Chapter 941: Celebrity Yandere?
And that alarm had a very specific source.
As far as yesterday’s misunderstanding went, Evy had actually apologized.
She had sent him a sweet, slightly frantic little message saying sorry for the stalker remark.
On the surface, it was perfectly nice. Perfectly normal. The kind of apology a flustered girl might type at two in the morning, stare at for seven full minutes, send in a burst of panic, then throw her phone face down as if the device had personally betrayed her.
He could recall it word for word.
He had read it more times than he wanted to admit, turning it over in his mind because something inside it had snagged at him:
[I’m so sorry about yesterday, calling you that, I mean. I didn’t know who you were and I think I panicked? You just have this way of looking at a person. Anyway. I hope the shoot today isn’t too brutal on you, I can see it’s your first time, it was hard to me too. But you’ll do beautifully even on your next ones with other companies. You always look like you would. — E]
’Sweet.’
Harmless.
Almost painfully flustered.
Except for other shoots?
She had known about the other shoots Phei was already planning to run away before any official word went out. The timing. The fact of it. Enough to mention it casually in a message, as though that information had politely knocked on her door and introduced itself.
Then there was "you always look like you would."
It was a strange thing to write to a man she had supposedly met once, in passing, the previous night.
Always.
That word bothered him.
To Phei, call him paranoid but to him it implied history, observation of him, a longer gaze than she had any right to possess.
As if the boutique had been the first time he noticed her, while she had noticed him long before and simply failed to file the necessary paperwork with reality.
And beneath all of that sat the detail that had turned his blood to slow ice.
’She texted me on my private number.’
The secured line buried behind layers of protection on his secured iPhone 17 Melissa had given him, given to almost no one, and meant, as far as the outside world was concerned, it did not exist.
Phei had gone through the list quietly.
One by one, he asked his women whether any of them had given his number to anyone.
None had.
Then he’d asked Yuki who went digging.
Sharp, careful Yuki.
She traced how the message reached him, pulled apart the path with that cool precision of hers, and eventually found the thing that ended the conversation cold.
Traces of a hack.
Clean ones.
Someone had gone into something and pulled the number out.
From that moment, Phei recalibrated his entire reading of Evy.
The distance shifted from polite to vigilant.
Because Evy was not merely some bashful chart-topping celebrity with a crush.
And she was a chart-topper alright. A genuine world-wide sensation.
She had two years at the summit of the music charts, her voice poured through speakers across countries, cities, cars, malls, bedrooms, gyms, breakups, weddings, and whatever other human disasters required background music.
She was famous enough that strangers knew her face before she entered a room. Famous enough to have money, teams, handlers, privacy specialists, and people whose job titles probably sounded boring while their actual work flirted with felony.
The blushing, the bows, the rehearsed jokes, the on-off skittishness, all of it might have been real.
That was the problem.
It could be real, and still sit on top of something far more dangerous.
Somewhere beneath that fragile fluttering innocence was a person who had reached into a number that should not have been reachable, then used it to apologise.
That unsettled him more than the breach itself.
The breach was irritating; a violation, yes and security problem to be traced, tightened, and quietly fed to the appropriate wolves once Yuki finished sharpening her digital knives.
But what stood behind the breach mattered more.
Because a girl with a crush sent flowers.
A girl with a crush lingered near a trailer, stole glances, wrote unsent messages, maybe saved a photo and pretended it was for artistic reference. Humanity had many sad little traditions for longing.
They were pathetic, but at least recognisable.
A girl with a crush did not peel back the layers of a secured.
That took more than longing.
Resources.
Money.
Access.
’Or skill.’
Two years at the top of the global charts could buy almost anything if one knew which polite criminals to hire. Specialists. Private investigators. Cybersecurity mercenaries with charming invoices and souls outsourced to the highest bidder. Assistants who knew too much. Managers who asked no questions because revenue was a wonderful anaesthetic for morals.
So the real question was not how she got his number.
That was surface.
The colder questions mattered.
’What else had she found?’
How long had she been looking?
Who helped her?
Either she had done this alone, which meant the flustered little fan routine concealed a mind and skill far sharper than she let on, or someone stood behind her, a second shadow guiding the first.
Phei disliked both answers with almost equal sincerity.
And here came the inconvenient truth, allowed only because no one could hear it.
Some traitorous part of him liked her more for it.
’That is the rot at my foundation, is it not?
The alarm and the attraction had begun ringing in the same breath, and he knew himself too well to pretend otherwise. Dangerous women had always been his weakness. The ones with locked rooms behind soft smiles; ones with secrets folded under perfume, who could blush at him while hiding a knife, a grief, a scheme, or a security breach.
Cassiopeia.
Sierra, once, Elena.
The whole magnificent, lethal collection of them.
A sweet girl who blushed and bowed would have bored him inside a week.
A sweet girl who blushed and bowed and had quietly committed a felony to reach him?
That made something low in his chest sit up and pay attention.
The same answering hum he kept claiming to trust stirred for entirely the wrong reasons.
Down, he told it:
The part of him that wanted dangerous things only smiled in the back of his mind and settled in to wait, because apparently even his instincts had learned patience when self-destruction wore a pretty enough face.
Across the garden, Evy dipped into another flustered little bow after a crew member adjusted the light between them. Her cheeks were pink. Her eyes darted toward him, then away. She looked sweet enough to be harmless and suspicious enough to make harmlessness feel like a costume.
Phei watched her for a moment longer.
Then came to the only reasonable conclusion available.
’Evy is what you’d Celebrity Yandere.’
Trouble itself, wrapped in a very pretty package, smiling at him as if she did not already possess a key to a door she had no business knowing existed.
The worst part, the truly damning part, was that a piece of him wanted to find out what else she could pick.
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