Prologue Rhett #2
When I reach the doors to the quad, I stop and press my palm to the cold glass.
The world outside is washed in the blue-gray of early evening, the last sunlight stabbing through the spires and across the quad.
I watch it, waiting for the moment the sun dips below the gates and the Academy becomes what it really is: a holding pen for predators and their prey, all of us walking the same bloodstained marble, waiting for the night we’re called back to the woods.
I don’t move until the light is gone.
Once the Hunt is over, you never see the blood on your own hands. The logic is simple. Any and all evidence is washed downstream, the Board signs off on your success, and you go home with your very own perfect match and a set of terms to make a baby. Simple enough.
Except with Casey… it was all wrong. Cops, interviews, interrogations. The fucking Academy shut down for a whole week while they tried to control the fallout. After the week, no one said her name. After a month, even I doubted she ever existed.
Except for the fact there’s a ton of paperwork when someone dies.
Or the meetings that happen when everyone else is sleeping off their traumas in campus housing or whatever secondhand penthouse their families can afford.
The real aftermath takes place in wood-paneled conference rooms at the far end of the Admin building, where the lights never fully dim and the air always tastes of old cigar and disinfectant.
That’s where they brought me the night Casey Greenwood died.
Past the first checkpoint, through two coded doors, and into a room where no one used her name—not even the men and women who had signed off on her candidacy for the Night Hunt.
They called her “the incident.” Sometimes “the liability.” Never “the girl.” There were five people at the table that night, each one wrapped in a suit two sizes too expensive for comfort, their faces lacquered with an even gloss of self-assurance and boredom.
Dr. Abelard led the meeting. His hands are too steady, even for a seasoned dickhead; his entire presence is tailored to be nonthreatening, but the effect is almost more sinister than outright menace.
He opened with condolences, moved briskly to logistics, and then explained, in the tone of a man lecturing on renal function, that the Greenwood family had been contacted.
The father was “inclined to accept the official version of events,” but the sister had proven more difficult.
There were mentions of litigious tendencies, a recent history of mental instability. The Board was handling it.
My role was even simpler. I was to remain silent for seventy-two hours, avoid all contact with outside parties, and keep a low profile.
There would be a full review of Hunt protocol—just a formality, nothing that would affect my status.
They reminded me of my ongoing obligations to the Academy’s code of honor, as if it was possible to break something already so fractured.
The meeting adjourned with a perfunctory handshake and a reminder to “take care of myself.” As if self-care was possible when the main thing I wanted was to sleep for a week and never dream again.
I left the Admin building just after two a.m. The campus was empty except for a groundskeeper dragging bags of salt to the walkways, muttering about the storm rolling in from the lake.
I watched him work for a minute, the back-and-forth of the shovel like a metronome, and then walked the perimeter until I’d circled the quad three times.
When I reached the dorms, there she was.
Casey, waiting in the lobby, hair braided down her back, the bruises just beginning to bloom along her jawline.
The red smeared over her face. A bloodshot eye.
She looked at me with the same expression she’d worn when I first pinned her to the ground: a kind of disappointed wonder, as if she’d already known how this would end.
I blinked, and she was gone.
The next morning, I showered until the steam erased every inch of the mirror.
I shaved by touch, hands trembling when I ran the blade over my Adam’s apple.
I thought about pressing a little harder, seeing how far I’d have to go before I hit anything vital.
But then I heard the ring of the phone in the other room—a sharp, insistent note, out of place among all the measured silence.
I let it ring seven times before I picked up.
“Mr. Grey?” The voice was all crisp, with a touch of awkward. “My name is Officer Cooper, North District. I’m following up on a report of an accident. I wondered if you could answer a few questions.”
I told him I was happy to cooperate, but that the Board lawyers had instructed me not to comment until their review was complete.
There was a pause. I could hear him breathing, the faint scratch of pen on a notepad.
