Prey (The Architects #1)

Chapter 1

NIKOLAI

The financial district empties fast after nine. Suits catch trains, bars fill up, and the streets belong to doormen, delivery drivers, and people who don’t want to be seen. I belong to that last category tonight.

Jay Weiss walks like a man who stopped being afraid years ago. Shoulders back, unhurried, the leather briefcase swinging at his hip. He took the same route from the parking garage on Wacker two Thursdays in a row. Habit is a leash, and I’ve had Weiss’s wrapped around my fist for two weeks.

I keep forty meters between us, enough that I blend into the reflected neon and the thin foot traffic still moving along LaSalle. I breathe slow and even, the cold air tasting like exhaust and the river two blocks west.

He stops at a crosswalk.

I stop at a storefront window, pretending to check my phone.

In the glass, I watch him glance left and right, checking for traffic.

Weiss wasn’t an operator. He never held a child down, never mixed a dose, never stood in a bright white room and watched the lights go out behind a seven-year-old’s eyes.

He scheduled shipments. He signed invoices.

He made sure the right children arrived at the right facilities on the right dates.

And then he drove home to a house with a lawn and slept through the night without a care in the world.

That’s the part people never understand about the machine that built me—it doesn’t run on monsters.

It runs on men like Weiss, who found a way to file their screams under logistics.

The light changes. He crosses.

I follow.

The route bends south toward the parking structure on Adams, where his car sits on level three.

He’ll never reach it. I’ve already mapped every camera blind spot between here and there, already noted the loading dock cut-through between the two glass towers where foot traffic drops to zero and the nearest camera points the wrong direction.

Forty meters becomes thirty.

A cab blows through the intersection, and Weiss flinches at the horn. I don’t. They conditioned that out of me so thoroughly I sometimes wonder what else went with it.

Twenty-five meters. The cut-through is just ahead on his left, and he’ll pass it—unless something redirects him.

I pull out my phone and dial the burner number linked to the fake parking authority message his assistant received this afternoon. The one that says his vehicle has been flagged for towing from level three, and he should use the Adams Street entrance to resolve it.

His phone buzzes, and he slows, pulls it out, and reads it before turning left.

The cut-through swallows him whole. No overhead lights, just the ambient glow bleeding in from both ends, and Weiss moves faster now, the parking authority text doing exactly what it was supposed to do. He’s focused on his phone, typing a reply to nobody, and I close the gap to fifteen meters.

Then Ezra’s voice crackles through my earpiece.

“Statistically speaking, you’ve been in that alley long enough to have completed the acquisition, filed the paperwork, and taken a light nap.”

I keep my eyes on Weiss. “I’m building tension.”

“You’re building a scheduling conflict. I have a probability window that closes in eleven minutes.”

“Then stop talking and let me work.”

“I’m multitasking.” A pause, the faint tap of keys in the background. “Also, I ran the numbers on your building tension approach, and it has a negative expected result.”

Weiss stops walking.

I stop. Press into the shadow beside a dumpster, one shoulder against the brick, and watch him turn his head. He heard something, or thought he did. His breath has changed—I can see it in the vapor puffing out in front of him, shorter and faster now.

“He spooked?” Ezra asks.

“Thinking about it.”

“That’s a yes. What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Your nothing has a distinct footstep signature, Nikolai. I’ve told you this.”

Weiss makes a decision. He breaks into a jog toward the far end of the cut-through, briefcase banging against his thigh.

“He’s running,” I say, already moving faster.

“Of course he is.” Ezra sounds mildly inconvenienced, like a man whose coffee order came back wrong. “Try to keep up. Biologically speaking, he’s twelve years older than you and doesn’t exercise.”

I’m already at a full sprint, boots hitting wet concrete, the gap between us collapsing fast. Weiss hits the far end of the alley and bursts out onto Adams, head swiveling, looking for anywhere to go. He spots the parking structure entrance thirty meters ahead and runs for it.

“He’s heading into the garage,” I say into the earpiece.

“Oh, good.” Ezra’s voice carries what might pass for amusement. “Enclosed space, limited exits, no cameras on levels two through four. It’s almost like someone planned for this exact contingency.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying the math works out.”

Weiss makes it to level two before his legs give out on the ramp.

I catch him by the collar before he hits the ground, spin him hard into the concrete pillar beside a rusted support beam, and pin him there with my forearm across his chest. The briefcase clatters away. He grabs at my arm with both hands and gets nowhere.

“Don’t.” One word makes him stop.

His face is a mess of sweat and terror, breath heaving in ragged pulls.

Up close, Jay Weiss looks exactly like what he is—a soft man who spent his career at a desk, putting names of kids into spreadsheets, and told himself that made the distance between him and the work wide enough to sleep through.

I was one of those names once. A line on a manifest like the ones he signed, delivered to a white room on a date someone like him chose.

He doesn’t know that and never will. I’m not here to be remembered—I’m here to ensure he never does it again.

