Chapter 26
Amy
The envelope is in my student mailbox on a Thursday morning.
No stamp. No return address. Just my name on the front in a typeset font, the kind of font that belongs to official correspondence, to documents that have weight, and to things you are supposed to believe.
I stand at the mailboxes on the ground floor of the administrative building, holding it for a long moment before I open it.
My hands are steady.
Inside the envelope is a single sheet of paper. And a photograph.
The paper is a printout of a meeting agenda dated fourteen months ago. The header reads: Order of the Consortium: Scholarship Selection Committee, Autumn Intake. Then a numbered list of twelve names.
My name is number seven.
Beside each name is a column of notes. Background check status. Family connection index, a numerical score. I understand immediately that it measures how isolated a candidate is. How likely they are to generate institutional noise if something goes wrong. How manageable.
Next to my name, the family connection index reads: 0.2.
The lowest on the list.
The photograph is of the meeting.
Eight people around a table I have never seen, in a room I do not recognize. I scan the faces. And I find Azriel.
Third from the left. His expression is the careful, composed one I know, the one he wears when he is managing information. He is looking at something on the table in front of him. He was at the meeting. The meeting where they selected me.
I fold the paper along its crease and put it back in the envelope. I put the photograph on top of it. I tuck the envelope into my bag, walk out of the administrative building into the cold morning air, and keep walking.
I walk for a long time.
The thing about finding out you were selected is that it re-contextualizes everything. This is how Azriel knew. How many others?
Not just the scholarship. Not just the meeting agenda. Everything.
Every moment since I arrived on this campus runs back through the new information and comes out the other side changed.
The courtyard on the first day. Azriel appearing. His warnings. His protection. His careful, partial truths and the things he left in the space between them.
The lunch where he told me enough.
I sit on a bench near the north perimeter wall where there are no cameras. I know where the cameras are now. I have known for weeks—another thing I learned without being watched. I take the envelope out and look at it again.
Family connection index: 0.2.
“Nobody is going to come looking for you, Amy.
Roman said it as a threat. The Order put it in a spreadsheet. Differently coded: she has no one, so she costs nothing.
I press my thumb against my forearm through my sleeve.
I think about the scholarship acceptance letter that arrived eight months ago, which I kept in the lining of my bag for two weeks because I was afraid that if I put it down, it would stop being real.
I think about the night I got it, sitting on the floor.
I read it four times, allowing myself, for the first time in years, to believe that something good could happen to me for a reason that had nothing to do with someone else’s agenda.
I think about how wrong I was.
Not about the something good. About the reason.
The rage arrives quietly, the way it always does with me—not a flash or the loud, combustive kind, but a cold that settles into my chest and stays there, hard-edged and patient.
I earned the grades. I earned every single one of them. My GPA is real, and my work is real. Nothing about what I have done here is a lie.
But the invitation.
The invitation was a net.
And I swam into it.
I put the envelope back in my bag. I walk toward the east academic building because I have a class in twenty minutes, and I need to attend.
I did not survive my father and Roman and a drugged drink in an alley to let a committee meeting fourteen months ago be the thing that stops me.
But after class?
After class, someone is going to tell me the full truth. Why have Azriel and Saint targeted me and not someone else? Then, I think, what if this is how they have all Prey. The economics girl. Rose. How many others?
I want the truth. Every word of it. Not the version that keeps me manageable. Not the partial, protective, carefree version that Azriel has been dispensing in measured doses since the first day.
All of it.
I find Saint between classes in the narrow hallway behind the lecture theater, the one that the students don’t use because it smells of old stone and pipe condensation and has no natural light.
He sees me coming from twenty feet away, and something shifts in his face, not alarm, but of a man understanding immediately that what is approaching is a storm.
I stop in front of him.
I take the envelope out of my bag and hold it out.
He looks at it. He looks at me.
He takes it.
I watch him while he reads. He is very controlled. Saint is always controlled, the stillness is his native state—but I have learned to read the small things, the tells that exist below the level of expression he manages.
The slight tightening along his jaw. The way his thumb presses flat against the paper.
He knew.
I can see it in the absence of surprise. He knew about the list, the selection process, and the family connection index. He knew what it meant and what it was designed to find.
He hands it back.
“How long?” I ask.
”From before you arrived,” he says like it’s nothing.
The cold in my chest gets sharper. “You knew before I got here.”
“Yes.”
“And Azriel?”
He holds my gaze. “Yes.”
I nod. The nod is not acceptance. It is processing the way I have always processed the worst information, by going very still and very internal while the outside stays functional.
“Were you assigned to hunt me?” I ask.
Something moves in his face. “No.”
“Then what?”
He is quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet that is not evasion. I know his silences now, I can read the difference, but the kind that means he is deciding how to be honest about something that does not have a clean, honest shape.
“I was in a cell for the criminally insane when the list was compiled,” he says.
“I was not part of the selection. I was not assigned. I knew about you from the list Azriel showed me. You were already real to me before you were here. What I did when you arrived was not an assignment. It was a choice.”
I look at him.
The rage mixed with fear in my chest does something complicated. It doesn’t go away. I’m not going to let it go away, not yet, not until I have sat with it properly and understood what it is telling me. But it shifts slightly. Makes room for something else.
“That doesn’t fix it,” I say.
“No,” he says. “It doesn’t.”
“You should have told me.”
“Yes. But that wouldn’t have changed what happened, or that I need to protect you from the others.”
“All of it is a lie. The scholarship.”
“Yes.” He says it without qualification, without defense, without the performance of regret that men put on when they want forgiveness without having earned it. A clean acknowledgment with no attempt to manage my response.
This is what makes it harder.
If he argued, I could be angrier. If he deflected, I could be cleaner about it.
But he just tells me I am right, and he means it, and it is the most honest anyone has been with me since I arrived at this campus.
It makes the rage and the grief and the exhausted, complicated love of it all sit in my chest at the same time without any of them winning.
“I need some time,” I say.
He nods.
I put the envelope back in my bag, then straighten my jacket. I look at him one more time, at his face in the dim light, the unguarded version, the one that costs him something, and I walk back toward the main building.
He lets me go.
That is either the most respectful thing he has ever done or the hardest, and I think, as I walk, that it might be both.
What sits with me next is the fact that he is mentally unstable. Azriel’s words about staying away from Saint hit me all at once. Criminally insane means he’s hurt people. It also means I’m no different from the economics girl or any other Prey on campus.