Someone Has Been Counting Your Steps

And then Priya remembered something. A detail she had filed away without understanding it — something Bastian had mentioned on the drive up, casually, while they were passing through Two Harbors. He’d said Roman had reached out to him once more, actually, about three months after the conference. Just a brief message. Asking whether Bastian had given any more thought to the offer.
Priya had asked what offer. Bastian had said it was nothing, a job thing, and changed the subject.
She looked at him now.
“Bastian.”
He didn’t look away. He didn’t do anything evasive or sharp. He just looked tired — the same bone-level exhaustion she’d seen in Tomek’s face when they’d arrived, and had not understood until now. “Roman worked for a competing firm,” he said. “He wanted information. Client data. Internal models. I said no.” He paused. “I said no and I didn’t report it because I thought it was over.”
This was the thing that reframed everything.
Roman had not been watching all four of them out of cruelty, or madness, or some unfocused compulsion. He had been building a case — a dossier of leverage, assembled over months, designed to demonstrate to Bastian exactly how exposed everyone around him was. How easily they could be reached. The lake house was not a trap. It was a message, delivered in an envelope on a kitchen table, in a language made entirely of other people’s secrets.
*This is what I know. This is what I can do. Reconsider.*
Vasquez called back at 6 p.m. The number had been traced to a prepaid device, long since inactive. Roman — whose full name Bastian now provided — had a file already open with a federal agency. He had done this before, to someone else, somewhere else. The investigation was ongoing. They were asked not to leave the state.
They drove back to the city that night, all four of them in Bastian’s car, the birch trees disappearing behind them in the dark.
Nobody talked much. The smell of damp wool, faint and chemical, had followed Priya out of the house and into the car, and she realized only now, with the highway lights strobing overhead, where she had first encountered it: on Bastian’s jacket, that first morning, when he’d come in from outside to say the coffee was ready.
He had been outside before dawn.
She didn’t say anything. She looked out the window. She thought about the envelope on the table, and who had known to put it there, and how the locks had been intact, and whether Bastian had ever actually told her he’d been asleep all night.
She thought about this for a long time.
And said nothing.

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About the Author

Rowan Vale — a student of occult symbolism, for whom every abandoned church is hiding something. Never leaves house without Daisy … his little doll.

— Rowan Vale

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September 28, 2026

10min-stories