Chapter 7 – Click
Clara’s Pov
The sound came again—sharp, electronic, so quick it could have been imagined. But I knew it wasn’t in my head. Renee and I stood perfectly still in the narrow hallway, staring at the front door. My skin prickled, and I could hear the faint rush of my own pulse in my ears.
That soft little click was unmistakable. A camera.
Renee mouthed, “What was that?”
I shook my head, trying to listen for anything beyond that brief sound—the shuffle of movement, the whisper of footsteps—but whoever was out there had gone silent.
Renee moved first. She padded down the hallway to the door, staying low, cautious but determined. I wanted to stop her, but the words stuck in my throat. She pressed her eye to the peephole, breathing shallowly. Then she jerked back and mouthed, “No one.”
“Are you sure?” I whispered.
She nodded, but her face was pale, uncertain.
I crept closer, pressing my ear against the wood. The hallway outside was still. No chatter, no hum of a late-night neighbor heading home. Just the oppressive quiet of a building holding its breath.
Renee finally said, “Let’s call the cops.”
I wanted to agree, but something in me hesitated. The idea of explaining this—texts, photos, mysterious clicks—felt like begging to be dismissed. The thought of police checking and finding nothing terrified me more than finding someone.
Renee didn’t wait for my decision. She darted to the counter, grabbed her phone, and started dialing. That proactive boldness was one of the many reasons I loved her. Me, I froze; she acted.
I turned back toward the living room, trying to calm my racing mind. Maybe someone had just walked by in the hall, taking a selfie or texting. Maybe I was imagining danger in every shadow because my brain was on overdrive.
But then I caught it—the faint impression near the bottom of the door. A smear. Like a fingerprint left on the white paint just above the lock. I knelt, heart sinking. Grease or dirt. Someone had definitely touched it. Someone who shouldn’t have.
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
Renee finished the call, phone still pressed to her ear. “They’re sending someone,” she said.
The officer arrived ten minutes later, a weary-looking man who clearly thought we were jumpy neighbors overreacting to normal city noise. He walked the hallway, checked the stairwell, looked at the lock. “No signs of forced entry,” he noted.
Renee bristled. “That’s because the guy must have a key. He just opened the door and walked in earlier—Adrian, her boyfriend.”
I winced at how bluntly she said boyfriend. The officer’s eyebrows lifted a little. “Did you give him a copy?”
“No,” I said.
“Could he have gotten one somehow? Maintenance, locksmith, anything like that?”
“I don’t know.”
He sighed, scribbled something in his notebook. “Change your locks. Call if it happens again. I’ll make a note in case there’s a pattern.”
That was it. Two signatures, a half-hearted promise, and then he was gone.
After he left, Renee locked the deadbolt twice and turned to me. “We’re not sleeping here tonight.”
“Where would we go?”
“Hotel. I don’t care which. Somewhere high up, far from windows.”
She was right. Half an hour later, we were sitting in a small hotel room ten blocks away, two twin beds, cheap coffee machine, thin curtains filtering the city’s neon glow. Renee tried to keep things normal, flipping on the TV to fill the silence.
I sat on my bed, watching the light from the screen flicker against the walls. I hadn’t told her about the message from earlier that morning, the one warning me not to tell anyone. The guilt churned in my chest. Whoever this was—whatever game they were playing—they already knew too much.
Renee eventually fell asleep, arm draped across her stomach, soft snores muffled under the hum of air conditioning. I couldn’t follow her lead. My phone lay on the nightstand, face down, taunting me. I’d muted the notifications, but that didn’t stop me from checking it every few minutes just to make sure no new message had slipped through.
Around two thirty, I finally convinced myself to try sleeping. I turned off the lamp, curling under the blanket, my eyes half-closed but my thoughts still wild and awake. The steady rhythm of the AC was almost enough to settle me. Almost.
Then came the buzz.
So faint it almost blended with the machine’s hum.
My heart dropped. I reached for the phone, hand shaking before I even saw the screen.
One new message. Same number.
I hesitated, then opened it.
It was another picture.
Not of my apartment this time—but of this hotel room.
The shot was from a low angle, pointed at the two beds. The blankets. Us.
Renee was visible, asleep, hair spilling across her pillow. And there I was, lying on my side… except the photo had been taken seconds before, in the darkness, while I was pretending to sleep.
I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming.
Then, below the photo, another message blinked in.
“Locks don’t stop me, Clara.”
I shoved Renee awake so hard she flailed upright, disoriented. “What—what happened?”
I showed her the phone. She stared, disbelief melting into horror. “You’re joking,” she whispered. “You took that. That has to be you. That’s impossible otherwise.”
“I swear to you, it’s not me.”
She grabbed her own phone. “We’re leaving. Right now.”
We stuffed our things into bags, fumbling with zippers and shoes as if the act of moving faster could somehow undo what we’d seen. I yanked open the hotel door, expecting maybe to see someone in the hallway—a figure half-hidden in shadows—yet it was empty, silent except for the buzz of a vending machine down the corridor.
We made it to the lobby, breathless. The overnight clerk barely looked up as we hurried past. Outside, the cold cut through my thin jacket. I scanned the dark street for watchers, cameras, anyone standing too still.
“Where do we go?” Renee asked.
It was a reasonable question, but I didn’t have an answer. The city felt suddenly alien, every window a potential camera lens.
I thought of Evelyn. She’d told me not to move on impulse, but this wasn’t impulse—this was survival.
“We go to her,” I said. “Now.”
We caught a cab, the driver too tired to make conversation. I kept peering into the side mirror, sure that any second another car would appear behind us, headlights following no matter where we turned.
When we stopped a few blocks from Evelyn’s office, the street was empty, all the shops closed. Half the windows dark, the rest dimly lit by signboards no one read anymore.
Renee looked at me. “You sure she’s in there?”
“She said she keeps night hours sometimes.”
We reached the building entrance; the glass door reflected our pale faces back at us. Inside, the hall leading to her office glowed faintly under a flickering fluorescent light. I called her twice. No answer.
“Maybe she’s asleep,” Renee whispered.
“She told me she doesn’t sleep much,” I muttered, knocking.
The door creaked open slowly, just an inch.
“Evelyn?”
No answer.
Heat crept up my neck. I pushed the door wider. The smell that greeted me wasn’t what I expected. Metallic. Faint, like copper. The office looked wrong—papers scattered, the blinds half torn from the windows. A chair knocked over, one wheel still spinning slightly.
Renee froze behind me. “Clara…”
In the center of the desk, my phone buzzed again, lighting up with another message from that same number.
Only this time, the message read:
“She shouldn’t have helped you.”