Chapter 148 The Stalker Revealed

Chapter 148 The Stalker Revealed
Levi's POV

Marcus finds me in the equipment room, laptop already open, jaw set in a way I've only seen once before, the night his sister's car got broken into and he spent three hours in the school parking lot waiting to catch whoever did it.

"You need to see this," he says, no hello, no warm-up. He turns the screen toward me.

It's a spreadsheet. Rows and rows of timestamps, IP logs, screenshots of messages, the same messages that have been showing up in Anya's inbox for two weeks now, anonymous, needling, always just specific enough to make her skin crawl. I know where you eat lunch. I know what he sees in you. Enjoy it while it lasts. I'd assumed some troll with too much time and a grudge against anyone dating a Thorne. I was wrong.

"I traced the account back through three burner emails," Marcus says, scrolling. "Took a while, but VPNs aren't as untraceable as people think if you know what you're doing and you're patient enough." He stops on a line, taps it. "This is the original login. Before it got routed through anything."

I read it twice before it makes sense. "That's a Sloane Whitfield account."

"It's not Sloane's," Marcus says quickly, before the wrong conclusion can finish forming in my head. "I checked. The account was created two years ago, way before any of this started, way before you and Sloane even stopped talking. It's tied to a device that's been active at the Whitfield estate for months. Consistently. Every single message sent from a location inside that house."

My stomach turns cold. "Her parents?"

"Or someone in that orbit. Staff, family friend, I don't know yet." Marcus closes the laptop halfway, like even he doesn't want to keep staring at it. "But whoever it is, they know things about Anya's schedule that Sloane herself probably doesn't. Her class times. Which exit she uses after practice. That's not internet-stalking-a-headline information. That's someone watching her in person."

The equipment room suddenly feels too small, the air too thin. I think about every walk Anya's taken alone across campus for the last two weeks, every message she's shown me with her hands shaking, every time she's said it's probably nothing in a voice that made it clear she didn't believe herself.

"Why," I say, low, "would anyone in Sloane's family care this much about Anya."

Marcus hesitates, which is unlike him, Marcus doesn't hesitate, he just says the thing. That hesitation scares me more than anything on the screen so far.

"I think it's not about Anya," he says finally. "I think Anya's just, collateral. I think this is about you. Or more specifically, about what happens to the Whitfield family's business deal with your father if the wedding they've been quietly angling toward for two years doesn't happen."

The floor tilts under me.

"Sloane and I broke up eight months ago."

"I know that. You know that." Marcus meets my eyes, steady, careful, the way he gets when he's about to say something he knows will land hard.

"I don't think everyone in that house got the memo. Or I don't think everyone in that house cares. If your dad's foundation deal with Whitfield Capital was banking on a Thorne-Whitfield marriage down the line, informally, unofficially, whatever handshake nonsense our parents do, then you showing up at a gala and calling Anya your girlfriend in front of every camera in the city isn't just a headline to them."

"It's a threat to a business deal," I finish, the words tasting like acid.

"Maybe. I don't have proof of that part yet. But the messages, the tracking, the timing, it lines up too clean to be a coincidence." Marcus closes the laptop the rest of the way, sets a hand on my shoulder, grounding in a way I didn't know I needed until he did it. "I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from anyone else. Or before Anya gets another message and has to sit with not knowing."

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to breathe through the anger climbing up my throat, not at Marcus, never at Marcus, but at a world where my last name turns the girl I love into a pawn in someone else's business calculation.

"I have to tell her," I say.

"I know."

"She's going to be terrified."

"She's already terrified, Levi. She's just been terrified alone." Marcus's voice softens, just slightly, the closest he gets to gentle. "Better she's terrified with the truth and you standing next to her than terrified in the dark, wondering."

He's right, and I hate that he's right, because it means the next conversation I have is going to unravel something in Anya that she's been holding together with sheer will for two weeks straight. But he's also right that the alternative, her finding out some other way, some crueler way, alone, is so much worse.

"Can you get more?" I ask. "Names. Proof. Something I can actually bring to my father, or the police, or"

"I'm already on it." Marcus reopens the laptop, fingers already moving. "Give me forty-eight hours. I want to know exactly who's sitting behind that account before you say a single word to Anya that you can't back up with proof. She doesn't need a theory. She needs an answer."

I nod, throat tight, already dreading and needing the next forty-eight hours in equal measure. Whatever's waiting on the other side of Marcus's spreadsheet, it's bigger than a jealous ex or a random troll with a grudge. It's tangled up in my father's business, in a family that apparently sees Anya as an obstacle instead of a person, in a version of my world I thought I'd already exposed her to the worst of.

I was wrong. There's more coming. I can feel it, cold and certain, settling into my chest like the first crack of ice under too much weight.

And whatever it is, I'm not letting her face it without me standing directly in front of it first.