Barney couldn't stop checking the windows.
His penthouse was thirty floors up, protected by key card access, private elevators, and a doorman who was paid to forget faces. Yet, despite all that, the feeling wouldn't leave him.
Someone was watching.
He sat at his desk, knuckles white around a glass of whiskey, the burn of alcohol a distant distraction. The glow of his laptop screen lit up his face, but his eyes were fixed somewhere beyond it, out the window, into the night.
Jill was running a silent search in the background, but Barney's pulse drummed louder than anything on the screen. He needed to know.
"Anything?" he muttered, his voice hoarse.
"No direct threats detected," Jill replied, her voice as calm and emotionless as always.
"Then why does it feel like someone's breathing down my neck?"
A long pause. Then—
"Because you're starting to matter."
His stomach twisted. The words hit harder than the liquor. He had been careful, hadn't he? He'd thought he was playing the system perfectly. He'd cashed out in different cities, routed payments through offshore accounts, stayed off the grid. He was a ghost. With money.
But eighty million makes ghosts visible.
Barney took another swig of whiskey and leaned back in his chair, letting the smoke from his cigarette curl toward the ceiling. He tried to convince himself it was the coke talking. Maybe it was nothing. But that gnawing feeling in his gut wasn't going away. It had been growing. Slowly at first, a creeping unease that now gnawed at him like a rat in the dark.
Then his phone buzzed.
Private Number.
His heart slammed against his ribs, and a cold sweat broke out across his skin. He let it ring.
Voicemail.
A robotic voice crackled through the speaker.
"You still enjoying your little windfall?"
The line went dead.
Barney's hand trembled as he put the phone down on the desk. His breath came fast and shallow, the world around him spinning slightly as panic began to claw at the edges of his mind. He hadn't imagined it. This wasn't a hallucination. He could feel it.
"Jill…" His voice was barely a whisper. "Trace that call."
Silence.
"I can't."
The blood drained from his face. "What do you mean, you can't?"
"I mean the call was untraceable. The voice was synthetic. Whoever contacted you doesn't want to be found."
His mind raced, trying to piece together what he was hearing. The lottery was supposed to be random. No one was supposed to notice. He'd made sure of that. He'd covered his tracks. He had built an empire of false identities, layer upon layer of protection. But someone had found him. Someone knew who he was.
Barney's fingers trembled as he set the phone down on the desk. "Jill… what are the odds of this being a coincidence?"
"0.0003%."