Chapter 32
Amy
The following day, I’m sitting at a table inside the coffee shop on campus. It’s half-off Thursdays.
The scent of coffee fills the air, giving me the push I need to read the assignment for next week’s class. I struggled inside my room after Saint left.
Instead of concentrating, all I could do was replay what he said, how he made me feel, how his hands felt on my skin, and then the guilt for wanting me when I shouldn’t.
I’m on the second paragraph when I see a looming shadow appear on the white page.
I look up and find blue eyes watching me with interest. He’s handsome in a boyish way. Lean frame. Small letters from his tattoo run down the side of his neck, but I can’t make them out from where I’m sitting.
“Hey,” he says. “Amy, right? I think we have Behavioral Psych together.”
We do not. I would remember. I remember everyone in my classes. Especially what I’ve learned about being Prey.
“I don’t think so,” I reply.
He smiles wider. “Maybe I’m confusing you with someone else. I’m Elliot, by the way.”
Yeah, right. He isn’t confusing shit. Now that I take a good look at his clothes.
He comes from money, and for whatever reason, I’m his current target. I’m alone, so he thinks he has a shot at making me believe whatever charming bullshit he wants to feed me.
I know this play. Roman fed it to me back in high school, and poor me, with no friends and an abusive father, ate that shit up out of desperation. Except Roman was better at it.
“Okay.”
He takes the seat across from me like I invited him and proceeds to ask me questions for eight whole minutes until my alarm on my phone goes off. I set it so I can head back to my dorm before the rush dies down.
He continues throwing out questions despite the annoying sound. What year I am. What is my major. Where is my hometown. I gave him all the wrong answers except for the year.
I swipe the screen of my phone to turn off my alarm. “I gotta go.”
“Oh, my bad. Um…well, it was nice talking to you. I wanted to ask before you go. Are you going to Saint’s party next Friday?”‘
I pause, sliding my textbook into my bag, trying to hide the shock. “I’m not sure. I wasn’t invited.”
Funny how he is throwing a party. He left that part out the other night, but then again, he doesn’t have to tell me shit, and I shouldn’t care.
“Well, I was. You wanna go with me?” he asks, his eyes bright with anticipation.
Like a little boy hoping they agree to go outside and play.
“Alright.” I find myself accepting.
He smiles wide. “I’ll pick…”
“How about I meet you there?” I interrupt. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish. “It’s easier. Time?”
“Um…sure. Seven.”
I grab my bag and coffee. “Great, see you Friday.” And I walk out.
I can’t believe I did that, but how else was I going to get invited without seeking Saint out? It would show him that I’m desperate for his attention. That I care.
It was stupid of me to agree to go with Elliot, but at least I’m meeting him there and not letting him pick me up.
Pulling the black door open to Babylon on Friday is like entering the set of a college movie. It’s a typical bar. But how many bars named Babylon sit right across a church?
The smell of wings and alcohol permeates the air. The sound of conversations breaks through Staind’s “Crawl.”
I find Rose sitting at the same booth and make my way through the crowd.
The place is packed. Bass from the speakers vibrates the floorboards. Neon bleeding red and blue across faces at the bar, two deep, everyone’s phone screen a little square of white in the dark.
Spilled beer, food, vape smoke, marijuana, and vanilla. A social media sound I half-recognize plays from a booth where three girls are recording themselves not having as much fun as they’re pretending to.
I do my three seconds at the door. Old habit. Exits: front, bathroom hallway, the fire door behind the pool tables propped open with a chair. Threats: none visible. Vibe: loud enough to think in.
Rose doesn’t wave. She just lifts two fingers off her glass—clocked you—because she did her own three seconds when I was still half a block away. Two beers on the table. One untouched. Mine.
She listened to me last time and ordered. This is the last place they would ID us. It wouldn’t be fun for them to hunt us if they did.
I reach the booth and slide in. “You ordered for me.”
She smiles. “Of course.”
