer, but needed to hear it anyway. I looked at Nico. He was still scrolling through the files she’d dumped into our system, shit even he couldn’t trace. His eyes were wide, fingers flying, muttering half-formed curses under his breath. He looked up and gave a slow nod, not in approval…in awe.

“Yeah,” I said. “I trust you.”

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Eyes In The Wall.

Her shoulders lowered just a little. The barest sign of relief.

“Good,” she murmured.

Then her eyes locked onto mine, sharper now. Focused and just like that, she twisted the knife.

“Now…” She leaned in, her voice silk and steel, “Put the cameras back, darling.”

The way she said it…darling, hit me like a fucking drug. It wasn’t just a signature. It was hers. A claim. A warning. A goddamn heartbeat… And even though she’d just hijacked my system, handed me a hit list, and peeled back layers of my life no one had ever touched…All I wanted to do was obey because she wasn’t just watching me. She was protecting me. Then the screen went black. Just like that, she was gone. No goodbye. No dramatic sign-off. Just silence, and that empty, eerie nothing where her voice had been. The room felt colder without it. Without her. I stared at the monitor like I could will her back, force the pixels to rearrange and show me one more frame, just a second more. But nothing came. I dragged a hand through my hair and turned toward Nico, who was already halfway to the desk where we’d dumped the cameras earlier. Ilis fingers danced over the tangled wires and sleek black shells like they were puzzle pieces. He didn’t look up when he spoke.

“Which ones are hers?” I asked, my voice rougher than I meant it to be.

He snorted under his breath, a low laugh muffled by disbelief. “Man, you’re really gonna put ’em back, huh?”

I didn’t answer. Just waited, jaw tight. He finally looked up, one brow raised as he separated the pile into two neat groups. His hand hovered over the first cluster, standard issue stuff, cheap surveillance. The rat’s. Then he nudged the second, more refined set toward me. Sleeker. Smaller. Smarter. Hers.

“These. Ghost-grade tech. Could probably transmit through a blizzard and still get audio so clear you’d hear your own heartbeat.”

I nodded once and reached for them.

“Remember where they go?” Nico asked, smirking like this was the weirdest Tuesday of his life.

I didn’t dignify him with words. Just grunted, standing up and heading down the hall. I remembered. Every camera. Every angle. Every exact screw and tuck of wire. I hadn’t touched them when we found them earlier, hadn’t dared. They were like breadcrumbs from her, like her eyes had still been on me even after she was gone. So I moved from room to room, replanting them with surgical precision. Living room, bookshelf. Hall corner, ceiling. The one angled at my bedroom door…I paused there for a beat longer, throat tight. She hadn’t just been watching me. She’d been protecting me and now I was putting the damn things back like I needed her to keep doing it. Because maybe I did. Maybe I’d needed her long before I ever admitted it. How long have you been looking out for me, my little ghost?

In Deep.

I can’t get the damn image of her out of my mind. Even now, hours later, het eyes still burn behind mine, piercing, focused, deliberate. The bottom half of her face hidden beneath that black mask, but it doesn’t matter. My imagination’s working overtime, filling in the blanks with soft curves and sharp teeth, with lips that probably taste like secrets and danger. She’d opened a can of worms reaching out like that… Giving me that intel, looking straight down the “Tens like she knew what it would do to me. I should’ve been furious. Should’ve shut it all down, cut the feed, burned the cables. But instead, I gave her exactly what she wanted. Hell, I put the cameras back. Every damn one. Now here I was, hunched over Nico’s desk, red-eyed and wired on bitter coffee and obsession, sorting through the encrypted files she dumped into our system. Layers upon layers of data, names, routes, bank transfers, some connected to me and some to people I hadn’t thought about in years. It was a goldmine… and a loaded gun and she gave it to me. Not Nico. Not the crew. Just me.

“Jesus,” Nico muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “She practically handed you the blueprint to a war.”

I nodded slowly, eyes locked to the screen, but my mind was spinning. Who the hell was she? What’s her name? Have I met her before? What would her voice sound like without the mask of distortion? Why the fuck was she looking out for me? How was she so good at what she does? Why me? I didn’t have answers. Just more questions, and a heat building in my chest that wasn’t anger. Footsteps echoed down the hall. Liam strolled in, yawning, coffee in hand, looking like he’d slept through the apocalypse.

“Hey,” he said casually, glancing between me and Nico. “What’re you guys up to? Looks like hell in here.”

Nico shot me a look, waiting for the go-ahead. I gave him a single nod. Out of everyone, Liam was the one I trusted most. My second. My brother in everything but blood. He already knew almost everything there was to know about my little ghost, how she’d been watching me for years, how she seemed to always show up right before the bodies hit the ground. What he didn’t know? She spoke to me now. Directly. Boldly.

“She reached out,” I said, voice low.

Liam froze mid-sip. “She? You mean…”

“Yeah.”

“The ghost?”

I nodded again, and Liam lowered the cup. “You talk back?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then I looked up at him, heart thudding slow but hard. “And now I can’t stop.”

Liam whistled, dragging a chair over. “Alright, tell me everything.”

I leaned back in the chair, stretching out muscles that were knotted from hours hunched over Nico’s desk. The caffeine was buzzing through my blood, but beneath it, there was something else. Something heavier. The need to talk. To get this out. I looked at Liam. He wasn’t just waiting, he was ready. That steady kind of calm he always carried, the one that said you can drop the weight here. So I did.

“She hijacked Nico’s system,” I started, watching his brows shoot up.

“Hijacked?” he echoed, glancing at Nico, who just shrugged like it was almost impressive.

“She took over the rig like she built it herself. Got in, cleaned up the mess we were sorting through, and then…” I hesitated, that image of her flashing behind my eyes again, all shadow and poise, all fire behind the mask. “She showed up on screen.”

Liam blinked. “She showed you her face?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Not her full face. She still wore the mask. Still had the hood up. But it was her. Her voice came through the speakers like smoke. Said my name like she’d been whispering it for years.”

Liam sat forward, like he could see it too. “And what did she want?”

“To warn me,” I said, jaw tightening. “Someone’s in our system. Watching me. Tracking movement, calls, heat signatures. And it’s not her. She said if it was her, I never would’ve noticed.”

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