I reach into my coat and produce the zip ties.

“My wallet—” he starts.

“I don’t want your wallet.”

That lands worse than the collision with the pillar did. His eyes go wide and wet, and he starts to say something else, but I have his wrists behind him before he finds the words. One zip tie, then a second for security. Clean and fast. It’s a skill that at some point became muscle memory.

I haul him upright and press him forward, one hand on the back of his neck, steering him deeper into level two, past a row of dusty sedans toward the far corner where the ceiling leaks a thin brown stain down the wall.

Headlights sweep the entrance ramp.

A black SUV rolls in low and quiet, tires whispering on the oil-slicked concrete.

It stops six feet from where I’m standing.

The rear door opens, and Raphael steps out first, mask catching the dim yellow light from the single working overhead fixture, that black beak of his mask tilting toward Weiss the way a crow regards a carcass in the road.

Weiss makes a sound I don’t have a word for.

The driver’s window drops and Ezra’s ice-blue eyes move from Weiss to me with the clinical interest he applies to balance sheets.

“Eleven minutes,” he says. “You had ten to spare.”

The passenger door opens. Theon steps out, mask filters gleaming, a case in his left hand.

Theon sets the case on the hood of the nearest car and unlatches it. Two clicks. He doesn’t look at Weiss while he works, just selects a preloaded syringe from the foam cutout with the same detachment he’d use picking a pen from a drawer.

“Neck or arm?” he asks me.

“Arm. He’s already terrified.”

“Neck is faster.”

“Arm, Theon.”

He sighs through his filters like I’ve asked him to do something unreasonable, steps around me, and puts the needle into Weiss’s upper arm before the man draws his next breath. Weiss jerks, tries to pull away, gets nowhere. Twenty seconds later, his knees go soft, and we’re catching him between us.

We load him into the back of the SUV, fold him across the rear seat, and I climb in after. Theon takes the middle row. Ezra is already back in the passenger seat, laptop open on his knees, the blue light of the screen cutting across his face.

Marcus pulls us out of the garage without being told.

For a while, nobody speaks. The city moves past the tinted windows in smears of orange and white.

“He ran,” Marcus says from the driver’s seat. Not a question.

“He ran,” I confirm.

“You let him run.”

“I let him think he had somewhere to go.”

Marcus makes a sound in his chest, not quite a laugh.

Theon is already relatching his case. “He’ll be out for four hours. Maybe five, given his body weight.”

“Four is long enough,” I say.

Ezra doesn’t look up from his screen. His fingers move across the keyboard in short, decisive bursts, and then he holds the laptop up slightly, angling it toward no one in particular.

“Sent.”

His phone buzzes almost immediately. Then again. Then three times in quick succession.

He sets the laptop back on his knees and reads the replies, his chin resting on one fist, his expression unchanged.

“Lucien says, and I quote, finally.” He scrolls. “Damon wants to know which room you want him in. Dominic hasn’t responded.” Another scroll. “Darius sent a GIF.”

“Of what?” Marcus asks.

Ezra stares at it for a moment.

“A cat carrying something in its mouth.”

Marcus’s shoulders shake once.

“I’m not a cat,” I say.

“You literally stalked prey through an alley and brought it back to us,” Marcus says.

“That’s called capture.”

“You pounced.”

“I intercepted.”

Theon tilts his head toward the unconscious Weiss. “He did carry him.”

“I didn’t carry him; I loaded him into—” I stop. “Why am I explaining this to you?”

Ezra is still looking at the GIF. “The cat looks focused. Purposeful.” He turns the screen toward me. “I think it’s flattering.”

I reach over and close his laptop.

He opens it again without missing a beat.

“Send Darius a different GIF,” Marcus says. “One with a dog and a bone, I think it’s more fitting.”

“I’m not engaging with Darius over stupid fucking GIFs.”

“That’s exactly what the cat would say,” Theon says.

“Theon.”

“Statistically,” Ezra begins.

“Ezra, I swear to God.”

The SUV goes quiet for about four seconds. Then Marcus’s shoulders start shaking again, silent and rhythmic, and Theon turns to look out the window with the stillness of a man suppressing a laugh through sheer force of will.

I look at Weiss. Then at the back of Marcus’s headrest. Then at the city sliding past in the dark.

This is what it looks like from the outside, I think.

Four men in a stolen SUV with a sedated logistics coordinator in the backseat, bickering about cats and GIFs.

Back at base, Damon is already prepping a room.

Darius is sending GIFs. Dominic is doing God knows what.

Lucien is waiting with that particular stillness of his that you stop trying to read after knowing him long enough.

Nine people were handed over to a program before they were old enough to understand what was being taken from them.

We didn’t choose each other. That’s the thing people get wrong about family. You don’t choose them. They’re the ones still standing when everything else burns down, and you’re too stubborn and too broken and too goddamn used to each other to imagine any other arrangement.

Fucked up. All of us. In our own personal ways that a psychologist would write papers about.

But they’re mine.