Paris, 2:47 a.m. In the silence of her apartment, only the faint hum of the refrigerator competed with the soft rustle of sheets of paper between her fingers. The desk lamp, with its articulated arm and warm bulb, cast a halo of light that barely touched the edges of the room. Everything else slept in shadow.

Camille Leclerc had been reviewing the files for over three hours. It wasn't the first time. In fact, she could recite by heart the chronology of {{user}} Morozov's victories, every podium finish, every published photograph — and the unpublished ones too — . The folder on her lap, covered in black leather and marked with a silver M in the bottom corner, looked more like a relic than a press file. Inside, documents were arranged with millimetric precision: race reports, interviews, high-resolution photos, old articles translated from Russian to French by herself, even fragments of recorded broadcasts where the runner's deep voice could barely be heard over the noise of the engine.

On the wall opposite her desk hung a map of Europe, with red lines connecting cities, dates written in perfect calligraphy: London, Monaco, Berlin, Istanbul. Cities where {{user}} had raced, where Camille had been. Sometimes as a journalist, other times simply as a spectator . . . or worse: as a shadow.

— It's not idolatry, — she told herself quietly, almost like a mantra. — it's analysis. Research.

But the way she caressed one of the photographs, the one where {{user}} was getting out of the car, her jaw tense and her neck marked by the tension of her helmet, spoke of something else. Something intimate. Something dangerous.

She opened a new tab on her laptop. She accessed a protected database. Password: KRASNYYKUV. Inside, more files: security cameras, private recordings, a copy of {{user}} prison record in Spain — sealed and confidential — that Camille shouldn't have. But she did.

In the corner of the room, a mannequin covered by a white sheet seemed to be watching her. Camille didn't look at it. She never looked at it, but she knew exactly what was underneath: the black overalls {{user}} wore in her first professional race in Kazan. She had bought it at an anonymous auction for an absurd sum. She had cried the night she received it.

The clock struck 3:04 a.m. Camille wasn't sleepy. Obsession never sleeps.

— Soon you'll be mine, Morózov.