Voyeur by Candace Wondrak
Chapter Sixteen - A Man
It’d taken him a while, but he’d found her. Had to go sniffing through all of his old channels to do it, too. It was a good thing the kid who hired him was loaded—he was making bank on this job, and the man wished every job would be as profitable. Granted, it was good not every job took as much time as this one did.
Bus tickets. Trailing someone who used cash. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible. The man had been at this a long time, finding those who did not want to be found. Sometimes those who’d run ran for a reason, and sometimes they didn’t. It was not his place to judge; only to find them.
And find her he did.
Zoey Marbella, heir to the Marbella fortune, eldest daughter to the rich clan in Hillcrest, was now working at a strip club and living in the dingiest looking apartment building the man had ever seen.
He’d found her, followed her to her job one night, even took a seat just to get a better look at her. She didn’t know him, so she didn’t look twice at him, which was fine. Tonight, he waited in his car for her to come back, and when she did, he coughed her name out of the window, just to be one hundred percent certain it was indeed her and not a pink-haired lookalike.
The Zoey Marbella his client had hired him to find didn’t have pink hair when she’d hightailed it out of Hillcrest, you see.
But it was her. When he’d called her name, she stopped, shoulders snapping straight, and looked all around. Of course, the parking lot was near pitch black, so she didn’t see him sitting in his car, off to the side, watching her.
Though it was late, the man picked up his phone after Zoey went inside the building. He dialed his client’s number, and it rang a few times before a groggy voice picked up, “Hello?”
“It’s me,” the man said, his voice coming out gruff and gravelly, the result of heavy smoking his whole life. And then he told his client the words he’d been waiting to hear for weeks now: “I found her.”
Regardless of what his client ended up doing, the job was now done, and he could wash his hands of the matter. After all, what happened between lovers during a quarrel was never anyone else’s business. Zoey Marbella and Bryan Oakes would have to hash it out on their own.