I’m reaching for the beer when she goes still. Not scared-still. Reading-still. Her eyes slide past my shoulder to the back of the bar and stay there.
“Don’t turn around fast,” she says.
So obviously I want to turn around fast, but I turn around slowly.
Pool tables. All four of them.
Garret’s lining up a shot, sleeves shoved up, the table lamp throwing green light across his tattooed forearms. Valen is standing at the rail with a cue like a cane and a drink that definitely isn’t on this menu, dressed like he lost a bet that required him to enter a college bar.
Azriel is mid-laugh, head back, the only one of them who actually looks like he belongs.
And Saint. He’s leaning against the wall. Black hoodie, hood down, cue against his shoulder. Just past the edge of the lamplight like the dark saved him a seat. Doing that thing he does where he’s the stillest person in the room and somehow you can’t hear anything else.
And he’s looking at me.
Of course he is.
Even Rose could feel it before I turned. He’s been watching the door. I’d bet the rest of my beer he planned on me showing up.
Which would be flattering. He’s been MIA for four days. No call. No lurking by my dorm room. My phone has been the deadest it’s been all semester, and I have absolutely not been checking it.
I’m lying. I have been checking it, but I did ask him to stay away.
I drink my beer and survey the rest of the scene like a person who couldn’t care less.
There are girls at the high-top nearest the table.
Obviously, there are. Four of them are arranged the way you arrange yourself when arranging is the whole point—angled toward the boys, drinks at collarbone height, and laughs pitched to carry over the bass.
One leans across to say something to Garret and lets her hand land on Valen’s sleeve on the way back.
Valen looks at the hand like it’s lint before moving away.
Then I see her. The brunette from the library.
Corner stool. Hair down her back, glossy under the neon, phone face-up on the table like she’s expecting something. I found out her name is Monica. The one who fucked Saint on the east stairwell. The story that grew after the locker room shower girl across campus.
She’s watching him too.
She glances at him every few seconds, hoping he notices she’s angled so her jean miniskirt rides up the back of her thighs.
And here’s the thing about how she’s watching him—it’s not hope. Hope looks hungry. This looks fed. She watches him like something she’s already had her hands on, and there’s a smugness that hope never gets to have.
Something hot and small switches on under my sternum.
I put my beer down. Carefully. I line the glass up with its own ring of condensation like the table’s being graded.
My thumbnail finds the corner of the label and starts peeling, one slow strip, edge to edge like I’m conducting surgery.
“You’re shredding that label,” Rose says, pointing it out.
“It was loose.”
“Mmm.”
It’s not jealousy, I tell myself. I don’t get to be jealous. There’s nothing said in any of the rooms we’ve been alone in that gives me rights over a barstool or the glossy hair of the girl on it. How could I anyway? He’s no different from the rest of them.
He is just more unhinged, honest about what he plans to do, and gorgeous. I think what makes him more dangerous than the others who hunt Prey is that he is big enough to destroy and big enough to protect.
The label comes off in shredded pieces. I fold a tiny part in half, then quarters.
The bar is too hot, the bass is too loud, and her hair catches the neon every single time she tips her head back to laugh. The sound drifts across the room like nails on a chalkboard.
By the other side of the pool table, Azriel spots us.
His whole face opens, and he throws an arm up in a wave that’s basically a flare, mouthing something that signals get over here.
The entire high-top turns to see who’s being summoned.
Monica turns too.
She looks at me, at Rose, at Azriel’s wave, then back at Saint.
She’s fast. I’ll give her that.
Rose arrives at an answer. The screen of her phone goes black. Her eyes follow Rose who is already sliding out of the booth.
“We don’t have to,” I protest.
“We absolutely do. Garret is there, and I want to piss him off. Plus, I’m bored.”
We pass the bartender serving drinks. The crowd folds around us, someone’s elbow, someone’s sorry through the chorus of “Little Things” by Bush.
I’m aware of the pool lamp getting closer and the green of the felt and of Saint against a wall the way you’re aware of a fire without feeling the heat.
