“I won’t lie to you. Crowds massively increase the amount of moving parts in your environment. You never know who or what might be hiding in them. And right now, you’re bound to have people following wherever you go.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s my job to assess threats and keep you safe.” His cell started to vibrate somewhere about his person. He pulled it out of his back pants pocket, checked the screen, and dismissed the call with a slide of his thumb. “But only you can decide what risk is important enough, for whatever reason, to be worth taking.”

“If they’re all still out there then I guess I might cancel my plans.” I planted my ass on the carpet and picked up my cell, sending Lena a quick text to let her know. Given the situation, I cancelled my appointment with my hairdresser in the afternoon as well. “Looks like I’m spending the day at home. You probably don’t need to hang around.”

“You won’t be leaving your apartment at all?”

“Only maybe to go down to the apartment building’s gym later.”

“Then I’ll stay. There’re some other tasks I have to do while you’re busy here.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but then changed my mind. After a long night of jumping at every little noise, keeping the bodyguard around might be for the best. Calm the savage nerves and all that. If it was a choice between annoying hotness and crippling fear, then I’ll go for the heat every time. “Okay.”

“Any update from Detective Ortega?”

“No. Not a word.” I sighed. “I tried going through some of my emails and messages last night, to see if they mentioned hearts or knives or anything like that. There’s some seriously deranged people out there. I mean, can you imagine sending a message to a complete stranger saying that baby Jesus was going to strike them down dead and send them to hell? Or that you wanted to strangle them and have sex with their corpse? Who the hell says that sort of thing? Just because they can hide behind a bullshit email address or fake avatar they think they can let all of their ugly out to play and inflict it on other people.”

His gaze narrowed, lines furrowing his brow. “Why don’t you let the police deal with that in the future, Miss Cooper? You don’t need that sort of shit getting into your head. Excuse my language.”

I attempted a smile. “It’s fine. Swear all you like. This situation makes me want to swear too.”

“There’s a lot of sick and cruel people out there. It doesn’t mean you need to give them a moment of your time.”

“True,” I said. “I guess you’ve seen a lot of this sort of stuff before.”