Chapter 5: Midnight Snoop
The window slid up with a soft, practiced scrape. Isaac hauled himself over the sill, his movements smooth and silent, a shadow detaching itself from the deeper dark outside. He landed on the carpet with a faint thump, dusting his hands off on his jeans. Stiles’s room was supposed to be empty, a quiet place to wait out the restlessness that came with the moon’s slow waxing. A temporary reprieve from the loft’s oppressive tension.
The desk lamp was on, a single pool of jaundiced light in the otherwise dark room. And there she was.
Violet was hunched in Stiles’s desk chair, her back to the door. She was leaning forward, one hand scrolling, the other braced against the edge of the cluttered desk. The blue-white light of the laptop screen washed over her, highlighting the sharp line of her shoulder under the thin grey tank top, the loose cascade of her dark hair. She was utterly still, absorbed.
Then she must have heard the intake of his breath, the minute shift in the room’s atmosphere. She froze. The scrolling stopped. Her head turned just slightly, a profile etched in light and shadow, and he saw her eyes go wide for one unguarded second—a flash of pure, caught-in-the-act alarm.
It vanished, replaced by a slow, deliberate smirk as she fully turned to face him. “Do you always use the window? The front door has this great feature called a knob.”
Isaac’s pulse, already elevated from the climb, gave a hard, disorienting thump. It wasn’t just the shock of finding her here. It was the intimacy of the scene: the late hour, her state of undress, the focused intensity she’d just torn away from. He crossed his arms, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe, willing his voice into its usual dry, unaffected drawl.
“Looking for something, or just practicing your B&E skills? Because you’re in the wrong house for valuables. The only gold here is in Stiles’s gaming trophies.”
She straightened up, the chair squeaking. The unflappable mask was back, but he could see the rapid beat of a pulse at the base of her throat. “Stiles left his laptop open. I was just checking my email. My charger’s in my room, and I didn’t want to wake anyone.” Her voice was cool, logical. A perfect, flimsy lie.
“At two in the morning?” he asked, not moving.
“I keep vampire hours. It’s a graduate student thing.”
The air between them felt charged, thick with the scent of old pizza, dust, and her shampoo—something clean and sharp, like citrus. He pushed off the doorframe and took a step into the room. Then another. His gaze, inexorably, dropped from her defiant face to the laptop screen glowing behind her.
It wasn’t an email client.
It was a browser window, crowded with tabs. The one at the forefront was a search results page. The query, in bold letters in the search bar, was unmistakable: ‘Beacon Hills animal attacks 2023 unexplained’.
And just below it, the most recent search, autofilled by the browser’s history: ‘lycanthropy clinical studies’.
His own breath stalled in his chest. The casual pretense he’d been holding onto crumbled. This wasn’t idle curiosity. This was targeted.
“You were snooping,” he said, the words flat, devoid of their earlier teasing. A statement, not a question.
Violet watched him, her hazel eyes tracking the minute changes in his expression—the hardening around his mouth, the way his casual stance had gone rigid. She didn’t bother with the email lie again. The jig was up, and she knew it. The smirk faded, replaced by a look of stark, analytical challenge.
“Yes.”
The single word hung in the silent room. She didn’t look away, didn’t apologize. She just admitted it, waiting for his reaction like a psychologist observing a test subject.
“Why?” The word was rough.
“Because you’re all terrible liars.” She swiveled the chair slightly, facing him more directly, but she didn’t close the laptop. It was as if she was presenting the evidence. “The kitchen. The whispered ‘alpha’ that wasn’t about a video game. The way you all look at each other when a siren goes by. Stiles’s ‘urban folklore’ thesis that reads like a police blotter for things that shouldn’t exist. And now,” she gestured at the screen, “a pattern of violent, unexplained incidents that the news dismisses and the police reports glaze over. Coupled with your collective, chronic case of jumpiness.”
She stood up then, the movement fluid. She was shorter than him, barefoot on the worn carpet, but she carried a formidable intensity. “So I got curious. You lied to me. A stupid, obvious lie. That, to me, is an invitation.”
Isaac felt a familiar, defensive anger rise, hot and quick. It was the anger of being cornered, of having his pack’s secrets probed by an outsider with a razor-sharp mind. “Some things aren’t your business.”
“Everything is my business,” she shot back, her voice low but fierce. “I’m living here. My cousin is in the middle of it, whatever it is. You all act like you’re in a war zone, but there’s no war on the news. So, what? Are you in a cult? Some weird fight club? Or is it something…” Her eyes flicked back to the search term ‘lycanthropy’ on the screen, then back to him, daring him to laugh it off. “Something else?”
He took the last step, closing the distance between them. The glow from the screen lit her face from below, carving out her cheekbones, deepening the shadows in her eyes. He could hear her heartbeat now, a fast, steady rhythm, not with fear, but with the adrenaline of the hunt. The scent of her, citrus and warmth, was overwhelming.
“You think you want to know?” he asked, his voice a gravelly whisper. “You think your psych textbooks prepared you for the answers?”
“Try me.”
For a long moment, they just stared at each other, the only sound the faint hum of the laptop fan. He saw the intelligence in her gaze, the relentless need to dissect and understand. He also saw the vulnerability she’d never admit to, the fear she masked with bravado. She was a puzzle-box of sharp edges, and he had the sudden, reckless urge to pry it open, to see what would happen.
He could shut this down. Threaten her. Scare her off.
But she wouldn’t scare. He knew that already. She’d just dig deeper.
A slow, humorless smile touched his lips. “Alright, Mercer. You want the truth?” He leaned past her, his arm brushing against hers as he reached for the laptop. He snapped it closed, plunging the room into near-darkness, save for the lonely desk lamp. Her eyes never left his face.
“Put on some real shoes,” he said, straightening up. “We’re going for a drive.”