Someone Is Watching Me Fall For The Wrong Man. by noranmesomachukwu at Inkitt

SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME FALL FOR THE WRONG MAN

No parts of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations in book reviews and certain other noncommercial used permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME FALL FOR THE WRONG MAN

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DEDICATION🌺

For everyone who has ever mistaken being watched for being loved, and had to learn the difference the hard way. And for the ones who finally chose honesty over control — even when silence would have been easier.

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Updates Schedule

Content Warning

Playlist

Prologue

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UPDATES SCHEDULE!

I aim to post two chapters every couple of days, though sometimes a day might slip by. Life can get busy, especially as I’m balancing this story alongside my responsibilities as a nursing student and Digital marketer.

I will do my best to keep the updates coming while managing exams, hospital rotations, and everything else on my plate.

Please try and be patience and give me all the support you can— it will really means a lot to me.

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CONTENT WARNING

SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME FALL FOR THE WRONG MAN

This is a dark romance with suspense elements. This book contains the following. Reader discretion advised:

Stalking and surveillance themes (non-consensual monitoring by a love interest)

Emotional manipulation and betrayal (infidelity, familial betrayal)

Possessive/controlling behavior from a main character (addressed as a flaw, not romanticized)

Kidnapping and threats of violence

Grief and parental loss (past)

Explicit sexual content (consensual, between adult leads)

Mentions of financial desperation and coercion

Brief violence in climax scenes

All characters are consenting adults. If any of the above are sensitive topics for you, please read with care.

SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME FALL FOR THE WRONG MAN— PLAYLIST

Wicked Game” — Chris Isaak.

“Control” — Halsey.

“You’re Somebody Else” — flora cash.

“Die For You” — The Weeknd.

“Work Song” — Hozier.

“I Found” — Amber Run.

“Youth” — Daughter.

“Hold Me While You Wait” — Lewis Capaldi.

“Earned It” — The Weeknd.

“You Know I’m No Good” — Amy Winehouse.

“Seven Devils” — Florence + The Machine.

“Bad Guy” — Billie Eilish.

“Running Up That Hill” — Kate Bush.

“Bring Me To Life” — Evanescence.

“Turning Page” — Sleeping At Last.

“Say you won’t let go” — James Arthur

You can go to Spotify through this link and you will surely find the playlist.(https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37uoXeoj3ZeQDZwD80AW1Z?si=PNaVsZQURketuM_irbYvxg&utm_source=copy-link&pi=tGDYLRK1Qsa-p)

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PROLOGUE

The funeral home smelled like lilies and floor wax, and Milo Vance stood at the back of the room the way he'd learned to stand at the back of every room that mattered — close enough to see everything, far enough that no one would ask him to speak.

Richard Calloway had been dead six days. Milo had known him for fifteen years, long enough to know exactly how much Richard would have hated this — the organ music, the strangers in black touching his daughters' shoulders like they had any right to, the flower arrangement shaped like a textile loom that someone at the company had thought was a nice touch. Richard would have laughed at that. Milo almost did, until he looked at Wren and the urge went out of him like a light switched off.

She stood near the casket in a dress that didn't fit right, like she'd bought it in a hurry and hadn't cared. Her hair was down — he'd never seen it down. She kept folding the corner of the program in her hands, over and over, while someone new stepped in front of her every few seconds to say something soft and useless, and she nodded at all of it, jaw tight enough that he could see the muscle working from across the room.

He had watched her grow up without ever meaning to. Ten years old, sneaking into board meetings to sit under the conference table because her father let her. Nineteen, arguing with Richard about supply chains at Christmas dinner like she actually understood the business — which, it turned out, she did. Twenty-four, the first time he'd shaken her hand as an adult and felt something shift under his ribs that he'd spent three years since then refusing to name.

He was thirty-five. She was twenty-six. Her father was the closest thing to family Milo had left, and there was a version of hell reserved specifically for men who wanted their best friend's daughter. He intended to stay very far away from it.

