chapter 5 ': Treadbare

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Chapter 5: Threadbare

Lena sat at her kitchen table, cold coffee in her hands, eyes fixed on her laptop screen.

Sleep had abandoned her. Instead, questions whispered through her mind like smoke. Who was Kai, really? How did he find that sketch? How much of her had she offered without realizing?

She pulled up his profile again.

She had looked through it dozens of times. But this time, she wasn’t admiring. She was dissecting.

Each photo. Each caption. Every word felt different now. Off. Too poetic. Too curated. There was no timeline, no pattern. Just scattered uploads, mostly nighttime shots of empty streets and blurred windows.

Some of them… looked familiar.

She opened a folder on her desktop—photos she had taken months ago for reference. She compared one with Kai’s post from March. The same alley. The same angle. Slightly different light.

Her photo was dated two days earlier.

Her stomach flipped.

Was he nearby? Had he followed her?

The fear cracked something inside her. But underneath that fear was a pulse of anger.

She clicked on his profile picture. It led to nothing—no full name, no bio. His messages didn’t link to a number. Just that handle. @Kai.Shadows.

She opened a search tab. Typed the username. Hit enter.

Nothing on Instagram. Nothing on Twitter. Nothing concrete. But then she found a forum. An old photography board.

One user thread stood out:

“Strange interaction with @Kai.Shadows—be careful.”

The post was two years old. The user described eerily similar behavior—compliments, personal insights, references to unseen art.

> “He messaged me like he already knew me. Said he’d been ‘following my work for a long time.’ I deleted everything and blocked him after he started showing up near places I mentioned online. Be careful. He’s not just some fan.”

Lena stared at the screen, her breath catching in her throat.

He had done this before.

She closed her laptop.

The air around her felt thick, like her apartment was no longer hers. Her phone buzzed again—screen lighting up with Kai’s name.

She didn’t open it. Not this time.

Instead, she called someone she hadn’t spoken to in months.

Theo.

They had met once, briefly, at an art meet-up. He was quiet, good with cameras and bad with people. But he had kind eyes. She remembered that.

When he picked up, his voice was groggy.

“Lena?”

“I know it’s late,” she said. “But I need help. You said you know how to trace metadata, right?”

A pause. “Yeah. What’s going on?”