Page 3 of Your Devoted Monster
How long have you been watching?
Six months.
The bartender with the neck tattoo? Pathetic technique with that belt. All force, no finesse.
Six months. Six months of being watched. That was six months longer than anyone else in Ezra’s life had stuck around.
Why wait?
I needed you to understand something first.
That you've been trying to fuck the memory of me out of your system.
And you’ve been failing.
You needed to know this before you'd admit that you're still mine.
The words hit like a punch. Ezra's breath caught in his throat, because Gabriel was right. The last three years had been a progressive spiral—trying harder and harder to feel something,anything, letting strangers do more and more, pushing boundaries that kept expanding into emptiness. He'd been drowning slowly, and Gabriel had been watching him drown.
Waiting for him to be desperate enough.
You've been in my apartment.
Not a question. He knew. Could feel it suddenly, the wrongness he'd attributed to trauma, his paranoid fucked-up mind. Things moved slightly. The sense of being watched even with curtains closed. That one time he'd come home to find his window cracked when heknewhe'd locked it.
Your lock is from 1982. The fire escape window doesn't latch properly. No cameras, no doorman, no neighbors who care.
You made it so easy, Ezra. Almost like an invitation.
Ezra's free hand went to his scars, pressing through the thin shirt. They throbbed in time with his heartbeat. His cock wasso hard it hurt. He was disgusting. Broken. Getting off on being stalked by a serial killer. What the fuck was wrong with him?
Everything. Everything was wrong with him, and he was too far gone to care.
Were you here tonight?
The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Like Gabriel was choosing his words carefully.
Did you want me to be?
The question made Ezra's vision blur at the edges. His hand moved to his cock without permission, pressing against it through his boxers. He couldn't answer that. Didn't know the answer. Had just wantedmore—more than that gym bro could give, more than anyone had been able to give him in three years.
Yeah.
He typed it before he could stop himself, then immediately wanted to take it back. But it was true. God help him, it was true.
I was close enough to smell his cologne. Atrocious.
You have terrible taste in men, Ezra.
Present company excluded, of course.
The words took a moment to sink in, like his brain was moving through molasses.
Not outside the window, then. Not on the fire escape looking in.
Inside.
The realization crashed over him in waves. The closet—he'd heard it creak tonight, hadn't he? Had dismissed it as the building settling. Or had Gabriel been under the bed, close enough that if Ezra's hand had fallen over the edge, he might have touched Gabriel's face in the dark? Had he been behind the bathroom door, watching through the crack as Ezra let a stranger use him?
