Her Shadows

CHAPTER NINE

AMELIA POV

A month into the assignment and still... nothing.

Other than the first vague document I had acquired no further information. Maybe Mr Parker is just an expert criminal or maybe I was the problem.

Because, it seems that no matter how much time passes and how many times I manage to pull myself away, I always finds myself perched on that rooftop, peering into the life of the strange boy in the window.

Not noting anything or waiting for clues. Just watching. His life was quite refreshing from the usual gloom that followed me.

Watching his life felt like a breath of fresh air as I surfaced from drowning. He was so normal. So unsullied by life. He had no hidden agenda or plot for death.

I had followed him as he continued those life-altering drawings of his, that I just itched to see.

I watched him attend the local university, seeming completely unfulfilled with the content he was forced to learn. A major in business and economics. Completely at odds with his obvious love for creativity and art.

I assumed his course had more to do with his overbearing father than his own personal interest. Especially since the one class I had decided to sit through, simply to observe him, I had caught him snoring in his seat. The slightest tinge of drool leaking from the side of his mouth as his leg randomly twitched with his dreams.

How the professor did not notice his sleeping state was beyond me.

It was quite endearing actually. Watching a boy so unbelievably unbothered by life, feeling such a profound sense of security in his own safety that he could simply fall asleep.

As though leaving his vulnerable, unconscious body in a room of 50 people wasn't something to be bothered by. How strange.

But that just intrigued me more.

Did he really just live life never looking over his shoulder? Never cautiously cataloguing every threat, every danger? Not once worrying if death lurked around the next corner?

Oh, how I envied him. But even more so, how I so wanted to know him.

To crack his code like a puzzle. I was so intrigued with every facet of his life. I had never been so quickly infatuated with anything in my life before.

It should have worried me.

Instead it excited me.

Desperately I held onto the normality of his life to escape my own. I want to feel that reprieve from darkness. I wants to know what it is like to feel and care as he does for his mum and dog. What it's like to smile.

But that was simply not in the cards for my future.