Chapter 164: Sophia In Danger!? [FIXED!][25/09!]
Sophia had swung by the grocery store on her way home from her shift, just a quick errand — milk, something for Mateo’s lunch tomorrow, maybe a snack he’d been asking about. Nothing that warranted a ride, nothing that should have taken more than fifteen minutes total.
She noticed it while she was still inside, actually. A presence lingering a couple aisles over for longer than felt natural, someone whose path seemed to mirror hers a little too closely for coincidence. She told herself it was nothing. People shopped in overlapping patterns all the time.
But once she stepped outside into the cooling evening air, bags in hand, the feeling didn’t dissipate. If anything, it sharpened.
She caught it from the corner of her eye — a figure a good distance behind her, matching her pace almost exactly. When she quickened her stride, they quickened theirs, just enough to notice, not so much that she could say for certain it wasn’t paranoia.
Her heart started hammering, pulse climbing into her throat. She resisted the urge to look back directly, kept her eyes forward, focused on getting somewhere — anywhere — with people around.
That’s when she spotted her.
"Denise?"
Her old coworker from the salon, standing outside a corner store with a cigarette between two fingers, looked up and broke into a grin. "Sophia! Girl, it’s been forever."
Sophia forced a smile, relief flooding through her as she closed the distance, putting a friendly body between herself and whatever — whoever — had been behind her.
They caught up quickly, the usual small talk, how’s Mateo, how’s the new salon, you look tired girl are you sleeping okay. Sophia kept her voice light, kept nodding along, but her eyes flicked past Denise’s shoulder more than once, scanning the street behind her.
Nothing. No one there anymore.
"Maybe I imagined it," she thought, exhaling slowly. "Maybe I’m just tired."
The conversation wrapped up within five minutes, Denise stubbing out her cigarette and heading inside, waving over her shoulder. Sophia turned back toward home, shoulders loosening slightly, telling herself the whole thing had just been nerves.
But the second she started walking, unease crept back in, colder this time.
She realized her mistake almost immediately. Stopping — even for something as harmless as running into an old friend — had given whoever was behind her time to close the gap unseen, to reposition, to overlap her without her noticing exactly when it happened.
Sophia wasn’t naive. She knew better than to walk the same path home after a moment like that. Without making it obvious, she adjusted her route at the next corner, taking a longer way around instead of her usual direct path, weaving through a couple of side streets she rarely used.
"If someone really was following me, this breaks the pattern. There’s no way they could’ve guessed this."
She held onto that logic for two blocks, gripping her grocery bags a little tighter than necessary, breathing evening out slightly as the unfamiliar streets passed by.
Then she felt it again.
That same prickling awareness at the back of her neck, the same sense of being watched that she couldn’t quite substantiate with anything concrete. She glanced over her shoulder — nothing immediately obvious, no one clearly matching the presence from before. Just an empty street, a couple parked cars, the low hum of distant traffic.
"It’s nothing. It’s just nerves. There’s no way anyone predicted this route."
She tried to convince herself of that, walking a little faster now, eyes darting between the shadows cast by streetlights spaced further apart than she would have liked. This part of the neighborhood was quieter, more residential, fewer people around to make her feel safe by sheer numbers alone.
That was the problem with the new route, she realized with a growing knot in her stomach. It might have broken whatever pattern someone could have anticipated, but it had also stripped away the safety net of a busier street. Fewer witnesses. Fewer places to duck into if something actually happened.
Sophia’s pace increased without her fully deciding to speed up, grocery bags swinging with the motion, eyes fixed straight ahead on the distant glow of her street’s more familiar lighting.
"Almost there. Almost home."
She didn’t dare look back again, too afraid of what she might — or might not — see, and instead focused every ounce of energy into simply getting through the door and locking it behind her.
Sophia’s steps slowed the closer she got to her street, a cold, creeping realization settling over her before she’d even consciously worked it out. If someone really had followed her this far, this consistently, walking straight up to her front door would hand them exactly what they wanted — her home. Her address. The place where Mateo slept every night, unaware and unprotected.
She stopped dead in her tracks, several houses short of her own, chest tight with the weight of that thought.
"I can’t. I can’t lead them there"
Whatever this was, whatever danger she might be walking into, she’d rather absorb it herself out here on an open street than risk even the smallest chance of it following her through that front door and finding Mateo on the other side.
Slowly, carefully, she turned around.
Nothing.
The street behind her sat empty, quiet, streetlights humming faintly overhead. She scanned further, eyes drifting toward her own driveway — empty as well, no strange car, no lurking shape in the shadows.
Logically, that should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.
Sophia knew better than to let an empty driveway convince her she’d imagined the entire thing. She hadn’t. She’d felt it too many times tonight, that persistent, matching rhythm of footsteps, that sense of being tracked rather than simply walked near. Whoever it was, they were good enough not to be seen the moment she actually looked.
"I’m not gaslighting myself into thinking I’m crazy. Something followed me tonight. Someone."
She turned sharply and cut down a side path instead of continuing toward her house directly, doubling back through a narrow gap between two properties that most people in the neighborhood didn’t even know existed. Mateo had shown her this shortcut once, months ago, cutting through on his bike — she’d scolded him for it at the time, telling him it wasn’t safe to wander through strangers’ backyards like that.
Funny how that same reckless little shortcut might be the thing that kept her safe tonight.
She pressed herself against the side of a darkened garage, breathing controlled and shallow, waiting, watching the mouth of the path she’d just come from. Minutes passed. No one appeared. No footsteps, no shifting shadows, nothing to confirm or deny what she already knew in her gut to be true.
Only once she was fully certain the coast was clear did she finally allow herself to circle back toward her actual house, taking the long way around, approaching from a completely different direction than she normally would.
-
Not far away, hidden in the deeper shadow of a tree line bordering the block, Drake stood with his jaw clenched tight, breathing hard from the pace he’d kept trying to close the distance without giving himself away.
He’d lost her.
He’d been so close, closer than he wanted to admit, and then she’d simply vanished between two houses like she’d known exactly where to disappear to. His hands curled into fists at his sides, frustration boiling hot beneath his skin.
"She’s smarter than I gave her credit for."
He’d been tracking Darren for weeks now through nothing but scraps — geotags, careless posts, secondhand mentions from people who still remembered him from the old crew. Sophia wasn’t even his real target. She was just someone he saw looked good and knew he could potentially have his way with her as there was no way she could overpower him.
He was that disgusting and a man who took life casually surely wouldn’t have a problem doing something this disgusting either.
He had no idea Sophia was linked to Liam or even Darren, this was a one-in-a-million coincidence.
Drake exhaled slowly through his nose, forcing the anger back down into something colder, more controlled. Losing her tonight wasn’t the end of anything. It was a setback, an inconvenience, nothing more. He knew where she lived now, but of course, he had no intention of coming back here at the end of the day as this could very well be a misdirection.
Next time, his next target wouldn’t get lucky enough to run into a friend at the perfect moment. Next time, there wouldn’t be a shortcut clever enough to save her.
He turned and melted back into the darkness of the block, already recalculating, already planning his next approach with the patience of a man who understood that prey caught too easily meant nothing at all.