Chapter 17
Saint
His name is Marcus Fell.
Third year. Business faculty. He’s been Victor Sokolov’s campus liaison for the past eight months—the one who identified candidates from the scholarship intake, ran background checks, and flagged the ones with no family connections.
The one who slipped things into drinks at parties and walked Prey out the side door with a hand at their back and a story ready for anyone who asked.
He’d done it before. The Order’s files confirmed four previous incidents, all quietly managed and resolved in the way that powerful institutions resolved things that would look bad in daylight.
He had his hand on her back.
I watched him do it from the far end of the room, through a crowd of people who were all looking at each other and none of them looking at me, which was perfect.
I tracked him from the kitchen to the side door, and I waited long enough to confirm where he was taking her before I followed.
The alley took forty seconds.
Marcus Fell will not be putting his hands on anyone for a long time. That is the part of this I am comfortable committing to.
I reluctantly left her there, conscious and breathing, since the worst of the drug had already metabolized out of her system. I checked.
I stood at the entrance of the alley for three minutes and watched her come back to herself, the hands first, then the shoulders, then her head coming up, trying to remember what went wrong. She is thorough, even in shock.
She catalogs everything.
Point is, she did not see me.
She was never going to see me.
I was back in my room before she reached the dorm entrance.
Valen arrives at seven the following morning without knocking, which is his only mode of entry, followed by Azriel, who knocks on the already-open door out of what I can only assume is reflex.
“That was some work last night,” Valen says, dropping into the single chair in my room like he owns it, which in some technical sense he does since the Order funds the building.
He lights a joint. “Marcus Fell. Victor’s inside man.
Discovered this morning by groundskeeping in a condition that suggests someone made a series of very firm points. ”
“He had his hands on her,” I say. “And he laced her drink. I couldn’t stop him without drawing attention to myself. I had to do what was necessary.”
“Yes,” Valen says pleasantly. “He did. And now he has two broken fingers, a fractured orbital socket, and a very passionate new commitment to reconsidering his career choices.” He exhales smoke at the ceiling. “Well done. Truly. Gold star. The Order is, naturally, furious.”
“The Order can register a complaint.”
“They have,” Azriel says from the doorway, arms crossed, his expression doing the thing it does when he is trying to be angry and finding it difficult. “Formally. In writing. There are three separate memos.”
“I’ll read them later.”
“Saint.” Azriel steps into the room and closes the door behind him, which means this is the serious part of the conversation. “You were supposed to be watching from a distance. You were supposed to flag the situation and let campus security handle it through Order channels.”
“Campus security?” I mock.
“Yes.”
“The same assholes in campus security who have been on Sokolov’s payroll for the past two years and whose head of department attended the same Order meeting where her scholarship was approved?”
A pause.
“He has a point,” Valen says.
“He always has a point,” Azriel says tightly. “That is what makes him impossible to argue with and also a significant liability.” He looks at me. “Saint, you left a man in an alley. She was ten feet away.”
“She didn’t see me.”
“This time. What about next time? What if she’d been more alert? What if she’d come back to herself thirty seconds earlier?”
“She didn’t.”
“That is not a risk management strategy. That’s luck.”
“I don’t believe in luck,” I say. “I believe in calculation. I calculated the fact that Victor is targeting her, and I was right.”
Azriel steps closer. “You calculated the window from the perspective of a man who spent years in a controlled room. The real world has variables, Saint. She is a variable. She is sharper than you are giving her credit for, and if she starts putting pieces together—”
“Then she puts them together.” I shrug, not giving a fuck.
Silence.
Valen looks at me with his cold, measuring eyes. “And you are comfortable with that?”
I say nothing.
“Fascinating,” Valen says, in the tone he uses when a situation has become interesting in a way that does not bode well for anyone involved.
He stubs his joint on the windowsill. “The man who has not cared about a single variable for years is suddenly comfortable with uncertainty.” He stands.
“This is either very good or catastrophically stupid, and I genuinely cannot tell which yet.”
“It’s neither,” I say. “It’s strategic. She is safer knowing certain things than not knowing them.”
“And the part where you were in that alley after five seconds of him touching her?” Azriel asks. “Is that strategic too?”
I look at him.
He looks back. My youngest brother, who knows me better than anyone on this campus and is therefore aware I’m the most dangerous person in the room. He knows I wanted to kill Marcus for simply talking to her.
“I want you to hear me out,” Azriel says, his voice dropping to a quieter and more serious tone.
“The Order gave you a leash, Saint. It’s a short one.
You are one incident report away from being back in Unit 9, and this time they will not let me trade Valen’s induction to get you out. Do you understand me?”
I hold his gaze. “I understand you.”
“Do you?”
“I understand every word you said.”
Azriel studies me for a long moment. He has the eyes of someone who learned early to read the things people do not say, which is an inconvenient quality in a brother.
“That is not the same thing as saying you will be careful,” he says.
“No,” I agree. “It’s not.”
He exhales, looks at the ceiling, then back at me. “She can’t know it was you.”
“She won’t.”
“Saint —”
“She won’t,” I say again. Quietly. With the weight I put on things I mean completely.
Valen picks up his jacket. “On that cheerful note. Victor is going to know his man was attacked by one of us. He’ll assume it was Order-sanctioned since Marcus was an exposed liability.
It buys us approximately one week before he moves to his next angle.
” He pauses at the door. “Try not to break anyone else in the meantime. Or at minimum, be less obvious about it.”
He leaves. The door swings open behind him.
Azriel stays a moment longer. He looks at me the way he used to look at me through the acrylic glass in Unit 9, like a man trying to reach something he does not have the right tools for.
“She’s not a mission objective,” he says.
“Whatever this is becoming for you, she’s a person.
With history. With damage. If you’re going to be in her orbit, Saint, you need to understand that whatever you are to her is going to matter.
Whether you mean it to or not. She’s not some nurse you can fuck and discard.
And it’s obvious she’s not like the other Prey you’ve already fucked. ”
I look out the window. The campus is doing its ordinary morning things. Students crossing the quad. A groundskeeper with a leaf blower. The fountain running.
Somewhere in the building three floors below, she is probably sitting on her bed, turning over the blank space in her memory. Counting her pieces.
“I know,” I say.
After Azriel leaves, I sit in the quiet of my room and look at my hands, the knuckles slightly swollen.
And I think about the way she looked in that alley when she came back to herself. Scared and cold and entirely alone, and still counting. Still refusing to fall apart.
I think about what Azriel said.
Whatever you are to her is going to matter.
I clench my hands into fists.
I don’t know what that is.