“Of course,” he said. “But if you do remember anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact me. ”
I hung up, washed my hands again, and told myself that the worst was over.
It wasn’t.
Officer Cooper showed up in person three days later.
He wasn’t much older than I was, but he had the posture of someone who’d spent his entire life apologizing for his own height.
His uniform was too new, the badge still factory-bright, and his eyes did that annoying thing where they tried to meet yours and look away at the same time.
He found me in the dining hall, two seats from the window, eating toast and ignoring the morning announcements.
Bam stared at him like he had three heads while Colton ate his apple with the loudest chews he possibly could.
The table was empty without Cai, who was away on some random vacation his dad decided they needed, but at least Julian filled the void with his incessant chatter.
All of them fell silent the minute this gooner opened his mouth.
“Mr. Grey,” he said, and when I didn’t respond, he said it again, softer, like he was talking to a child. I looked up and saw his hand hovering above the table, pen tapping against a folded piece of paper.
He stood across from me. The paper turned out to be a consent form, standard for all interviews on Academy grounds. I signed without reading it.
“Can you walk me through what happened the night of the incident?” Cooper’s tone was patient, almost gentle. He kept his voice low, careful not to let the words travel.
I gave him the official version. We found her in the river after someone reported her missing. I even managed to sound upset, my fingers trembling as I described how she looked, how I tried to perform CPR. Cooper scribbled notes, nodding in all the right places.
“Did you see anyone else that night?” he asked.
I shook my head. “It was just the two of us. The rest of the search party was looking in a grid.”
He nodded. “Right. Of course.” There was a beat, and then: “Did Casey ever mention being afraid? Of anyone at the school? Or did you ever get the sense that someone was following her?”
I almost laughed. “Nope.”
Cooper sighed. He closed his notebook. “If you do remember anything else, Mr. Grey, you can reach me at this number.”
He handed me a business card, crisp and impersonal. I flipped it over, memorized the numbers, and then tore it in half.
After he left, I went to the gym and ran five miles, then boxed the heavy bag until my hands were blistered and slick with sweat. When I looked down, I thought for a second that my knuckles were bleeding, but it was only the dye from the tape, staining my skin the same red as Casey’s blood.
The interviews continued. Every time Cooper showed up, he was a little more direct, a little less polite.
The questions got sharper, like he was paring away the layers of bullshit one at a time.
He asked about my father, about the Board, about the “unusual social rumors” at Westpoint.
Once, he asked if I’d ever heard of a case being “deliberately mischaracterized” to protect the school’s reputation.
I told him I didn’t know what he meant.
He looked at me for a long time, like he wanted to see if I’d blink first. I didn’t.
That night, I dreamed of Casey again. This time, she was standing at the edge of the river, hair loose and floating around her face.
Her hands were cupped, holding something small and white.
When I got closer, I saw it was a tooth—her own, knocked loose in the fall, root still bloody.
She smiled, and all her teeth were gone.
I woke up with my sheets twisted around my legs, cold sweat pooling at my collarbones. I checked my phone. Three missed calls from my father, one from Dr. Abelard.
The next day, I found Cooper in the chapel.
He was standing at the altar, reading the inscription on the front. His head was bowed, but he heard me enter. “Mr. Grey,” he said, turning around. “I was hoping we could speak somewhere private.”
I crossed the aisle, the soles of my shoes scuffing the stone. The chapel was empty except for us, the pews arranged in neat, military rows. Sunlight filtered through the stained glass in tiny, precise slashes, painting the dust in red and gold.
“I wanted to ask you something off the record,” Cooper said.
I waited.
“Why do you think the Academy is so invested in keeping what really happened to Casey Greenwood a secret.”
He didn’t wait for my answer. Instead, he stepped away from the altar and turned to face me.
“I’ve been doing some research. There have been other accidents.
Other students who disappeared, or were written off as suicides.
But the records are always incomplete, and the witnesses always say the same thing—nothing unusual, just a tragedy, a statistical outlier. ”