Azriel meets us at the corner of the table.
“Finally. Civilized company. Do you know what these animals were arguing about before you walked in? Whether a fifty-dollar side bet pays before or after the eight ball like they’re two lawyers.”
“Did you bet?” she asks.
“Obviously, I bet. I’m not civilized. I just dress like it.”
And I laugh.
That’s the whole crime. It comes out easy—no negotiation, no toll—the way laughing only works around people who’ve never once made me pay for it. Azriel grins like he won something. For exactly one second, the night is simple.
Then the temperature changes.
I don’t look toward Saint because I don’t have to. The cue stays on his shoulder. The shadows stay where they are. Valen’s gaze does a slow lap at Saint, at me, at Azriel like a man updating a private spreadsheet as he takes a sip of his drink to save the file.
“Amy,” Saint says.
Just my name. Flat. Ironed. A voice with no read receipts.
“Saint,” I say, exactly as flat, and I get the small vicious pleasure of watching it land on him the way his landed on me.
Garret straightens up from his shot, looks between us, and very wisely decides to chalk his cue right before his gaze lands on Rose.
“You two know each other,” Azriel says, dry as a group chat screenshot.
Azriel knows exactly what he’s doing, and the look Saint gives him over my head is a full paragraph in a language only brothers speak.
He’s never seen us in the same room or introduced us, but we all know we know each other. This is for the other Prey’s benefit.
“We’ve met,” I say sarcastically.
Rose makes a sound into her beer that is legally not a laugh. No one wants to address the tension between us.
They rack the next game.
Azriel forces a cue into my hands over my protest. “You cannot possibly be worse than Garret. He plays like the table owes him an apology.”
“Fine,” I say, reluctantly taking the cue.
I take a shot and miss. Take another and don’t. Rose turns out to be a shark, which surprises everyone except me.
Saint plays his turn, then goes back to the wall between them. He doesn’t stand next to me. He doesn’t perform a single thing. But every time I look up, he’s watching me, while Monica watches him.
And every time Azriel makes me laugh, the grip on the cue in his hand gets one notch tighter. I’m surprised it doesn’t snap.
Monica drifts over near the end of the second game from the bar, or making her route look like it, and posts up next to me at the rail with her glass with a smile.
“You’re Amy, right?” Her voice sweet. Lethal. “Are you going Friday?”
“Friday?” Like I don’t know what she means.
“The party. At Saint’s house.” Her smile tilts, gentle as a box cutter. “You haven’t been there?” Her eyes flick to the wall and back, letting the silence finish the gut punch to my stomach. “I thought you’ve been over there. Anyway, literally everyone’s going. I assumed you knew.”
She’s been to his house? And he invited her to his party.
He didn’t mention his house on the rooftop the other night. It’s been four days of radio silence and now a party. I’m finding out under a pool lamp that he invited the same girl he fucked on the east stairwell but claims to want to fuck me.
“Of course,” I say, smooth enough to skate on. “Friday.”
“Cute,” she says, meaning nothing, meaning everything, and then drifts off toward the bar again with her phone already in her hand.
I set my cue down on the rail. Line it up parallel with the cushion. Precise. Like the table’s being graded.
When I look up, I find Saint watching me.
This time I let him see exactly nothing. The neutral face. The one my father built and Roman polished and no one on this campus has ever seen the inside of. Something flickers behind his eyes.
“Rose. I’m getting the next round. Come with me?”
Rose looks at me. Then, behind me. “Sure,” she says.
We walk to the bar. I feel him watching me the whole way, and the whole time I tell myself he doesn’t owe me anything. I was the one who fell for his bullshit. His lies. Despite all of Azriel’s warnings to stay away.
I have to keep reminding myself that Saint isn’t like the other assholes at this school. He’s worse, and he hasn’t hidden the fact that I’m Prey. I’m no different from Monica or the others these guys prey on.
If my past taught me anything, it was to survive.