That plan lasted until Priya walked in.

He almost didn't recognize her at first — grief did strange things to a family's resemblance, sharpened some faces and blurred others — but then Priya crossed the room in heels too tall for a funeral and set her hand on the arm of the man standing a few feet from Wren, and Milo watched something in Wren's face go very still.

He knew that man. Everyone did. Wren's fiancé, dressed like he'd come from a boardroom instead of a burial. Priya's hand stayed on his arm two seconds too long, and Wren's eyes moved from her sister's hand to her fiancé's face and back again, and Milo understood — the way you understand a gunshot before you understand the sound of it — that something in that room was about to end.

She didn't make a scene. That was the thing about Wren that undid him most — she had every right to scream in that moment and instead she just turned, quiet as anything, and walked toward the side door that led out to the parking lot. Nobody but Milo seemed to notice she'd gone.

He followed her. He told himself it was because someone should.

She was standing by her car, arms wrapped around herself, not crying — which was somehow worse than if she had been. The evening had gone that particular gray-blue color that happens right before actual dark, her breath showing faintly in the cold. She didn't hear him until he was almost beside her.

"Don't," she said, before he'd said anything at all. "Whatever kind, condolence-adjacent thing you're about to say. Don't."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good." She wiped under one eye with the back of her wrist, fast, like she was annoyed at her own face for doing that. "They think I didn't see it. My own sister. At my father's funeral. I don't even—" She stopped. Laughed, short and wrong. "I don't even think I'm surprised. That's the part that scares me."

Milo didn't move closer. He'd learned, somewhere in fifteen years of watching Richard Calloway navigate a business full of people who wanted pieces of him, that the worst thing you could do to someone mid-collapse was crowd them.

"You don't have to be surprised for it to hurt," he said.

She looked at him properly then, like she'd forgotten he was a separate person from the room they'd left. Something in her expression made him want to close the four feet of parking lot between them, and he didn't. He kept his hands in his coat pockets and his voice level and thought, not for the first time, that there were versions of himself he was never going to let this woman meet.

"My father trusted you with everything," she said. "Did you know? About them?"

"No."

"Would you have told me if you had?"

That one he had to sit with, because the honest answer complicated things he didn't want complicated tonight, of all nights. "I don't know," he said finally. "I'd like to think so."

"That's not a yes."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

She studied him for a long moment. The wind picked up enough that she shivered, and he almost — almost — took off his coat, and stopped himself, because a gesture like that would mean something he had no right to mean. Instead he said, "You should go back in. People will talk."

"People are already talking." But she pushed off the car and straightened her dress, and by the time she'd taken two steps toward the building her face had gone back to the careful, composed thing she wore for rooms full of people who wanted something from her. At the door she paused and looked back at him.

"Thank you," she said. "For not saying the thing everyone else is saying."

Then she went back inside, into the lilies and the organ music and her sister's borrowed grief, and Milo stood alone in the parking lot a minute longer before he followed.

He didn't sleep that night. He lay in the dark of his own apartment across the river and thought about the exact sound her voice had made when she said I don't even think I'm surprised — not devastated, not really, just tired in a way no twenty-six-year-old should already know how to be — and he made himself a promise that had nothing honorable in it and everything careful.

He wasn't going to be another man who took something from her.

He was going to watch. Quietly. From exactly as far away as he needed to stay to make sure nothing else in her life got to blindside her the way that parking lot had. He'd have his people keep an eye on the fiancé's exit from the company. Make sure Richard's estate didn't get picked apart by vultures who'd been circling for years. Make sure that whatever was coming for Calloway Textiles next didn't come for it while she was still learning how to grieve and run a company in the same breath.

He would never tell her. That was the promise underneath the promise. Whatever this was — whatever had lodged itself under his ribs the day she shook his hand like an adult — it could exist entirely in silence. He was good at silence. He'd built an empire out of it.

He had no idea, lying there in the dark with his jaw tight and his hands still faintly cold from the parking lot, that silence was the one thing that was eventually going to cost him everything.